A local politician is pushing back against the NCAA’s latest rules regarding college athletes’ name, image and likeness rights.

State Rep. Joe Tate, D-Detroit, introduced House Bill 4643 to prevent colleges and athletic departments from blocking student-athletes from profiting off NIL.

“House Bill 4643 really specifies that no entity has the right to be able to prohibit a student-athlete from executing a contract involving their name, image and likeness,” Tate said.

The bill prohibits universities from upholding any limitations on an athlete’s NIL rights; from complying with investigations into agency agreements, NIL agreements, NIL compensation, or NIL activities; and from reporting any NIL information to an athletic association such as the NCAA.

House Bill 4643 also prohibits the NCAA and other athletic associations from punishing an athlete or university for issues related to NIL rights, or from requiring either party to report NIL information.

The bill comes in the wake of the June 6 approval of the House v. NCAA settlement by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken. The settlement allows college athletic programs to directly compensate athletes with revenue sharing beginning July 1. A sum of nearly $2.8 billion in damages will also be distributed to athletes who competed over the past decade. But a key change in the aftermath of the settlement is the creation of an NIL clearinghouse — NIL Go, run by Deloitte.

NIL Go requires athletes to report all deals worth more than $600. It was created by the College Sports Commission, a new group tasked with enforcing NCAA regulations.

The goal of establishing NIL Go is to limit the participation of NIL collectives in pay-to-play, which has become a growing problem in college athletics according to coaches and administrators. However, as Tate points out, limiting these NIL opportunities is an issue of state law.

“We’ve seen already up to this point with the settlement outcomes,” said Tate, himself a former Michigan State offensive lineman from 2000-03, “that there are conflicts with the Michigan statute that we do have on the books allowing student-athletes to take advantage of their name, image and likeness while they are at the university that they participate in as a student.”

That previous statute, Public Act 366 of 2020, paved the way for student-athletes to profit off NIL in the state of Michigan, as a number of other states also approved at a similar time when the NCAA’s rules on NIL rights changed. House Bill 4643 would reaffirm the state’s position while addressing ways in which athletes’ NIL rights might be limited.

Ramogi Huma, executive director of the National College Players Association, noted that the House settlement itself directly stated that the settlement’s outcomes do not overrule state law.

“That’s why it remains important for states to adopt NIL laws that grant college athletes and recruits robust freedoms and protections,” Huma said. “However, I’ve seen media reports about conferences attempting to pressure universities to agree to violate their own state NIL law if they conflict with NCAA and conference NIL restrictions. It’s my sincere hope that this is not true, as it would threaten college athletes’ rights and ultimately lead to new lawsuits.”

Limiting NIL deals is unfair to student-athletes in the eyes of some detractors, including Dr. Tom Dieters, a former MSU baseball player who is now president of NIL deal-cutter Charitable Gift America.

“If a school is to allow Deloitte to determine a student’s fair market value, it completely goes against capitalism,” Dieters said. “School administrators and coaches are very quick to negotiate their own seven-figure contracts without a third party determining their value, and students should have those exact same rights.”

The path forward may see friction between individual states and the NCAA as new NIL regulations go into effect. This bill may be the first step of many in Michigan’s pushback against NIL limitations.

“Speaking as a state legislator around legislation that was passed, that’s the law of the land, the law of our state,” Tate said. “I think that is something that we would continue to address too, if we see those explicit conflicts with the NCAA in particular, trying to essentially punish student-athletes for something that is their right here in the state of Michigan.”