WASHINGTON, D.C. – It was a touchdown for student athletes when the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the NCAA should allow them to make money from their fame.

Since then, student athletes have been able to ink lucrative deals for everything from product endorsements to autograph signings, thanks to being permitted to capitalize on their name, image, and likeness (NIL).

What You Need To Know

  • Ohio U.S. Representatives Mike Carey (R) and Greg Landsman (D) have teamed up to attempt to create a federal rulebook for name, image, and likeness (NIL) in college sports

  • In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that college athletes could make money from their fame

  • Carey and Landsman are picking up where former Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, a former football star, left off
  • An attorney who specializes in NIL compliance says federal guardrails will be helpful

“The problem with a decision like that isn’t the decision itself, it’s that it doesn’t come with any rules,” Ohio U.S. Representative Greg Landsman (D) told Spectrum News in an interview this week.

Landsman has teamed up with Ohio Rep. Mike Carey (R) to create a federal rulebook for these NIL deals. They call it the “Student Athlete Level Playing Field Act.”

“Everybody will know what people are getting paid, people will have to register with the FTC, and we’re not going to put in harm's way some of these other programs that may not be what everybody sees on TV every day,” Carey said in a joint interview with Landsman.

Their efforts pick up where former Ohio Congressman Anthony Gonzalez (R) left off.

Gonzalez was a football star at Ohio State and reached the NFL before turning to politics. Once in office, he became the face of the effort to pass NIL legislation, but it failed to make it to the end zone before Gonzalez left Congress last year after declining to seek reelection. He declined to comment on this story.

“Representative Gonzalez was providing that leadership, but as Mike [Carey] said, with him gone, someone needed to step up and Mike did,” Landsman said.

Landsman and Carey’s bill would create an organization to track NIL deals worth over $500, guard against colleges using them to recruit student athletes, and ensure a student is actually enrolled at a school before inking an NIL deal.

“What we were seeing happening, and the fear was, is that a student athlete could go to one school and another school to try to get a better deal,” Carey said.

Attorney Cal Stein, who advises clients on NIL matters and hosts a podcast on the topic, said in an interview that federal legislation like this could be helpful because there’s now a patchwork of NIL rules at the state level.

“While there are some common themes across the state legislation, they do vary in some significant ways and in some ways that can give certain schools in certain states an advantage over others,” said Stein, a partner at Troutman Pepper.

By instituting one national standard, and requiring disclosure of most NIL agreements, he said the legislation would help to level the playing field.

“For every [deal] we hear about, there could be five, 10, 50, 100 that we don’t know about,” Stein said.

Carey and Landsman hope that by introducing their bill on a bipartisan basis – and this early in the two-year legislative session – they can make some progress. 

“Folks want structure to what’s happening in college sports, and this provides that,” Landsman said.