Sources: Big 12 circulating NIL agreement template to member schools
The Big 12 has circulated an NIL template to its schools in recent weeks that would effectively spell out, among others, the terms, services, payments and timing of payments to athletes.Getty Images
League sources told Sports Business Journal the Big 12 circulated a name, image and likeness agreement template to its schools in recent weeks that would effectively spell out, among other things, terms, services, payments and the timing of payments to athletes.
The template, which remains in its infancy and could undergo significant changes, was also created to allow each school to format it related to its varying needs, like, for example, whether athletes would sign over their NIL rights exclusively or non-exclusively to the university.
Sources told SBJ the document is currently rather unwieldy at around 20 pages and staffers are working to parse down the information to be more digestible.
"It's not going to be short, even if we pare it down," one Big 12 source told SBJ. "You're just going to have to be like a real estate agent — 'This means this. This means this, and this is what you're interested in.'"
The Big 12's circulating of this potential template comes after Judge Claudia Wilken granted preliminary approval of the House settlement last month. The proposed settlement would grant schools the ability to share revenue directly with athletes, along with creating a system that would provide the NCAA and a third-party entity with some level of oversight over the payment of players.
Schools around the country are largely planning for a world in which athletes may well sign multiple agreements with each institution. Those contracts could entail but aren't limited to agreements related to House payments, scholarships and NIL that would be based on fair market value.
"Are you going to commingle the scholarship agreement with the House payment? Are you going to keep those two separate?," posited a second Big 12 source. "I don't think you're going to see institutions all do it one way or the other."
The larger hope among administrators is the settlement will show enough progress to Congress that it might step in to create some kind of wider national NIL standard that would circumvent the patchwork of state laws that currently govern the matter.
College sports leaders also desire congressional help in creating an antitrust carve out that would allow athletes to collectively bargain without being deemed employees (federal law does not allow non-employees to collectively bargain).
Opponents of the settlement, however, argue its implementation would functionally create a collective bargaining agreement without the input of the athletes.
"We oppose the settlement, and the conferences and the schools have done a masterful job of throwing out breadcrumbs for the media long before the settlement was actually made public and analyzed," said Ramogi Huma, executive director of the National College Players Association. "There's a lot of cheerleading around [it] right now, but the reality is that this would be terrible for athletes."
The Big 12, for its efforts, is working to get ahead of the curve.
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