Creating a student-owned trust fund for college athletes is among the ideas swirling in the mind of the man leading the state task force charged with keeping Florida competitive in the new era of paying college athletes.
Ken Jones, a member of the State University System Board of Governors and chair of the newly-created Task Force on Intercollegiate Athletics, said the trust could be one, but not the only, driver for change in the multi-layered athletics environment.
“We’re not simply convening a committee here. We’re stepping into one of the most consequential transitions in the history of college athletics,” Jones said during the task force’s meeting in Tampa Thursday.
In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that athletes can profit from their names, images, and likenesses (NIL). Since than, students have been transferring from school to school seeking the best financial opportunity while schools have majorly changed the way they budget for sports.
Jones, founder of a Tampa financial firm, presented a “novel” idea: “I think that the state of Florida should explore a structural model where a percentage of NIL earnings can be directed into a professionally managed, athlete-owned trust that vests over time.”
This approach, he said, would encourage financial stability and a serve as foundation to “stabilize what is currently an increasingly purely transactional system.”
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As universities and conferences look to compete, the boards governing them and state legislatures seek fairness, regulation, and a sense of direction, resulting in a patchwork of policies.
“Florida has always been a state that competes at the highest level, and it leads at the highest level in college athletics. This is our chance to do something to shape the future and shape how this system works going forward,” Jones said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Florida A&M University men’s basketball coach Charlie Ward, and New College of Florida trustee Urban Meyer served on a federal task force earlier this year seeking policies and guardrails for name, image, and likeness.
Brainstorm
Jones brought up the trust at the beginning of the meeting and, at the end, reiterated, “I really want us to think about that, to look into that.”
He noted a headline written this week.
Yahoo! Sports reported the Big 12 conference, in a first-of-its-kind deal, agreed to a five-year agreement to send about $12 million to the league office, up to $30 million to each member school, and erect “a strategic business partnership” as it relates to media rights.
“You’re going to see all these conferences start to do deals, revenue sharing deals, multimedia rights deals, and we need to figure out what that system looks like,” Jones said.
The University of Central Florida plays in the Big 12.
The Big 12 deal is with RedBird and Weatherford Capital. Weatherford Capital is managed by Will Weatherford, former chair and sitting member of the University of South Florida Board of Trustees and a former Florida House speaker.
The Florida House convened a workgroup on Collegiate Name, Image, and Likeness last year. Although it hosted three lengthy meetings in the same week with expectations to meet in the future, it never pushed out a proposal, nor did it meet again and is listed as inactive on the House website.
The Board of Governors nearly a year ago approved a policy that allows universities to use auxiliary funds (dorms, dining halls) to pay college athletes.
“These are not going to become one-off stories. These are going to become the norm about how we do things in college athletics. We were just talking earlier about the NFL vs. the NBA vs. Major League Baseball, and the amount of revenue that gets generated in those leagues is going to be dwarfed by college athletics, not in 20 years or 10 years, probably in the next three to five years,” Jones said.
The task force sought advice from a panel Thursday comprising Rob Higgins, University of South Florida CEO for athletics; Todd Golden, University of Florida men’s basketball coach; two student athletes; and Amy Hass, UF deputy athletic director.
Higgins floated “a handful” of ideas, one featuring a corporate sponsor claiming rights to in-state rivalries to protect and reinstate those rivalries and boost revenue.
The task force discussed, too, a mechanism to regulate agents, perhaps a law limiting commissions on student contracts or requiring verification of an agent’s credentials.
Common themes, Jones thought of Thursday’s discussion, were agent regulation, anti-trust exemption, limiting students to transferring schools only once (with exceptions), and the state crafting a statement expressing support for college sports.
“If there’s anything that we know, the market responds to incentives,” State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said, calling the 2014 implementation of university performance-based funding “the secret of our success as a system.”
“Obviously, the solution here is to try to identify what are the incentives that we can support that will yield the result we’re looking for. Right now, the only incentive I see is money. If you know of other incentives, I’m very interested to know what those may be, so that we can do what we can to support equipping you with those incentives,” Rodrigues said to the room of administrators and athletes.
Peter Collins, Florida State University Board of Trustees chair, said planning beyond the next legislative session could be hard to do with accuracy. “It’s going to change,” Collins said of the landscape.
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