College players may soon get NIL contract lessons

By STEVE BRAWNER

College athletics has become a professional sports endeavor, which means 18-year-old student-athletes soon will learn that contracts are enforceable and that they don’t want to get on the wrong side of rich people and powerful institutions with good lawyers. 

The first paragraph comes after Arkansas Edge hired attorney Tom Mars to enforce a contract buyout clause involving former Arkansas Razorbacks backup quarterback Madden Iamaleava. CBS Sports first reported the story.

Let’s identify everyone in the above paragraph. 

Arkansas Edge is the University of Arkansas athletic department’s collective. It represents the department in its name, image and likeness (NIL) agreements that pay players to play for the Razorbacks. 

Mars is an attorney and former Arkansas State Police chief appointed to that job by then-Gov. Mike Huckabee. His legal efforts have the full support of UA Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek. He was the country’s first AD to tell an NIL collective to enforce buyout contracts, CBS Sports reported, and he will not be the last. The site noted that hundreds of players and their universities have ignored buyout clauses so far.

Iamaleava (I don’t even try to pronounce the name) is a talented backup quarterback who enrolled at Arkansas in January. The California native recently announced he was transferring to the University of California at Los Angeles.

He was slated at Arkansas to make roughly $500,000 for one year with a requirement in his contract that he pay back half of what was left in his agreement if he left early. CBS Sports said Arkansas Edge is trying to recoup $200,000.  

His brother, former Tennessee starting quarterback Nico Iamaleava, also recently transferred to UCLA. It got a little ugly there, too. He held out for more money – despite being on track to earn roughly $10 million over four years, according to ESPN. He wanted $4 million annually, and the university refused to agree to his demands.

These are staggering sums for college students to make. I hope these guys are getting a lot of good financial advice – in fact, hand-holding. It’s not hard to imagine an 18-year-old blowing his first paycheck on a down payment for a luxury sports car and digging himself into a financial hole. I enrolled at Ouachita Baptist University as a freshman in 1987 with $750 spending money in my bank account, thinking it would last forever. I couldn’t believe how fast it was evaporating that first semester. An athlete without guidance simply has more zeros in his bank account, and more opportunities to blow it.

The changes in the college sports landscape bring up another question – one that’s especially relevant coming the week after the NFL draft. College athletes generally have four years of college eligibility. If football players and women’s basketball players leave college for the draft with eligibility remaining and they’re not drafted, they can’t return to college. Thanks to a rule passed in 2019, men’s basketball players can return. That change would have benefited Razorback basketball great Scotty Thurman. He declared for the draft early back in 1995, wasn’t drafted, played overseas and never made it to the NBA. His teammate, Corliss Williamson, also declared early that year and enjoyed a long NBA career.

Why can’t still-eligible players come back to school if they’re not drafted in those other leagues? It’s working in the NBA. The bans on returning to school were created back when there was a bright line between the supposedly amateur ranks and the pros. Now, the NCAA is just another professional league, and it’s not unheard of for players to switch leagues. Michael Jordan played basketball, baseball, and then basketball again. Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson played both football and baseball in the same years. 

In fact, why can’t players return to the college game at any time as long as they’re not under contract elsewhere and have eligibility left? Again, they’re all pros now. 

It may sound like a crazy question, but college sports is seeing bigger changes than that. Players earn millions of dollars. In Arkansas, they don’t even have to pay income tax on NIL money coming directly from the university thanks to a law recently signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Maybe Scotty Thurman and Corliss Williamson could return for their last year of eligibility now. They’re 50 and 51, respectively. That’s young enough to run up and down the court a few times, and old enough that they won’t blow all their NIL money.

Steve Brawner’s column is syndicated to 19 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.