SEC coaches hoping new-look NIL enforcement is ‘uniform’

Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin and his staff have been prepared for the revenue sharing era of college sports. And, now that it’s here, Kiffin and his coaching peers are awaiting to see how it plays out and how its guidelines will be enforced.

As of July 1, individual schools can “directly pay players” a shared sum of $20.5 million in name, image and likeness payments, according to the Associated Press. Previously third-party organizations, collectives and businesses were the ones inking deals with student-athletes to NIL deals. Third-party deals will still be available for student-athletes but must be cleared by the newly-established College Sports Commission, per CBS Sports.

In an interview with the Daily Journal in June, Rebels athletics director Keith Carter said Ole Miss will revenue share between five sports – football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and softball.

Revenue sharing was among the hot topics at SEC Media Days in Atlanta last week, and Kiffin was one of the head coaches asked about its impact.

“We basically have followed this structure of the cap that was coming, that we were told was going to most likely be approved, if you go back to retention contracts from last year, free agency contracts in the portal in January and then in spring,” Kiffin said. “So, we’ve been following that because that’s what we were told most likely was going to be approved and that there was going to be ways to enforce that and follow that.”

The College Sports Commission – with help from Deloitte – will review all potential third-party NIL deals “to ensure ‘fair market value’ and valid business purpose based on an actual endorsement,” according to CBS Sports. South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer expressed concerns with how the new rules regarding revenue sharing and NIL would be enforced.

“That what we say is going to be enforced, is going to happen and be enforced. Because all the talk out there about what’s new stuff and this and that, if there is no teeth to it, doesn’t matter. It’s just going to continue to be,” Beamer said. “What has been implemented with rev share and the clearinghouse and all that, I see other conferences talking about the negatives about it already. Let’s give this thing time to work and develop. Let’s see what it is and not all of a sudden say it’s not going to work.

“I was in (Washington) D.C. earlier this year talking about the need to it for national legislation, so been talking a lot about this. But something uniform that has some teeth to it where it is what it’s supposed to be, and if somebody is not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, it’s going to be enforced and there will be repercussions.”

Like Beamer and Kiffin, Florida’s Billy Napier is hoping for uniformity in the enforcement of the new NIL standards.

“I do think that it’s professionalized the game to some degree. Everybody wants to use the word salary cap. I think right now it’s more of a cash budget, to be quite honest,” Napier said. “But I don’t want to take away from the fact that I do think that it’s important that we have to continue to fight the fight here and find some common ground and create some guidelines and get some direction that we all can kind of abide by the same set of rules.”