SEC commissioner Greg Sankey shared his thoughts on taking inducements out of recruiting

During SEC media days, Commissioner Greg Sankey has made it clear that he wants to see some kind of NIL reform, preferably at the federal level. One of the biggest concerns for Sankey and other leaders has been that they feel the current rules and laws allow for too much room to induce recruits to choose one school over another.

While on the set of SEC Now, Greg McElroy asked Sankey about inducements in NIL and how they can be taken out of the game.

“A couple of things, I was at the Texas High School Coaches’ Association gathering on Sunday and spoke in a room with a few hundred folks and had a line afterwards of coaches and athletic directors at the high school level telling me about transfer offers around agents or third parties and NIL deals,” Sankey said. “Some of the bad elements of that, that have impacted communities and people, and my answer was ‘You need to tell those stories.’ It doesn’t need to be me telling those stories. You need to tell those stories.”

Sankey emphasized that it’s important that voices are amplified to show where there are problems with inducements in sports. In particular, when those inducements become exploitative of recruits.

“I’ve had the same type of conversation with members of the media who are approached by families or by student-athletes to say, ‘We had this promised to us at school A. We went to school A, and it didn’t happen,’ and so we’ve seen some of those reports. Two or three. But will people go on the record and say, ‘Let me tell you what actually happened,” Sankey said.

“And what’s interesting is the college athletics enterprise is often accused of exploitation, but I would argue the base level problem would be if a base level problem would be, if an offer is made and a decision is contingent on that offer, which is then not fulfilled because of an individual, or an organization, or a collective not fulfilling a promise, that strikes me as exploitative behavior, and we don’t have any insight into that. We don’t have oversight into who is making those promises. We don’t have any level of regulation and we don’t have protections for young people and their families around these decisions.”

One big push that Greg Sankey has been making is for Congress to create a uniform NIL legislation for the entire country, rather than dealing with 50 separate state laws. For Sankey, inducements are another good reason for that.

“They deserve that and that’s where the congressional menu can provide the consistency.”

Paul Finebaum says there’s almost nothing Greg Sankey can do about NIL

Greg Sankey has made his thoughts on NIL clear. Despite those concerns and his standing in the sport, Paul Finebaum doesn’t think there’s much he can actually do about NIL.

“He may be powerful but there’s almost nothing he can do about this. Because this is a ball that was dropped many years ago by the NCAA. They could have done something about it. They had all the tools. But they punted. They did not want to deal with a litigious society that they are currently in. And we’ve seen the Supreme Court rule against them and everyone else lately,” Finebaum said.

“So now what they have done is the most unorthodox way of getting anything done. They are now going to Congress. And Congress, quite frankly, has more important things to worry about.”