A month ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed legislation that will allow college athletes in the state to profit from their sports celebrity by promoting products and companies. Other states quickly moved in the same direction, and on Tuesday the N.C.A.A., the governing body of college sports, bowed to the inevitable after long opposing the move.
The group’s governing board voted unanimously to allow student-athletes “the opportunity to benefit from the use of their name, image and likeness.” The board directed the organization’s three divisions to develop new rules to begin no later than January 2021.
While the details of this “modernization” remain vague and it is unclear how student-athletes will be allowed to “benefit,” the new rules will be “consistent with the collegiate model,” according to the organization. By that, the N.C.A.A. means “consistent with the values of college sports within higher education.”
Professors like me already follow a “collegiate model” for receiving revenue from intellectual property created by university research we do. This model provides an obvious and straightforward solution to the challenges of compensating athletes based on their name, image and likeness. Just treat athletes like others on campus.
In 1978, Joe Allen, a member of the staff of Senator Birch Bayh, a Democrat of Indiana, discovered that of the 28,000 patents owned by the federal government through government-funded research, only about 5 percent were being commercialized. This was a dismal record for a nation investing hundreds of billions of dollars in science and technology. Senator Bayh teamed up with Senator Bob Dole, a Kansas Republican, to propose legislation to fundamentally change how universities commercialized their discoveries.
Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act allows universities to retain ownership of patents that result from federally funded research and to share any revenues that result with professors and other researchers whose work led to the discoveries. For instance, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I work, 50 percent of such revenue is split equally between the researcher’s personal and research accounts, and the remaining 50 percent is divided equally between the university system and the campus.
The benefits of this model are obvious: It aligns the incentives of the individual, the university and the federal government in the direction of commercializing their discoveries. Since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, billions of dollars in licensing revenues have been generated from federally funded research.
The N.C.A.A. and universities could easily adopt this model for student-athletes. Here is how it would work: Each campus would help athletes identify, negotiate and secure compensation for their name, image and likeness rights. A formula would allocate the resulting revenue — perhaps one-third each to the athlete, the athletic department and the campus. The N.C.A.A. could standardize this formula across its divisions or allow it to vary.
This would be, in the words of the N.C.A.A., “consistent with the values of college sports within higher education.” The interests of the athlete, the athletic department and the campus would be aligned. The beauty of this approach is that it threads a very tight needle — it allows athletes to financially benefit, as explicitly outlined in the new California law, while avoiding compensating them as employees, which is strongly opposed by the N.C.A.A. In fact, this approach costs the N.C.A.A. and universities nothing, since they would not be paying athletes, sponsors would.
Like the federally funded researchers and their schools in the 1970s, college athletes and their athletic departments are failing to capitalize on commercial opportunities. College athletes want and deserve the chance to earn compensation for their hard work and skills, and athletic departments and colleges and universities are always looking for more money. A revenue-sharing model would benefit all involved.
Why leave any potential money on the table?
Adopting an athletics version of the Bayh-Dole Act would place college athletes squarely in line with the “collegiate model” that already governs faculty members, students and other researchers who use campus facilities to generate discoveries. It would also underscore the benefits of a large athletic program to the rest of the university, reinforcing the union of sports and scholarship.
The solution to the N.C.A.A.’s “modernization” challenge already exists. Colleges and the N.C.A.A. just have to look across campus and adopt the approach already in place.
Roger Pielke Jr. is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is the author of “The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports.”
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