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Challenges for the Collegiate Team Physician - NIL ...
Challenges for the Collegiate Team Physician - NIL, Social Media, Parents, AD/Coaches
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Video Transcription
This is the last talk for the afternoon, so we'll just kind of look at the same optics or the same prism, but from the collegiate side. These are my disclosures. Name image and likeness. This is a new concept that's sort of taken over collegiate athletes, you know, the idea of amateurism started with the NCAA in 1905, where athletes were felt just to be athletes and could only receive scholarships and aid, but could not be paid for their image. It started to change in 2015. Ed O'Bannon from UCLA basically sued, saying that they were still benefiting from their name image and likeness even after graduation, and they had some lower courts that believed them, agreed with them. That's why the EA Sports Games went away. It was not heard by the Supreme Court, and that left open a lot of doors for future cases, which is the one in 21 that came out, the Alston case, which effectively went to the Supreme Court and stated that the NCAA was violating antitrust laws and effectively turned over NIL decisions to the states. That can only be really changed by a federal regulation. You can imagine in today's political climate, that's not real high on the list of to-dos, although they did have a hearing yesterday where you could tell the legislatures really had no idea what was going on with their questions, but that would be the one thing that would change this would be a federal law, and maybe in the future. Certainly there's a lot of push from the colleges to try to make that happen, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Because of that, different states started passing their own laws, and really some states were more restrictive. California, Florida was the first. California was the first to mention it. Florida was actually very restrictive, and they since changed it to make it less restrictive to open things up because they felt like it was giving them a recruiting disadvantage. I found this timeline, which is interesting, you can see the evolution over the last 120 years. In 1905, Incitable A was formed. In 87, SMU received a death penalty for effectively paying athletes to go there. This was the days of the Pony Express with Eric Dickerson. September 2010, Reggie Bush had to return as Heisman, USC had to forfeit a number of games because of him being paid for his name, image, and likeness. 2014, the O'Bannon lawsuit. 2019, California was the first to propose a state law allowing athletes to be able to get paid for their name, image, and likeness. 21, Incitable A versus Alston. July of 21, a number of states started coming into effect and really kind of ramped up the changes in the environment. February 22, these collectives started to come together. Collectives are effectively groups of fans that put money together to give athletes, for representing the university, I guess is the best way to describe it. The problem is, how do you differentiate these collectives from boosters, because there's a very strict rule that boosters can't be involved in recruiting, and so they're trying to figure out how that is now. March of 22, five-star athletes signed an $8 million NIL deal to go play for Tennessee. April of 22, Isaiah Wong publicly said he was going to transfer if he did not get more NIL money. Just became the ACC Player of the Year and took the team to the Final Four, so this will definitely change the landscape moving forward. May of 22, they finally got together to meet and say, we need to kind of figure this out, because right now it's a wild, wild west. That's where we are. How does that affect physicians? By definition, NIL can't be pay-for-play, although obviously that's not being enforced or really that no one's really looking into that right now, and you can't have booster involvement. How does that affect collectives? The bigger thing is, you've got to be careful with what you're involved with. Staff can help with connections, but they can't be directly involved. It's an NCAA violation if you're a staff member and you're directly, intimately involved with an NIL deal. We had our quarterback get an NIL deal this season from Arthrex. UF got so worried about my involvement, they took my name out of it, so he had a pretty good combine, but all my name was taken out of everything because UF was worried about what was going to happen if they looked like they were promoting coming to UF, that you can be involved with NIL deals. Also, you can't be involved in athlete endorsements. If you operate on somebody and you want them to do an endorsement for you, that's a violation if you're a member of the team, so to speak. But I've heard stories of competing groups in town who are not involved with the teams using the athletes to do endorsements. So it's kind of a double-edged sword here that others are benefiting, but those who work with the team cannot. So you've got to be careful because the last thing you want to do is get slapped with a penalty by the NCAA. It also brings in agents. That's a new world in college football. I've dealt with this for years with college baseball, but college football did not have agents. Now there are agents. Now you've