The Demond Williams Jr. situation shows that NIL has gone way past its intended use.
I want to make this perfectly clear. I am 100 percent OK with college athletes making money based off their name, image and likeness.
I don't believe that college athletes should be exploited by the universities they play for and I don't believe that kids who spend so much time on sports and can't have traditional jobs should be restricted from making money.
If a kid wants to sit at the mall for 10 hours and sign autographs for $20 a pop, then great. If the school bookstore sells a jersey with the No. 10 on it and makes $100, I believe that No. 10 deserves to get a cut of that.
I believe that the school's quarterback should be allowed to be paid for a weekly radio hit, or to appear at the local car dealership and shake hands for a few hours on a Saturday in the offseason.
Go set up a camp in your hometown and charge money. I don't care. Get a sandwich named after yourself at the local deli and take a cut of those sales. That's all fair game.
The problem? We've gone so far beyond that premise it's not even funny. We're no longer at name, image and likeness. We're at pure "pay for play," which is bad enough, but the Demond Williams Jr. situation at Washington shows that we're not even doing that right. The whole system is broken.
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About the Williams situation
In the NFL when a player signs a contract, that player is under contract. And it doesn't matter if next week, someone comes along and signs a bigger one and you feel upset by that. The contract is the contract. Sure, sometimes there are renegotiations, and someones someone holds out for more money, but those don't usually happen until a player is years into that current contract.
Williams reportedly signed a new contract to stay at Washington last week. Now, again, I don't like this idea of contracts and salaries in college sports, but if we have them, they need to be adhered to.
Cal Raleigh signed what turned out to be a team-friendly contract extension with the Seattle Mariners last offseason. If he had held out until this year, he could have gotten much more. That's the breaks. That's the way it works. That's how it should work for Williams too, but evidently college sports doesn't see it that way.
Because one of two things has happened with Williams entering the transfer portal on Tuesday night: Either Williams signed a contract and then shopped it around to other schools, looking for a better offer in order to break it. Or, a coach at another school tampered with an athlete who had a contract in order to convince him to break it.
College sports has always had an underbelly, but this situation has exposed the sleaziness of this new world order in full force.
When NIL was created and legalized, I don't believe that player salaries, player contracts, unlimited mobility, the decimating of programs, the breaking of contracts and potential lawsuits were at the crux of the thought process.
But here we are. So far removed from where we started.
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