Bowl Season director Nick Carparelli: In-house NIL collectives, 'binding agreements' could help stop opt-outs

Over the last few years, opt-outs have become part of the bowl game landscape for teams that miss out on the College Football Playoff. Players currently have the option to sit out the game and focus on their NFL Draft preparation, although some teams stay fully in tact for the postseason appearance.

Wednesday, Bowl Season director Nick Carparelli weighed in on the conversation in an interview with Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger.

Carparelli joined the growing number of people calling for NIL and collectives to move “in-house” and move toward an employment model. With his suggestion, athletes and the universities would come to a “binding agreement” that require them to play in both the regular season and postseason – whether it’s a bowl game or the CFP.

“I had a meeting recently with Charlie Baker and we discussed that,” Carparelli said. “On the national level, what needs to happen for everybody is collectives need to be brought in house and universities need to manage that.

“I think what will come with that is we’ll see agreements, much like any other employment agreement between athletes and the university now compensating them, whether it’s employee or employer relationship or inducement contractors, and when we see these binding agreements with their student-athletes, you’re going to see student-athletes that are required to play in 12 regular season games, the bowl game and the CFP as part of their compensation, not unlike how the rest of the real world works.”

The top five picks in last week’s NFL Draft all opted out of their respective bowl games, and Florida State got hit especially hard by players choosing not to play. All told, 29 scholarship players – including FSU’s top quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers – all sat out of the Orange Bowl against Georgia.

As for the changes Carparelli wants to see, it will likely take a while. According to current NCAA rules, NIL collectives operate as third-party organizations to provide opportunities to student-athletes. But the idea of bringing them “in-house” to schools has been around for some time.

Late last year, Baker proposed a new subdivision of schools that could directly pay athletes. The proposal, called Project D-I, entails the annual investment of at least $30,000 per athlete into an enhanced educational trust fund for at least half of the institution’s eligible student-athletes, On3’s Eric Prisbell wrote.

Getting there, however, might not be a quick process.

For starters, there are still some legal issues to sort through. The high-profile House antitrust case is perhaps the biggest, and the sense is it could signal a revenue-sharing era in college athletics. However, there’s still plenty left to figure out, including a likely settlement.