21 hours Ago
Thanks to an assist from former UI student Larry Ellison, prized quarterback recruit Bryce Underwood is staying in state to play college football at Michigan. To subscribe, click here. To submit a letter to the editor, click here.
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Sign up for our daily newsletter here Michael LeRoy The recent Illinois high school playoffs provide a window into the rapidly evolving name, image and likeness landscape. In the first four championship games, private schools outscored public schools by a combined 193-28 — an average margin of 48-7. For years, private schools have enjoyed a recruiting advantage, allowed to enroll students who live within a 30-mile radius.
Public schools can only play students who live in their district. But high school NIL may be increasing this competitive disadvantage. Illinois is one of 40 states that allows high school athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness.
Sports Illustrated reported that seven current high school athletes have NIL deals worth around $1 million, led by Michigan recruit Bryce Underwood (earning $1.9 million this year). And recently, Nike signed McKenna Whitham, a 13-year-old soccer phenom, to an NIL deal.
Like many star athletes, she is not enrolled in a public school. These astonishing deals have disturbing implications for sports. But they also signal the evolving nature of work.
Start with a traditional model. Professional sports with unions — the NFL, NBA and NHL — have employment with hard salary caps. This system spreads talent across all teams and offers stability and fair rules of competition.
Because they are employees, players are allowed by law to have a union and negotiate pay with their employers. Now look at the Illinois high school model. The system has rapidly careened out of control, stirring deep resentments across the state.
It disallows employment. Its best high school athletes probably use social influencing, a form of gig work that is often performed by posting on social media for a sponsor. Then there is the NCAA model, which has been in litigation for more than a decade.
In September, Judge Claudia Wilken in the landmark House vs. NCAA antitrust case questioned the NCAA’s lawyer aggressively, suggesting that a newly capped revenue/NIL space would reduce pay to athletes. Briefs from player advocates made similar points, like my research articles.
Now comes the fine print of the revised deal, showing that “outside” NIL deals are allowed if they aren’t pay-for-play and approved by an outside clearinghouse. Critics of the House settlement knew that in September. Two details have come into focus since then.
First, those deals don’t count against the 22 percent cap in the House settlement. The NCAA recently explained this revision: “Under the new model, institutions may pay student-athletes directly for their NIL rights. Any institutional NIL payments would apply toward the 22 percent cap.
Third parties may continue to enter into NIL agreements with student-athletes. Such agreements will be subject to review to ensure they are legitimate, fair-market-value agreements and not used for pay-for-play. NIL payments by third parties would not apply toward the 22 percent cap but must be disclosed to a clearinghouse for review.
” In other words, the new NCAA model will have a partial cap, which is another way of saying that a lot of NIL money can escape the cap. Second, that outside NIL deal provision was generally viewed as a deal for superstar endorsers — e.g.
, Caitlin Clark ($3.3million last year, much of it in legitimate endorsement deals) — that is, for limited exceptions. Enter Underwood, who recently signed for a reported $10 million with a Michigan donor, Larry Ellison, a former UI student who is married to a Michigan alumna.
Ellison, who created Oracle, is worth over $200 billion. This does not seem like an endorsement deal. It looks like the same type of “Wild West” NIL pay-for-play that almost everyone thought the House settlement would end.
If the clearinghouse questions the Michigan deal, perhaps Underwood could tweet an endorsement for Oracle. In any event, he’s already worth $2 million in high school. And if there is one NIL deal like this, there are likely others waiting to be revealed.
In other words, high school and college athletics — which shun employment but allow unrestrained NIL pay — are sowing the seeds of ruinous competition, so that only elite schools with deep-pocket donors and business partners can attract the best athletic talent. It’s a world designed for an ever-shrinking pool of competitive high school and college teams, shutting out marginalized fans and donors who can’t compete with wealthy corporations and supporters. But NIL is part of a much broader shift in the American workforce away from traditional employment to gig work — an informal method of performing a task for pay that often isn’t recognized by law as an actual job.
A recent poll by Morning Consult shows that 57 percent of Generation Z (those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s) want to be social influencers. This work is poorly understood, even by experts. For example, the U.
S. Census Bureau lists 22,607 industries, including canoe repair, but has no listing or measurement for social influencing. Yet this “creator economy” — so named for an estimated tens of millions of people who create content for sale — is a surging phenomenon, a $250 billion industry.
I saw the flip side of social influencing when I moderated a Decatur labor-management meeting earlier this year. Decatur has good jobs that employers can’t fill. The group of human-resources managers, union officers, elected officials and community-development professionals agreed that engagement with Gen Z workers was necessary.
But no one understood how to attract this group in a way that matched their organization’s work requirements. Ameren and IBEW union officials gave the most striking example. They partner with high schools to train and recruit future workers — and they have some success, but not enough.
Their labor agreement in Decatur starts an apprentice at $38 an hour, but the work is demanding and involves call-out assignments at inconvenient hours. The consensus among Decatur community leaders was that they shouldn’t stop trying to interest Gen Zers in taking good jobs, but many don’t want traditional work. In America’s sports and manufacturing industries, even professions such as law and medicine, NIL, social influencing and gig assignments offer workers a sugar high of freedom, flexibility and easy money while eroding traditional employment.
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