on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan
But if you were to say to me, you know, is the eligibility system that we currently have working? I mean, if everybody would comply with it and stay out of the courts, maybe, but they don’t. There is no agent regular regulation, which is a huge problem. You talk to any student athlete about that, and any school about it, they’ll tell you that. This provides some regulatory structure around agents. It also deals with all the state preemption issues. We, you know, you got 40 different states with 40 different rules around how NIL should work, which makes it virtually impossible to set a national standard. You also have the elements associated with dealing with how we’re going to handle some of the issues around NIL, which you mentioned. And again, you know, for all of this, what we’re really trying to achieve is some sort of national framework so that you can have national championships and national competitions, in which, for all intents and purposes, everybody’s playing by the same set of rules. Now, I understand some of the concerns that the Big 10 and the SEC, in particular, have raised with the bill. We have some concerns with the bill too. But to simply walk away from something that deals with a number of the most significant challenges that face college sports at that point in time, in my view, would be a mistake, and I spent time talking to folks in all of the power conferences, and the rest of Division I, and Division II, and Division III about this, and my message to them has been, look, these folks crafted a bipartisan bill, really hard to do, does everybody love everything about it? No. Is the process associated with crafting it done? Also, no. So, let’s take seriously this opportunity to support the process, support the effort, support the parts of the bill that we believe in. And then continue to try and work with folks in the Senate, and hopefully ultimately folks in the House to create something that we can all get behind.