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    • UNLV Football: Matt Sluka’s NIL chaos is the first of many to come
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    UNLV Football: Matt Sluka’s NIL chaos is the first of many to come

    Madoc Meredith Posted on

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    Matt Sluka, UNLV’s little-known quarterback, became the most famous player in college football on Wednesday for one of two reasons.

    The first version of the story – his version – says that after he transferred from Holy Cross, a UNLV assistant coach verbally promised him a $100,000 payment for his name, image and likeness, and that the money never arrived when he arrived on campus.

    The second version – spun by people more friendly to UNLV – is that Sluka asked for a raise, so to speak, after becoming the starting quarterback for a 3-0 team that has a good chance of making the College Football Playoffs.

    In NIL’s “Wild West” era, both scenarios are plausible, as they have happened dozens of times before at schools in college sports. The difference now is that we learned about it through a statement in which Sluka said he was leaving the team and retaining his redshirt eligibility for the rest of the year.

    This unusual situation is like rocket fuel for the debates surrounding NIL over the past three years. The lack of oversight around NIL in general, the malicious scammers and incompetent agents trying to make a quick buck, the basic economic rights of college athletes, and the delicate locker room dynamics surrounding money are all themes represented here. Depending on how you view college athlete pay and given the lack of clear evidence as to why this has gone wrong, you may come up with your own version of it.

    But it should be a wake-up call for anyone who has been bent over backwards trying to avoid an employment model for college athletes. Until schools accept the responsibility of being employers — just like any other multibillion-dollar sports league — the challenges of building and maintaining rosters will continue to lead to chaos and consequences that make the entire operation seem shady at best and a breeding ground for malicious actors at worst.

    Some will argue that all of these problems are just part of the teething issues college sports are going through: from an era where it was taboo to pick up the tab for a college athlete’s pizza to an era where assistant coaches wear T-shirts at practice bragging about paying their players money. Just good old American capitalism in action, baby.

    But there is currently no industry in this country where capitalism functions as freely as in college sports and NIL, without enforceable regulation. And the result?

    For the most part, it’s been great for players, who have the opportunity to look for better terms and a new team on the open market each year. It’s been miserable for coaches and officials, whose rosters have to start almost from scratch each year and operate in a silo of misinformation every time they make a decision about a player’s true value on the open market. And it’s proven to be a never-ending treadmill for collectives, those semi-independent development organizations that can never stop raising money so the coffers don’t run out for the next group of recruits and transfers.

    Did UNLV’s collective not have enough money to fund the thing? Was the school trying to draw a red line about the consequences of trying to demand $100,000 in the middle of the season? We may never really know.

    UNLV’s official statement is that Sluka “made financial demands … in order to continue playing,” which the school interpreted as a violation of NCAA rules.

    “UNLV does not participate in such activities nor does it respond to subtle threats,” the statement said.

    The UNLV collective denied in a statement that it ever made an offer over $100,000 and stressed that it had met all contractual and financial obligations this season.

    But no matter who you believe, the consequences will be real for UNLV, whose football team and remaining players were abandoned by a teammate, and for head coach Barry Odom, who must repair his reputation on behalf of his staff.

    While there’s no reasonable way to determine how often such things have happened behind the scenes, the coaching community, particularly in football and men’s basketball, has an endless supply of anecdotes from the past three years – from misunderstandings about what was being offered, to collectives clinging on by their fingernails to paying salaries, to agents threatening to pull players from otherwise good situations because of financial disputes.

    Sure, college sports are booming. The seats are full, ratings are rising, and interest continues to explode, even if the sport seems chaotic.

    But no business with such high stakes and dollar amounts at stake should be run so haphazardly and with so little control over the financial transactions that essentially serve to generate payroll.

    However, there is a major obstacle to controlling the NIL environment: Any attempt by schools or the NCAA to restrict the collectives’ operations will face legal resistance and be subject to scrutiny for antitrust violations.

    Even the agreement between the House and the NCAA that would allow schools to share revenue directly with players for the first time was held up by Northern District of California Judge Claudia Wilken’s concerns about some restrictions on NIL/collective activities.

    The only solution is to make college athletes employees and to standardize the rules of the road and establish them through a collective bargaining process – just like in any professional sport.

    University presidents and NCAA officials have spent tens of millions in recent years on legal fees and lobbying in Washington, D.C., to prevent this outcome. They seem willing to make any concession possible to prevent athletes from becoming employees.

    But as long as the NIL collectives exist in their current form, with virtually no rules, standards, oversight or transparency regarding the deals they make with players, the dispute between UNLV and Sluka will undoubtedly be the first of many to escalate publicly in the middle of the season.

    If schools are OK with this trend, they should definitely continue on the current path. If they want to regain some control and bring order to the compensation of athletes, making them employees is really the only solution.

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    Madoc Meredith
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