I believe that most people who follow college sports, and in particular college football and basketball, already realize the fallacies underpinning NIL.

NIL was supposed to grant college athletes the ability to earn money from their name, image or likeness. The original commentary conceived of athletes getting paid for various types of sponsorships or inclusion in a Company’s advertising. While this is happening and will continue to happen, there is something much more significant underway. Recruits are being paid to choose their college sports team. Pay to play is here.

Despite being forced by the Supreme Court to allow college athletes to be paid for NIL, the NCAA still clings to whatever remnants of amateur athleticism it can (which has dramatically slowed and complicated necessary changes – more on this later). In particular, the NCAA hates the idea of recruits being enticed to attend a university based on compensation.

The NCAA has never allowed the challenge of enforcing an NCAA rule (or ideal), to deter it from creating unpractical and unenforceable rules. The rules which have historically governed the recruitment of student athletes have leaned toward complex to interpret and challenging for coaches and administrations to remain compliant as they apply these rules in practical situations. It appeared that the definition of “impermissible benefit” was frequently not clear or appropriate or both. Please refer to the Rick Majerus story of a purchase of a burger for an athlete as case-in-point and certainly there are many more.

That leads us to the current challenge of interpreting the intent behind payments made to recruits. The NCAA would suggest that payments to recruits for NIL must be permissible under the Supreme Court ruling, but that money provided to recruits for the purpose of enticing them to attend a university should remain an NCAA violation.

Most of us realize that it is, by all means, practically impossible to determine the intent behind payments made to prospects for use of their NIL from payments to attend a particular university. Even reviewing a contract with a recruit may shed little or no light on the actual intent.

However, this has not deterred the NCAA from attempting to adjudicate precisely this.

In reality, recruits are already getting paid to attend universities as enticed by donor groups with loyalties to these universities. This activity is surreptitiously being labeled NIL.

Like it or not, the era of paying players to attend and play sports for a particular university began the moment the Supreme Court ruling was signed. Most or all of these payments will likely be labeled as payments for the use of a student athletes NIL; however in most cases the payments are likely (these contracts are not publicly available) instead made primarily in exchange for a recruit selecting a particular college to play sports. NIL rights themselves are less significant or even unimportant.

There is nothing the NCAA can do to prevent this.