{"id":246072,"date":"2025-09-22T10:09:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T10:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/246072\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T10:09:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T10:09:09","slug":"college-sports-rev-share-secrecy-undermines-public-records-laws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/246072\/","title":{"rendered":"College Sports Rev-Share Secrecy Undermines Public Records Laws"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn June 2021, I wrote an article<\/a> for Sportico exploring the debate over whether college athlete NIL<\/a> contracts should be subject to state sunshine laws.<\/p>\n

\n\tBack then\u2014those heady, almost nostalgic days leading up to the NCAA<\/a> adopting its interim name, image and likeness policy\u2014the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) had assembled a task force to draft model NIL legislation for states to plug and play. As I reported at the time, one key question was whether such legislation should stipulate how or if universities should disclose copies of athlete NIL contracts they obtained.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was already understood by then that, as part of the NCAA\u2019s begrudging acceptance of athletes earning endorsement income, schools would be required to collect their players\u2019 NIL contracts. Ostensibly, this was so they could ensure the deals didn\u2019t violate the NCAA\u2019s still-extant rules against pay-for-play and improper inducements. The school disclosure requirement drew concerns from a number of quarters, especially among athlete advocates, who worried that it could lead to college athletes at public universities having their private business dealings unmasked by state sunshine laws.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne ULC task force member, Harvey Perlman, a law professor and former University of Nebraska chancellor, pushed to exempt athlete NIL contracts from the commission\u2019s model legislation. Despite his pleas, the ULC left the matter unresolved. In the years that followed, schools closed ranks in resisting disclosure, primarily by citing student privacy (FERPA) or trade secret protections. In response, a few news organizations tried to litigate the matter, but were quickly rebuffed by courts.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2023, Frank LoMonte, then a University of Florida law professor and director of UF\u2019s Brechner Center for the Advance of the First Amendment, co-authored an article<\/a> in the Temple Law Review, \u201cBlowing the Whistle on NIL Secrecy.\u201d As the title implied, LoMonte and his collaborator, Rachel Jones, made both a legal and public policy case for why such contracts between athletes and third-parties should be disclosed.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe have repeatedly seen how secrecy contributes to abusive and exploitative conditions within college athletic programs, sometimes putting athletes\u2019 physical safety at risk and allowing wrongdoing to fester,\u201d the article said.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough I consider myself a committed transparency zealot, I was fairly agnostic when it came to this sunlight debate. After all, records held by public institutions aren\u2019t always public by default\u2014and I sympathized with concerns that college athletes, long marginalized, shouldn\u2019t face new privacy intrusions just as their publicity rights were gaining recognition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that was then.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, in the wake of the House v. NCAA<\/a> settlement, schools can sign agreements to pay their athletes directly. Yet those agreements are just as shrouded from public view, shielded by the same exemptions\u2014FERPA, trade secrets\u2014that were once used to justify withholding third-party NIL deals. In light of that, this is no longer a debate. It\u2019s a scandal, one that undermines the core purpose of public records laws: ensuring that taxpayers can see how public institutions spend public money.<\/p>\n

\n\tLast week, the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government (NMFOG), a First Amendment and press advocacy group, filed companion lawsuits against the state\u2019s two Division I universities, New Mexico and New Mexico State, after being denied copies of the schools\u2019 revenue-sharing contracts with athletes.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe litigation faces both an uphill climb and a narrowing window, as legislatures across the country rush to create special public disclosure carveouts for this information. New Mexico hasn\u2019t yet followed the lead of states like Colorado in actively hiding this information, but if local lawmakers weren\u2019t already being aggressively lobbied to do so before, you can be sure they will now.<\/p>\n

\n\tNMFOG\u2019s suits make a clear-cut argument for the public\u2019s \u201csubstantial interest\u201d in ensuring its overall right to public inspection isn\u2019t horse-collared by its passion for college sports: \u201cPayments by public universities to anyone; whether to faculty, staff, student-workers or student-athletes, are public record and should be available for anyone to see.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the suits also advance an equally compelling case for why a specific subset of the public\u2014the college athletes\u2014has a direct stake in this transparency.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWithout transparency,\u201d it states, \u201cno one\u2014including female student-athletes themselves\u2014has any idea whether UNM\u2019s distribution of revenue-sharing payments provides female student-athletes equitable opportunities or equitable treatment between genders as required under Title IX.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s not just about fairness for women. Male football and basketball players, who will receive the largest shares of House money, should also support public access. Transparency allows all athletes to see not only how much their counterparts at other schools are earning\u2013without having to rely on aggregated from vested third parties like Deloitte or Opendorse\u2013but also to understand the full terms of those deals. It stands to reason that this kind of visibility leads to more informed, strategic, and equitable negotiations.<\/p>\n

\n\tFinally, this obscurantism delays a necessary reckoning with the Big Lie about revenue-sharing in college sports\u2014enshrined in the House settlement\u2014that the money schools are now paying athletes are for their NIL rights, not for the actual services they perform on the field. So long as colleges athletics cling to that fiction, it must sustain the pretense in every other corner of the industry.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the clearest cracks in that facade is contract disclosure itself\u2014an implicit admission that this is no longer amateurism, but a commercial relationship between institutions and the labor producing their product, whether or not we dare call them \u201cemployees.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAdvocates for athletes\u2019 rights should avoid repeating the same transparency double-standards that have long undermined those rights, and instead champion the vital role open records\u2014from coaching deals to athletic department budgets\u2014have played in advancing their cause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In June 2021, I wrote an article for Sportico exploring the debate over whether college athlete NIL contracts…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":246073,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[43],"tags":[1428,2076,12911,1318,34028,1317,1315,1316,24249,62,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-246072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-college-football","tag-college-basketball","tag-foia","tag-football","tag-house-v-ncaa","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-nil","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115247406388202981","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}