As college basketball players around the country prepare for the upcoming NCAA Division I Tournament, opportunities are prime for the taking. There is the opportunity to win a national championship on the court for sure, but there is also a special window of opportunity to win a historic victory off the court.
The COVID-19 pandemic that has gripped the country for more than a year and all of the reverberations that have stemmed from it have created an unprecedented set of circumstances for the NCAA and all of its stakeholders. The cancellation of last year’s NCAA college basketball tournament and the hundreds of millions of dollars that were lost as a result of it has placed even more importance on this year’s tournament being played.
The players have more power and leverage than ever before as there can be no games without them and no tournament without games. They are in a unique position to force the hand of the NCAA to make a decision and fulfill the promise that was made back in 2019 to dictate how athletes would be able to benefit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). The NCAA Board of Directors pledged to have this done by January 2021 and failed to do so.
What does “name, image, and likeness” (NlL) mean? According to the NCAA website they “are three elements that make up a legal concept known as ‘right of publicity’. Right of publicity involves those situations where permission is required of a person to use their name, image, or likeness.”
The current rules regarding NIL for Division I athletes according to the NCAA website are: “In general, to maintain NCAA eligibility, Division I student-athletes may not promote or endorse a commercial product or service, even if they are not paid to participate in the activity. Athletes may use their image to continue participating in nonathletically related promotional activities if they were initiated before college enrollment.”
The absurdity of players not being able to profit from promoting a commercial product while simultaneously being walking billboards for shoe companies that often have multimillion dollar apparel deals with schools, is just one example of the need for an immediate change. One way that athletes can bring about change in an expeditious manner when it comes to forcing action on the NIL issue is to boycott the 2021 NCAA College Basketball Tournament.
There is no doubt that taking this kind of action would be a risk and require tremendous courage. Players would potentially forfeit their lifelong dreams of playing in the “Big Dance” and winning the NCAA Tournament. Coaches and administrators could potentially try to use their institutional power to take away scholarships from student-athletes. They could be branded as pariahs and troublemakers, but then again, they could be branded as game changers and history makers.
