Eli Drinkwitz responds to comment about future of NIL, player compensation at SEC spring meetings

Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz drew some scrutiny on Tuesday at the SEC spring meetings when some comments he made about NIL were taken somewhat out of context and tweeted to the world in a short-form snippet.

But the Tigers coach had a larger point about the current structure of NIL.

“I think the future’s unknown. I think we’re in a very unknown situation,” Drinkwitz said. “If I had the right answer I’d probably give up coaching football and be Miss Cleo, 1-800-ELI and you can get information from me. I’m not sure what it’s going to go to. I know in my opinion right now what we have is a broken system that needs some sort of guidance.”

In fact, the system can best be described as a loose collection of rules that vary widely by state and by school.

That has left a lot of wiggle room for potential abuse of NIL. While the intent was to compensate players whose name, image and likeness is valuable enough to earn more than just their scholarship, it has turned into a veritable pay-for-play system in many instances.

Missouri as a state has been one of the least restrictive in terms of guidelines handed down by the state government.

“We’ve been criticized as a state because of our state law, which I think is unfair,” Drinkwitz said at the SEC spring meetings. “We don’t criticize other people for being innovative in what they try to design for offense or defense or how they run their schemes to try to create an opportunity for success, so why would we be criticized for creating an opportunity for success with us through our state laws?

“I don’t believe that that’s a fair criticism by anybody, and I think it’s an unknown situation and the future is, until there’s some sort of crisis I would assume to create it, create some stream-lined standards, I don’t know that there will be much change.”

A handful of coaches at the SEC spring meetings have already advocated for some sort of congressional oversight or regulation, and multiple bills have been introduced at the congressional level to attempt to put some guardrails on NIL.

To this point, everything has been governed at the state level.

One other idea that’s been floated in some corners is the Southeastern Conference taking some proactive steps to lead the charge on implementing more hard-and-fast NIL rules.

“I think that’s an avenue that could potentially be addressed,” Drinkwitz concluded at the SEC spring meetings. “With all the realignment and strategies and all the things that we were talking about last year, there was an idea floated around that the SEC was going to become their own 16-team conference and have their own playoff, why can’t the SEC run their own NIL collective model or how we want to be governed?

“We do that with some recruiting restrictions, we do that with some admittance restrictions. And I know they’re going to say the conversation’s what puts us at a disadvantage against other leagues, but we’ve got to come up with something.”