Interesting analogy. I'd add, if you're on salary at IBM, your side gig also cannot hinder your work for IBM, even if it doesn't represent any other sort of conflict.
This concept of "leveraging" is really intriguing and complicated. I think you have to be right about employment status not being the employee's property. That doesn't seem to be a credible argument. Now to test the analogy: 1) is a student athlete an employee? and the prior question, Are students employees? Many students have tested this notion in litigation against universities. Grad student TAs recently won a significant concession from the UC in which they demanded employee benefits, and this entailed being recognized as employees, something the university had resisted for many years. 2) Even if NIL is best understood as a property rights issue, is the student-athlete's training and competing while wearing a university-branded jersey a form of employment? If we think it could be leveraged, we might have to say so. But here again, I think universities have resisted this notion too. But if the student-athletes are not employees, then leverage may not be the appropriate category to apply here. This looks like a delicious rabbit hole to plunge into! Who knows what warren of distinctions might be discovered.
One last thought: the endorsements Paige and Azzi and others get are sometimes for athletic shoe companies and other things tangentially related to their athletic endeavors. But they also endorse things like restaurant chains, electronics brands, etc. In other words, much of their NIL income is not closely related to their student-athlete status and yet was forbidden until recently.