got to remember this is a different environment. There's no collective bargaining agreement. There's no long-term contracts. It's effectively a one-year deal that are renewed every year. And so if you bring in outside influence, outside pressures, how does the coaching staff handle that? How do they handle the frustrations if things aren't being followed? Do they drop the scholarship? It becomes very complicated when you get outside influence. In addition, medical care, this is not a work comp injury. There's no work comp group system, all those kind of things. Working outside of the primary physicians, you know, now you're out of network. Who's handling costs? Who's handling rehab? Becomes very, very challenging. You know, at UF we have negotiated fees to make it more affordable. All that goes away if you go outside of the university. So that becomes a much more difficult problem. Next issue is the transfer portal. This has also picked up steam in the last couple of years. This is one of our athletes last year had a very complicated chronic bony bank art that I repaired, did an osteotomy, repaired him. The next day, he got into the transfer portal. I had no idea it was coming. I'd never heard from the team that he went to. No one asked me for rehab plan. I had no idea about his return to play. You know, kind of just lost contact, you know, and this is a guy that potentially two years down the road I'm going to be seen at the combine when I help out and my name's on it. But I have had no interaction with him since he left. Fortunately, he did well this season, so that worked out okay. But that's the problem with this thing is there's who covers the cost when they leave or when they come in. There's no set rules, all those things. Who handles the communications? It just becomes very, very difficult when they're moving in and out. Just last week, I had a guy on surgery on Friday morning, Thursday night, he tweeted out that he was leaving to go to the transfer portal. I'm like, well, am I still doing the surgery tomorrow? I have no idea. So it becomes very, very difficult when people are moving around all over the place. Conference expansion. This may not seem like a big deal because you guys are used to flying all over the country on the professional level, but I can tell you that getting from Gainesville, Florida to Pullman, Washington is not an easy trip. And so when you expand these conferences to small college towns, are the physicians need to go for three, four days now for a game? You know, it's not easy to get to these places to get back, you know, so how do we handle the coverage in that situation? You know, now UCLA and Maryland are going to be in the same conference next season or two seasons from now. That makes things very difficult for those of you, for those who are in practice and trying to manage dealing with all that. So there's a lot of fallout from that that haven't been really looked into. And then lastly, head coaches, it's a different world that there are certain coaches that do very well in college that don't do well at the higher level because they are control freaks and they're basically the CEO of a $90 million company. And so you have to do your best to make sure that you try to establish a relationship but not feel the pressure to always make the coaches happy and let that kind of dictate your decision making process. You know, really the head coach is the top of the pyramid at the collegiate level. There's ADs and things like that, but their job is to keep the head coach happy for the most part. And so it makes it difficult. You have to kind of work through. You're not an employee, but they can easily tell you, hey, thanks, but no thanks, you know, this isn't working out. We'll find somebody else. So you got to kind of walk that tightrope to keep the coaches happy. And then once they get fired, the next coach comes in and starts that process all over again. So, you know, it becomes a challenge kind of managing that. So I think that's something that we have to do kind of, you know, on a day-to-day basis. So those are the things that the latest things that I've been kind of seeing the collegiate level as the evolution moves forward. Hopefully we get things figured out. I mean, I love the sport. I love college football, but I'm worried about the future because right now there's so many moving parts that hopefully we can kind of get ahead of things as we move forward. So thanks.
Video Summary
In this video, the speaker discusses the evolution of name, image, and likeness (NIL) regulations in collegiate athletics. They explain how the concept of amateurism started with the NCAA in 1905, but has since changed due to legal challenges. In 2015, Ed O'Bannon sued the NCAA, leading to a Supreme Court case in 2021 that stated the NCAA violated antitrust laws. As a result, different states passed their own laws, with some being more restrictive than others. The speaker also talks about the challenges NIL presents for physicians, such as issues with endorsements and outside influence. They also touch on the transfer portal, conference expansion, and the dynamics of working with head coaches.
Asset Caption
Presented by Kevin W. Farmer MD
Keywords
evolution of NIL regulations
collegiate athletics
amateurism
Ed O'Bannon lawsuit
Supreme Court case
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