Nicole Auerbach ($$) asks Jon Duncan, the NCAA’s vice president of enforcement, about what she calls the “NIL presumption”, and his answer… well, judge for yourself.
I have already heard someone posit that a fan could put a rumor on a message board, and the NCAA will assume it’s a violation. Like, someone could plant purposely false information. But when I see, in the bylaw, that it’s circumstantial evidence that could come from a news story, I think that must mean a booster talking about signing a deal with a recruit on the record, or something like that.
I wouldn’t say it’s limited to media stories or social media. We have information coming in from lots and lots of different sources. But we also know that sources have their own agendas. We’ve always got to ask why it is that somebody would put something on a message board. We know that there are folks out there who want to use the infractions process to advance their own agendas, and we work really hard to be discerning consumers of information and know that sources may have their own reasons for sharing information. We don’t want to fall prey to that. We don’t want to be a pawn in somebody else’s scheme. We work really hard to test information that comes in. We’re common-sense people.
The membership, I think, wants the NCAA office generally and enforcement specifically to be reasonable and exercise our common sense. We do and we will, when we invoke the presumption and then when a school responds, we’ll assign value to what they share. We’re not so cynical that we think everybody’s lying to us, but we’re also not so naive that we believe everything that every booster puts on a message board.
Hoo, boy. The NCAA is going to scour social media for NIL compliance tips? Sounds like Pork Rind Jimmy could be making a comeback. What could possibly go wrong there?
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