Towel Rack Exclusive: Todd Stewart Discusses SB 206 & Its Effect on College Athletics
Yesterday, we shared the highlights from our exclusive interview with Western Kentucky athletic director Todd Stewart. We discussed a range of topics across the board from fall sports, scheduling, needed program improvements and basketball eligibility questions. You can listen to the entire interview here.
Today we’re going to share with you his first public comments on the recently passed California Senate Bill 206, the athlete name, image, and likeness (NIL) bill. This landmark legislation is set to directly impact college athletics and how the NCAA responds (before it is set to take place in 2023) will be crucial in how college athletics will be for years to come.
Here is what he said about the landmark bill that was passed by California, how the system may be changed moving forward and his thoughts on potential consequences of changing the system.
- We’ve all talked about the bill
- Had national NCAA athletic director meetings in Washington D.C. recently
- About 100 of FBS ADs in room at same time and that was a big topic of conversation
- A lot of layers to that
- Current NCAA model is heading towards change
- It will be different at a point of time
- There is a working group that is coming up with suggestions
- May have suggestions done by the end of the month relative to NIL
- Any time you come up with one thing that seems to work then there are reasons that it may not work
- It’s complicated
- Some athletes may be under the impression that this will be a financial windfall for all with NIL
- Not likely to be the case at all
- We do exit interviews with our athletes
- If you were to talk to every student-athlete from all sports nationwide about their experience, I’d bet that the vast majority would say the current model works very well
- Current model works better than the national narrative suggests
- There are certainly examples of it not working, not suggesting its 100% perfect
- Need to be careful to not overhaul a system for those it’s not working for and change it negatively for the vast majority it is working for
- How would you handle NIL and the ability to make money off of that?
- One of the beauties of college sports is that is hasn’t been like pro sports
- Everyone is on a team, they’re in it together, they all share in everything the same.
- If all of a sudden one person goes out and makes money off of something and nobody else gets anything how does that affect the team dynamic?
- It’s human nature, jealousies will come into play
- That’s society it’s just not an athletics thing
- One of the things that’s been talked about is finding a way of enabling some revenue that has been generated to be allocated across the board with the same amount going to everybody
- Much in the same way of cost of attendance
- There was a lot of angst when that came into play 4 or 5 years ago and now you don’t even hear about it
- That has worked fine, and every full scholarship student athlete gets the same cost of attendance amount
- I think when it comes to the NIL and the ultimate compensation that comes out of it, the more uniform it can be, the better it will be. But it’s complicated because the revenue opportunities vary greatly from conference to conference and school to school
- If everyone is a free agent then you’re going to have a lot of problems
- You’re going to have a lot of corruption, a lot of abuse of the system
- Prominent Schools that have donors with big pockets will probably do things that shouldn’t be done
- It’s a slippery slope there
- When we talked in the room (at the athletic directors meeting), the consensus seemed to be that some form of change is likely on the way
- Change isn’t always a bad thing
- Change sometimes is a good thing
- Ultimately what degree of change is the unknown right now
- We’ll have to wait and see where that goes
We’d like to thank Todd Stewart for taking the time and giving us his first on-the-record comments since SB 206 was passed. With his leadership, WKU should be ready to react to changes in the system and continue to compete at the Division 1 level moving forward. Stay tuned to The Towel Rack moving forward as we’ll continue to explore how the changes might affect WKU athletics moving forward.
