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The NIL landscape in college athletics is a tricky one to follow right now. NIL has become one of the biggest aspects of college sports in recent years, but there aren't a lot of regulations. It certainly has brought a lot of positives to the athletes, but there have been a lot of issues too. Most people agree that there needs to be some more rules surrounding NIL, and one of those people is Georgia football head coach Kirby Smart.
Right now, the future of NIL is in the hands of Congress. Kirby Smart and the rest of the college sports world are left to navigate their way through a lot of uncertainty in the meantime.
“Very little has happened,” Smart said on The Paul Finebaum Show. “It just shows you how hard it is to make changes and correct things, probably when they’re needed, because … people have talked about Congress. That’s not easy. Not a lot gets done quickly there and where we are right now. Like, I think every coach agrees we’re in a good place with being able to compensate players. Call it pay for play, call it NIL, I don’t care what you call it.”
Smart clearly sees the positives of NIL, but he sees the negatives as well. What is happening now isn't going to work long-term.
“We’re all in a good place for that,” Smart continued. “We just want it to be in a way that’s sustainable. I just want to be able to have a freshman come in and not make more than a senior and I’d like for other sports to be able to still survive. You know, we’re on the brink of probably one to two years away from a lot of schools cutting sports. What’s the pushback going to be then when you start cutting non-revenue sports? I don’t want that to happen.”
With the looming House settlement decision on the table, navigating the NIL landscape in the recruiting world is a big challenge right now.
“A lot of misleading information out there,” Smart said, according to an article from CBS Sports. “Nobody really knows what’s accurate. A lot of schools are approaching it in different ways. We hear something different from every school. So I don’t think anybody really knows.”
Kirby Smart is the head coach of one of the best college football programs in the country, so obtaining NIL is not going to be a problem for him and the Bulldogs. Still, he realizes that there are changes that need to be made to the current model.
