Cooper Flagg, the basketball phenom at Duke, already has name, image and likeness endorsement deals worth $3.2 million. And he isn't even a pro player yet. Or is he?

WNBA star Caitlin Clark signed an estimated $3.1 million in name, image and likeness deals while still at Iowa. Livvy Dunne, the Louisiana State University gymnast with a prolific social media following, has garnered $4.1 million worth of endorsements, according to On3 NIL Valuation. And Shedeur Sanders, the flashy University of Colorado Boulder quarterback and son of "Prime Time" Deion Sanders, reportedly inked deals worth $6 million

The fatuous NCAA rules previously blocked all such earnings, even to the point of some scholarship players being destitute. But where there is money there can be exploitation, and even noble causes can turn sour.

Amateurism, for example, was supposedly meant to preserve athletic purity in competition. It came to be seen as a ploy to leave athletes unpaid. This was not invented by the NCAA, but the association did monetize it very well.

Avery Brundage, who was head of the U.S. Olympic Committee from 1929 to 1953 and the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972, championed amateurism to a fault. He stubbornly worked to preserve Olympic amateurism until the vaunted USA men's basketball team did the unthinkable by losing to the Russians in 1972.

Official changes were implemented in 1988 when the IOC expressly allowed professional athletes to compete. That led to the invincible 1992 basketball "Dream Team" stocked with pro players such as Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.

Meanwhile, the NCAA exploitation became more egregious when television rights deals skyrocketed. Players not only shared in none of it, they weren't allowed to earn their own endorsement income. With a current six-year NCAA deal with ESPN worth $7.8 billion for football playoffs alone, the disparity had become egregious.

In 2009, a former UCLA star, Ed O'Bannon, sued the NCAA for antitrust violations to free the players from the pretext of amateurism in the landmark sports case O'Bannon v. NCAA. O'Bannon scored wins at trial and on appeal, new state laws eventually were enacted, and the NCAA came up with revised rules in 2021 to allow players to earn NIL income after losing another case that reached the Supreme Court.

Change often comes with a price, including the law of unintended consequences. Considering the newer college transfer portal along with sanctioned name, image and likeness income, the current NCAA football champion Ohio State had a reported $20 million roster that was sometimes mocked as "the best team money can buy."

Consequently, college recruiting and coaching have become more challenging because of the new name, image and likeness entanglements. Simply luring players with big-name coaches and athletic scholarships is no longer enough. Now the recruiting process includes outside deals and licensing factors rendered more complex with a college football transfer portal that was first implemented in fall 2018. The portal is confusing, but fundamentally it is a database where players desiring a transfer can list their names to solicit interest.

With so many restrictions for so many years, a number of aberrations have distorted the whole process. A highly regarded high school quarterback, Jon English, enrolled at Michigan State in 1979, then rethought his chances there and began a sojourn of transfers that included two junior colleges as well as two more NCAA Division I universities. When he finally landed at Tulane, where his father coached, the NCAA denied him eligibility, citing a rule that required a newly transferred football player to sit out at least one year since the time of transfer from the first school.

That language seems straightforward, except when there are three Division I schools involved, not just two. In this case, the "first" school in the series was Michigan State, and that was well over a year before. The courts addressed that anomaly by finding that the "first school" really meant the "last school," which in his case had been less than a year prior to the transfer to Tulane. This produced the oxymoronic decision that the word "first" really means "last." Remarkably, that probably was right, and ironically, the carefully wordsmithed 1983 opinion was from the case English v. NCAA.

NCAA regulations that genuinely support student-athletes are laudable. But as the 19th-century British historian and politician Lord Acton noted, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Beware when rights are taken away "for one's own good," like when student-athletes are prohibited from earning their own licensing income even as the NCAA sold all their likenesses for billions. That was blatant hypocrisy.

Thanks to O'Bannon and others who pushed back, such restrictions are now unlawful. That makes the whole process more fair to the players. Finally.

Eldon Ham is a faculty member at IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law, teaching sports, law and justice. He is the author of five books on the role of sports history in America.

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