Commentary: NIL is divisive, but death of high school sports in Florida is exaggerated

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The obituary has been published, the eulogy written and the epitaph chiseled on the headstone. High school sports died on Tuesday in Gainesville.

Cause of death: name, image and likeness. Sounds extreme, doesn’t it?

That’s been a headline or a narrative I’ve seen this week after the Florida High School Athletic Association passed NIL to give athletes earning power. This is a topic with so many layers to it that it can’t be viewed from that vote by the board of directors alone.

NIL was going to pass one way or another.

High school sports won’t die from NIL.

You don’t have to like any of it, and that’s fine, too.

NIL is divisive, no doubt, the same way open enrollment in Florida is divisive to coaches. Twenty years ago, students were still playing at the schools they were zoned for with friends they grew up with.

But times have changed.

The collision of school choice with athlete empowerment at the college level has blown up an antiquated amateurism model and left each state to figure out what works best. And when the blueprint where NIL and the transfer portal started (at the college level) is an absolute trainwreck of proportions that not even Congress has elected to touch, then it’s simple to catastrophize and think that’s what’s going to happen to high school.

High school sports have long since been considered the final sacred runaway before the business of college took hold. The NCAA has elected to die on the hill of an outdated model of amateurism while raking in billions and billions in revenue is likely on financial life support as it continues to get handed one courtroom setback after another.

St. Augustine High football coach Brian Braddock said it’s easy to see why the views on NIL in high school sports here have been dire. How college sports have been wrecked by the portal and NIL would scare just about anyone with an attachment to high school athletics.

“We’re the closest parallel to what the disaster of the NCAA is. The NCAA has no transfer rules. They also have no NIL rules. So, I think people are looking at those two things combined, and seeing how that can become disastrous in Florida,” he said.

NIL hasn’t ruined Georgia sports

NIL is still a nascent field with limited impact at the high school level, at least right now. And it very likely isn’t going to be the Armageddon that’s being feared.

If we’re being blunt about high school sports, controlled open enrollment coming to Florida in 2017 — the transfer portal before the transfer portal — has had a far greater impact athletically (positive and negative) than NIL ever will. Students can change schools freely and play sports in fall, winter and spring at three different schools if they want.

That’s great to empower parents and students to have school choice, but competitive equity in sports has suffered at a greater level since then than at any other time in high school history. But education still trumps athletics in high school, something that has clearly been clouded by the free agent market at the college level.

“I feel like such an old-school coach, I just want to coach football. I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to deal with the drama. I don’t know that it will be as bad as everybody thinks, but I could be dead wrong. I really don’t know,” said Mandarin coach Toby Bullock. “It’s hard enough raising money for your team, let alone thinking that there’s going to be a whole lot of people or a whole lot of, you know, restaurants and other places wanting to sponsor a high school player.”

The limited data suggests that there won’t be a massive rush to line up and hand out NIL deals to high school athletes.

The Georgia High School Association implemented NIL last October, and the flood of deals never materialized. GHSA executive director Robin Hines told Connect Savannah in late January that only 44 athletes had signed NIL deals.

That’s 44 out of 429,714 athletes, or .01%.

Why the FHSAA didn’t vote it down

The popular take has been to aim the scope at the FHSAA for not voting NIL down, but this is a rather complex and nuanced topic itself.

If you just look at the headlines, then yes, you’d think the association has just put the final dagger through the heart of high school athletics. But look at the 14-year road up to this point to understand that there was no other avenue for the FHSAA to take.

“A lot of people are upset with the FHSAA over it. I don’t blame the FHSAA. The FHSAA is doing what every organism does, and that’s whatever it takes to survive. And they can’t handle the litigation that potentially will come from not having NIL,” Braddock said. “It’s the same reason the NCAA did what they did. So, it’s the byproduct of a society focused on expediency, not focused on depth and what’s right.”

When state legislators first started taking serious aim at the FHSAA in the early 2010s, it spelled the beginning of the end. The FHSAA pushed back hard against some of those early bills which were largely aimed at transfer and eligibility issues. But in one contentious legislative session after another, the state removed more and more power and slapped more ominous tones on laws. Some of that reining in of the FHSAA and its broad punishment and scope of control was needed, but the state went overboard.

Over the past 14 years, the FHSAA has gone from using lobbyists and having former professional athletes come to its aid against the state to delicately trying to not rock the boat and draw attention to itself.

The FHSAA board could have voted down the NIL proposal, drawn the wrath of lawmakers in Tallahassee and watched as the state enacted it anyway. Instead, it voted unanimously to pass NIL and brought Florida in line with the 35 other states that had already passed bylaws to allow it for high schoolers. By those combined metrics, it couldn’t not happen.

The FHSAA still makes decisions and oversees high school athletics, but it no longer has final say over those. The Florida Department of Education does now. And if it goes against what the power brokers in Tallahassee want, then the threat of being erased for another ruling body is spelled out loud and clear in the laws passed by the state.

Florida led NIL for college athletes

Behind California, Florida was the second state in the country to pass NIL legislation for college athletes back in 2020 when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed that into law. The FHSAA was overhauled by legislation last year that allowed eight DeSantis appointees to be placed on the board. Put those two things together and you can see why there was no recourse for a board in Florida to say no to NIL.

The shift to empower athletes and their families has been gaining momentum for years. If you’ve paid attention to the backlash and subsequent litigation losses the NCAA has absorbed, you know what I’m talking about.

The FHSAA had already been named in a suit about NIL in 2022. Counsel Leonard Ireland brought that up in a board meeting about NIL two years ago, and that the FHSAA would have to stare down those sooner rather than later.

That decision came this week.

Braddock and Bullock, like many coaches, say that if done properly, NIL can work at the high school level here and that athletes can benefit from it. The gray area — and there’s more gray than black or white right now — is what scares those who run the programs. The rules for violating NIL do have some teeth to them, but those rely on rulebreakers being turned in for enforcement. If college athletic departments and the NCAA, with obscene amounts of resources behind them, can’t get a handle on NIL, then what’s the chance that the FHSAA will be able to?

NIL hasn’t killed high school sports. But with open enrollment and now NIL, they’ll certainly look different here. Different, but not dead.