We Interupt this Cowboys vs. Cancer Golf Classic for an NCAA/NIL Update

STILLWATER – Mid afternoon on Monday, May 9, 2022 the NCAA Division I Board of Directors made good on a promise made last week by a variety of Division I athletic directors and administrators in Scottsdale, Ariz. and across the country. The promise: that members of a special NCAA task force on NIL were working on guidelines for the wild and runaway freight train that NIL had become. The promise was that those guidelines would be ready and would be passed by early the next week, maybe Monday and that is what has happened. In the end this is what the NCAA smartly did. Nothing new, they simply said all rules apply and that boosters and collectives they were involved with could not have any contact with prospective recruits. Basically, the long standing rules apply. Violators past, present, and future will be punished. Cases with NIL involvement in recruiting will be investigated immediately.

It was very coincidental that earlier Monday morning, I was standing at Stillwater Golf and Country Club where The Eddie Sutton Foundation and Cowboys vs. Cancer were hosting their annual fund raising golf classic and Oklahoma State football head coach Mike Gundy, who later in the day would be allowing the young kids that are fighting cancer and are cancer survivors to be chasing him with Super Soaker water guns and drenching him, was talking NIL with OSU athletics director Chad Weiberg. Before the fun and games Gundy was discussing the NIL situation and comparing notes from last week with Weiberg.

Miami, Fla. was one of the schools that came up. Gundy told Weiberg that the Big 12 coaches seemed to be for guidelines to keep NIL and booster money out of recruiting and out of the transfer portal situations. Weiberg was telling his head coach that the athletic directors were on very much on that same page.

Weiberg told Gundy he was hopeful that they would hear something today.

Larry Reece

Weiberg and Gundy have been seen before this spring helping raise money for good causes. 

“There is a broad consensus across all of college athletics that the way this has ended up is not good and not where we want it to be,” Weiberg later told me in an interview on Triple Play Sports Radio. “Name-Image-and-Likeness as it was intended to be is a good thing and something we thought was good for our student-athletes. We are supportive of that. Unfortunately, it has evolved into something it was not intended to be. The question is, how do we get our arms around it and reign it in. We’re working on that and those are talented people that are working providing clarity on where we want to go with this. It will be met with resistance from all of the outside parties that helped get us here. But we are going to stand up for what we think is right in college athletics.”

Alonzo Adams-USA TODAY Sports

No question, Oklahoma State lost Bernard-Converse (24) to tampering.

The biggest part of the renegade actions on this is the boosters and booster-run collectives that are paying athletes to get them to attend and play at certain schools. This ranges from high school recruits to athletes at others schools who have been tampered with, told to get into the portal to get paid to go to a certain institution. Oklahoma State saw this happen with former Cowboys corner Jarrick Bernard-Converse, the best cover corner in the Big 12 was contacted by family members that had been contacted by LSU. At first, Bernard-Converse resisted. He was happy at Oklahoma State, but the price got too high.

The stuff at Miami, Fla. with billionaire, businessman, and Hurricanes booster John Ruiz is directly paying players is crazy. Ruiz told Sports Illustrated last week that he thinks his operation is bullet-proof from the NCAA.

“We feel our platform is the only one in the country that truly would be resilient to any attack by the NCAA, because we do have a quid pro quo,” Ruiz told SI. “The payments are made electronically to them every two weeks. It’s a pretty well-oiled machine.”

Some of this stuff makes past NCAA recruiting and pay-for-play like the SMU death penalty look tame, if not very similar.

Ruiz brought it up and so did Chad Weiberg, will the NCAA be able to enforce these guidelines and keep NIL to being NIL in definition and reality?

“We’ve got to make sure we are telling the story of what is good in college athletics and good with NIL and keep it that way,” Weiberg added.

He also was asked about his department, his staff, and his coaches and if they were on board with the methodical development of the two collectives at Oklahoma State. Both are booster funded, Unbridled is a for profit collective and Pokes with a Purpose is a non profit 501(c)(3) operation.

“We have tried to be strategic about it, Robert,” Weiberg told me. “We believe in the way that we have won here. We have won here because we are really strong. Our school is great and just like you see here (Cowboys vs. Cancer) this is what makes Oklahoma State Oklahoma State. The thought was this NIL had the chance to change things and not in a good way and change our culture if we let it. I give our coaches, Coach Gundy, Coach (Mike) Boynton, Coach (John) Smith; all of them understanding that had the ability to let it do that, but wanting to prevent it from doing that. They want to continue to win on the things we have always won on here. That is our people, our culture, this place. We have approached it from the standpoint that we have to make it work for us here. I thank our coaches, our staff, and our boosters for doing it that way.”

Oklahoma State is not in danger of being in any trouble of runaway NIL violations as either pay-for-play or stepping into recruiting. There are a number, I predict a significant number of schools that are. Personally, I hope they get punished with sanctions that are painful. Do I think it will happen that way? Unfortunately, no I don’t.