Friday evening, a letter written by the four NCAA-member HBCU conference commissioners to the Congressional Black Caucus was made public, expressing support for the SCORE Act.
The SCORE (Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements) Act would, according to proponents of the bill, protect the rights of student-athletes, including creating one uniform national law as opposed to more than 30 individual state NIL laws.
This bill would also codify the status of student-athletes, thus rendering them ineligible to be considered employees of their colleges and universities.
Credit must be given to the NCAA/HBCU commissioners, who in late July announced the HBC4Us alliance with this very thing in mind. While we’re still waiting for more details on what this alliance will carry out, it’s a start at least.
The NCAA finally admitting they’re a money-making organization has been discussed several times before, including on this platform. While Power 4s divvy up trillions of dollars and other D-1 conferences are playing one country-wide game of musical chairs, HBCU conferences are figuring out what happens if and when all this collapses. Because it will collapse.
A select few universities hogging all the resources for themselves means the NCAA will eventually either have to force the Power 4 to create their own thing or break up the entire system as a whole.
Neither choice is an attractive one when considering how the TV money that ESPN/FOX/NBC spends is always geared towards those larger schools and that no one has any idea of what a post-NCAA organization/world would look like.
Still, as the old saying goes, if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
HBC4Us getting out in front of people asking “what are our conference commissioners doing about this” is huge, but sooner rather than later, more action than a strongly worded letter will have to take place.
Having the framework in place to align on common goals must become initiatives dedicated to preserving the competitive spirit of HBCU athletics and the overall well-being of our schools.
With that in mind, HBCU stakeholders must have confidence and faith that Stills, McClelland, McWilliams Parker and Holloman (sounds like a pretty good law firm, by the way) are the right leaders for this job.
In a time full of unprecedented times, there’s no real guideline or formula for figuring out this new normal in college athletics. We are asking athletic administrators and executives to solve this problem on the fly and it’s going to take some time to do that.
And if they do it, we’ll look back on this turning point in HBCU sports history with pride instead of looking through our fingers at a train wreck.
