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Message: [QUOTE="Bone Dog, post: 5262150, member: 12088"] There’s some confusion about NIL and endorsements… and it may be mine. Currently, as I understand it, schools don’t pay NIL money to students, though this may change soon and probably should. Currently, collectives of well-meaning alums and boosters arrange a package nominally tied to endorsement deals for local businesses. The school itself can also be one of these businesses in the sense that they sell branded merch and have to compensate students for this. As far as I know, that’s the limit on direct school involvement in any pay package. Paige and Azzi on their own had negotiated endorsement deals with national businesses, like Nike and Gatorade and Chipotle and Bose. When Paige said she didn’t need to have a piece of the school’s NIL package, she probably meant her national endorsements dwarfed what the school could arrange through its collective. I don’t know if she is compensated for the many “5” jerseys we see everywhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she even let UConn keep that as well. Paige was already on magazine covers in high school. The initial NIL question concerned kids like her. Could she be disqualified by the NCAA for making money while a student on the basis of her name, image or likeness, which she unquestionably owns. There were no legal grounds to justify preventing a kid from selling her own property. But soon enough, booster organizations saw an opening to slip back into the picture and fund athletes more or less directly. This has made the picture rather murkier. We all talk rather loosely about schools paying kids NIL, and this is not quite accurate. The schools obviously arrange for booster collectives to put lucrative packages together for their athletes. This may be a distinction without a difference, but I don’t think any school is allocating endowment funds to pay NIL money. Personally, I think the situation would be improved if the schools simply did become the direct source of NIL money. They could raise the money from boosters, of course, and it could be somehow tied to some value-calculation. But it might be morally clarifying to do away with the current fictional facade to mask the real situation. And undoubtedly the entire situation would change college athletics in ways none of us would welcome if this were to happen. But the current situation is so rife with dishonesty as not to merit preserving. [/QUOTE]

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