Casagrande: Tennessee fights back against the NCAA

Casagrande: Tennessee fights back against the NCAA

Danny White, who is in charge of sports at Tennessee, grabbed this bazooka and started typing.

There’s no other way to put it. There’s no doubt about it—he went after the NCAA when word got out Tuesday that the Vols were being investigated again.

After that first report in Sports Illustrated, a lot of evidence pointed to a big change in how schools handle situations. They’re just no longer scared.

At one point, the NCAA investigators tried to make people afraid or at least follow their orders so that they would get away with something when it came time to face the jury and the judge. He said that they had to answer because this “ill-conceived investigation” was made public.

White, on the other hand, doesn’t come down on his knees. No, he came out swinging a bat toward the NCAA, joining UT Chancellor Donde Plowman along with other state politicians who were doing things that had never been done before.

The reporters got Plowman’s harsh letter to NCAA head Charlie Baker by asking for public records. White, on the other hand, went straight into the public.

These rules that hurt competition are against the Sherman Act and hurt current and future student athletes in addition to the State. They should be stopped.

White made many accusations against the NCAA in a post on Elon Musk’s social media site. He said right away that the governing body broke its own rules by giving the details to the news media.

The Attorney Generals of Tennessee and Virginia sued the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) on Wednesday, saying that the NCAA was breaking federal antitrust laws by making it harder for current and future student athletes to make money off of their name, image, and likeness (NIL).

“Athletes on campus have the right to clear and fair rules,” said Attorney General Skrmetti. “There would be no college sports without athletes, and weaker students shouldn’t be left beneath while everyone else does well.”

Federal antitrust law is broken when the NCAA makes it hard for potential students to negotiate NIL deals. Such limits can only be put in place by Congress.

The Supreme Court said that the NCAA broke antitrust law by putting unreasonable limits on how much college athletes could be paid.

As a result, Tennessee alongside other states passed laws to help the NIL market grow, which was good for student-athletes.

In spite of these state laws, the NCAA has made a confusing set of rules and guidelines that make it impossible for student athletes to get adequate reimbursement for their NIL.

White then said that the NCAA staff “does not understand what’s currently happening” with the NIL atmosphere that the office is looking into in Knoxville.

He says that the NCAA’s NIL rules are “fuzzy and contradictory” and that investigators are “moving the goalposts to fit a predetermined outcome.”

In his statement, White said that we needed “to be spending our time and energy on solutions that would improve college sports in the NIL era.” He then said that “the NCAA leadership failed” in 2021 to do that.

With the start the NIL era and the confusing mix of NCAA rules and state laws, a new market with unclear boundaries was created.

Some programs, like Tennessee, reacted quickly to this new situation because they saw it as a chance to build their rosters.

One SEC athletics director stated to me last fall that other directors kept their involvement low-key because they knew the NCAA’s enforcement arm would not be watching as schools tested these fuzzy lines.