The American Football Coaches Association has followed a slew of conference commissioners and university administrators in reacting to President Donald Trump’s Executive Order issued Friday night. The EO from Trump is theoretically designed to mandate fixes to the litany of things that currently ail college sports. Commissioners and administrators generally thanked Trump for his efforts. The AFCA asked for additional help in an area that was not really addressed by the conferences/schools.
CFB Coaches Ask For Help with Agents
The Executive Order
We start with the Executive Order. The 10-page document orders the NCAA to update its rules governing college sports by August 1st. It also attempts to mandate limits on how many times college athletes can transfer to different schools, without losing eligibility. All other college students remain free to transfer whenever they choose.
The Executive Order also wants the NCAA to put the toothpaste back in the tube in terms of revenue caps for athletes. It orders the NCAA to put guardrails around what it called “fraudulent NIL schemes,” a reference to booster-backed collectives that operate outside the legal intent of Name, Image, and Likeness rules.
Under What Authority?
While the order does not unilaterally make changes to any system, it makes those demands of the NCAA. It says it will withhold federal funding from schools that do not comply with new rules. It does not address that university budgets (to which the federal government contributes) are usually in a different bowl than the athletic department budgets (upon which the federal government has no impact).
Most legal experts agree that the executive branch of the federal government has no jurisdictional authority over college sports, the NCAA, the conferences, or the athletic departments. And federal courts have repeatedly found in recent years that the NCAA has been acting in violation of antitrust laws for decades. That all but removes any chance that the NCAA will follow the executive order.
Making Sure to Kiss the Ring
Still, conference commissioners from the ACC, SEC, Big 12, Big 10, and the American swiftly put out memos over the weekend thanking the president for his involvement in the current college sports morass and trying to find ways to enlarge the conversation. There was no public comment on their part that any attempt to impose any of these new rules would swiftly bring about lawsuits from athletes, their representatives, or even the schools themselves.
But the AFCA went in a different direction. The organization, made up of coaches at every college level throughout the country, issued a statement asking the president to intervene in the area of player agents.
Seeking Help with Agents
AFCA Executive Director Craig Bohl issued a statement Monday afternoon, both thanking the president for getting involved in the conversation and asking him to expand the scope of the direction to include player agents.
The Executive Order does take a position on standardizing requirements for agents of college athletes. But that became the focal point of the AFCA position on Monday afternoon. “I am encouraged by President Trump’s Executive Order on college sports,” Bohls said in his written statement. He went on to encourage the president to commit to the promise to have the Federal Trade Commission enforce the Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act (SPARTA) of 2004.
Past Law That Didn’t Help
SPARTA was passed by Congress and signed into law by then-President George W. Bush in 2004. The intent was to protect college athletes from unscrupulous agents. The legislation, all 264 words of it, says that agents should not use false or misleading information for the purposes of inducing college student-athletes to sign contracts with them. As a punishment for those who do, the bill “authorizes” state attorneys general to file civil action against the agents. The hitch in the process, not mentioned in the bill, is that when it was signed, it was illegal for college athletes to have agents in any capacity until they left school. In other words, the bill, in its entire three paragraphs, was a moot point.
“Increased federal focus on enforcement is a constructive and necessary step toward addressing long-standing gaps in oversight,” says Bohl’s statement, inferring that there ever was federal enforcement to begin with. But student-athletes are now allowed to have representation for the purposes of NIL or revenue-sharing contracts with the schools.
Looking for a National Standard
The AFCA statement correctly points out that “Today, there are no minimum standards, no universal registration or certification system, and only minimal, uneven regulation of college sports agents.” There is no singular institution with the legal standing to enforce day-to-day rules on the transfer portal, athlete eligibility, money from collectives, and the NIL. So it is unclear as to who the AFCA thinks could/would enforce any rules on agents.
Currently, there are 32 states that have laws on the books that govern the activities of representatives of college athletes. But there is no national certification process to make them licensed agents. Coaches will tell you they get approached by people who could just as easily be the uncle’s neighbor’s barber, looking to negotiate the revenue-sharing/NIL deal for an athlete. And whatever laws may exist at the state level are not likely to get enforced if it would negatively impact an athlete at a school in one of the states in question.
The Bottom Line
The AFCA listed three bullet points it wants to see prioritized when it comes to the issue of agents for college athletes. Among them is “Empower a single entity with national oversight of college sports agents, replacing the current patchwork of 32 state regulatory systems that lack uniform standards and meaningful enforcement.”
Presumably, the AFCA would be satisfied with whatever national organization is eventually empowered to run college sports. The AFCA is, after all, the same organization that took all of the coaches’ complaints about the CFB calendar, the portal, recruiting windows, and turned that into a four-hour debate on how many games players can play and still redshirt.
Main Image: Tony Siracusa