Jere Morehead’s guardrails

Jere Morehead haz a concern.

As a member of the NCAA Division I Board of Governors and Board of Directors, Georgia president Jere Morehead has dealt directly with the topic of name, image and likeness. The conversation around NIL has not gone away over the offseason, and Morehead made it clear Thursday he’d like more changes to be made…

“It was intended to reward student-athletes for their name, image and likeness, as student-athletes enrolled at college institutions. It’s clearly become something different than what it was intended,” Morehead said. “I believe we’ve got to have some very clear rules that do not lead to the professionalism of college athletics. And you probably saw the action that the Division I Board of Directors took a few weeks ago at the NCAA, that was a strong statement by the board that we want the enforcement staff to enforce the rules that exist related to recruitment. And we don’t expect that NIL would be used as a recruitment device.

“I believe in the long term that we’re going to have to have a more formalized process whether that comes from Congress, or can come from the actions of the NCAA. We clearly need a strong framework that governs the conduct that every institution engages in when it comes to NIL. How we get there, and when we get there, is an open question. But right now I hope the enforcement staff feels like they’ve been given a green light by the Division I Board of Directors to investigate some of the cases that have gained a lot of national attention.”

What a false equivalency there.  The NCAA (of which Morehead himself is a figure of some influence) has the desire to do something, but apparently lacks the power, while Congress has the power but lacks the desire (at least in the sense of doing what the NCAA would like for it to do).  Quite the conundrum!  Just imagine the constructive role somebody like Morehead might have played had he made those comments a decade ago, had the desire and the power both co-existed.

While everyone’s at it, Jere thinks something needs to be done about the transfer portal, too.

“I think some work’s got to be done with the transfer portal. We’ve got, again, a great leader, co-chair of our Division I transformation committee, Greg Sankey, along with Julie Cromer, the athletic director at Ohio University. They’re leading our Division I transformation committee every Tuesday afternoon through important discussion of all these issues. And I’m hopeful that we can ultimately come up with a series of rules that will effectively govern us in a collegiate model.”

Give him credit — at least he’s not giving the “doing it for the kids” faux justification any lip service.  Of course, if the NCAA isn’t doing it for the kids, that could open up its own can of worms.  Sigh.  It’s not easy being a concerned school president these days.

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