Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a former college football coach himself, wants to shake up college sports, but his recent complaints about recruitment and so-called name, image and likeness (NIL) rules are drawing flags.
During a discussion with the Monday Morning Quarterback Club, a football-adjacent nonprofit, Tuberville condemned the current state of NIL rules, as reported on AL.com. “I don’t think you should be able to recruit with money,” he said. “I think you recruit with your school and your salesmanship, but then you get there and then you give them the opportunity to make money.” He bemoaned schools “buying a new player, new football team every year” and used the University of Indiana’s football team, which has relied on dozens of transferred athletes to carry it to a 10-0 record, as an example of a team he claims was “bought.”
Over the past couple years, I’ve covered the attempts — mostly, by college administrators and conservative members of Congress — to rein in NIL rules that allow college athletes to make money through advertising. Many people agree the current arrangement could use more structure. But the legislative proposals introduced so far, including a bill Tuberville co-sponsored last year, have been criticized for favoring college administrators while potentially disadvantaging college athletes, who can collectively generate millions of dollars for their schools.
Athletes and activists have worked for years to secure “freedom of movement” to allow players to leave schools at will — and Tuberville seems pretty peeved about it. “I’m not against players making money, but we got to have some kind of penalty for players breaking contracts,” he said. And there was more where that came from, per Al.com:
‘There’s going to have to be some exceptions,’ Tuberville said. ‘But my thoughts are, you know, you sign a contract on NIL, I mean you can’t just up and break it. I mean you gotta … you wanna sign a year, two-year, three-year, you got a three-year contract. If you break it, there’s gotta be some kind of penalty. We’ll have to go through all the rules and regulations when it comes to the commerce committee on this.’”
As AL.com noted, Tuberville isn’t the ideal source for gripes about breaking commitments:
Tuberville did that twice — once when leaving Mississippi for Auburn in 1999 after promising he’d never leave and again in 2012 when bolting for Cincinnati while coaching at Texas Tech.
Funny how conservatives pick and choose when they want to support free-market capitalism. Online, Tuberville’s complaints were met with responses like the one below, noting his hypocrisy:
If Republicans plan to put together a federal bill regulating NIL, they might want to find someone a bit less conflicted on the matter than Sen. Tuberville.