Nixing NIL

Leaving Nick Saban at a recruiting disadvantage?  Inconceivable!  And in this case, the Alabama legislature knows exactly what that word means.

The lawmaker who last year pushed a state law to allow college athletes to be compensated whenever their name, image or likeness is used in promotional material is now trying to undo it.

House Bill 76 was approved by the House State Government Committee without any debate on Wednesday.

“It’s just a straight repeal of what we did last year,” sponsor Rep. Kyle South, R-Fayette, told Alabama Daily News. “We were thinking that the NCAA last year was going to go in one direction and they ended up adopting basically a different rule that was kind of a blanket for everybody. 

“And it left us in a place where our state law was more restrictive than what the NCAA adopted,” South said.

So, states that adopted nothing, including Michigan and Texas, are now at a recruiting advantage for college athletes now because they’re working solely off the NCAA guidelines, South said. Twenty other states passed legislation related to student-athlete compensation in 2021, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“That’s kind of the gist behind (the bill),” South said. “It may be the shortest-lived law on the books, passed one session and repealed the next.”

I would assume, Kirby being his usual on-the-mother self, that Georgia will follow.