Rempe, who serves as the executive deputy director of athletics/chief operating officer of the LSU athletic department, pieced together a task force more than a year ago to prepare the Tigers for what she believes will be the most transformative change to hit college sports since Title IX arrived nearly a half century ago.
Schools located in states without a law on the books will likely be required to form their own policies for athletes based on a short list of requirements from NCAA leadership, according to a proposed rule change that is being reviewed by the Division I Council in a meeting Monday afternoon.
Thus the rabbit holes, which have spiraled and collided inside LSU’s meetings for the past several weeks as Rempe and her team try to sort through an endless stream of hypothetical situations in order to craft a policy that can turn that gray area into black-and-white answers for their athletes.
Most athletic department officials around the country assumed for much of the past year that the NCAA or Congress would eventually prescribe a set of nationwide rules to guide them through the specifics of what athletes can do and provide the infrastructure needed to enforce those rules.
As it became increasingly clear in recent weeks that help was not coming from above, schools were left scrambling to sort through the details themselves.
“Up until Memorial Day, there had been this gradual curve of light bulbs going off around the country about how big these changes are going to be,” Schwab said.
Politicians, athletic directors and other college sports stakeholders have predicted that the lack of a clear national standard for NIL rule changes will lead to some degree of chaos this summer.
The chaos is likely to be contained within the offices of athletic departments where officials used to working with strict regulations are forced to field questions without firm answers.
It’s clear that means an LSU football player could not appear in a Budweiser commercial, but could he endorse a local liquor store that also sells soft drinks and snacks? Could he endorse a Baton Rouge bar that doubles as a pool hall? What about a restaurant that serves food along with alcohol? Where do you draw the line? Schools will have to make the initial decision.
Rolling out the lawyers to battle your own athletes will be an unpleasant experience for schools and teams that are constantly locked in a hyper-competitive battle to recruit and retain talent.
She said having a compliance department that is viewed by their athletes as a group that is there to help them rather than play the role of traffic cop is essential.
Dolson said he drew up a plan for implementing NIL changes in his job interview and formed a task force to start putting his plan into action during his first days in his new office.
Dolson said he has no doubt that Indiana will be able to provide the answers and resources its athletes need, but that there will inevitably be scenarios that require extra discussion and thought because no specific rule and no precedent exists yet.
We’ll have to finalize the draft of our policy, meet with our coaches and then meet as soon as possible with our student-athletes and their parents to get that information out.
He said they’ve worked with business and media professors on campus to figure out how to best prep their athletes as well as hiring a pair of outside firms to provide a better picture of the national landscape.
Schwab said many of the schools he’s spoken with in the past year were initially focused on resources that would maximize what their athletes could make, especially by building an athlete’s brand on social media platforms, so they could tout those tools in recruiting pitches to prospective athletes.
“I don’t think I had any idea how big of a lift this would be,” Rempe said.