Lawmakers are poised to allow Colorado universities to pay student athletes while keeping secret the details of individual compensation amounts — a provision that CU Boulder argues protects students who play sports from public criticism.
Much of the debate in the Senate Education Committee revolved around the lack of disclosure of contract details built into the bill from the beginning. The argument from CU Boulder and bill sponsors is that if the public knows how much student athletes are paid, then those athletes are open to criticism and harassment if they have a bad game — criticism that is routine on social media today without the formalized payment system.
Media groups have rejected that argument throughout the month-long debate about the bill.
“Doing this in secret doesn't protect students, it exposes them to potential abuse,” said Tim Regan-Porter, CEO of the Colorado Press Association. “At a minimum, contract amounts should be public, even without names, that would allow the public to see the range of deals, identify disparities and expose potential abuses.”
One scenario floated in testimony from media groups was: what if a university’s athletic director signed his daughter to a large contract? Shouldn’t the public have a right to know individual deal amounts, to make sure that there’s accountability?
Bill sponsors countered that they have already added transparency through amendments to the bill, like requiring aggregate data on spending on name, image, likeness (NIL) deals by sport reported annually to state regulators.
“With these amendments, we are the most transparent state regarding student N-I-L,” declared Senate President James Coleman, D-Denver, a prime sponsor of the bill.
It’s unclear how this bill makes Colorado the “most transparent” as other states are considering similar or identical bills to the one in Colorado.
Coleman’s bill would allow CU Boulder and other universities to pay athletes directly for their name, image, and likeness. The bill is necessary because federal court settlements and NCAA rules will soon require schools to pay student athletes. Current Colorado law prohibits it.
There is no requirement in the settlements or NCAA rules that NIL contracts with athletes be barred from public disclosure. Nevertheless, other states are instituting similar secrecy provisions as part of their NIL laws, said Rick George, athletic director for CU Boulder
“In order for CU Athletics to compete at the highest levels we must be on an even footing with our peer institutions in other states,” George told lawmakers.
The Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) provides for broad access to documents from governments and taxpayer-funded organizations, including CU Boulder. A university representative told lawmakers that they received 293 records requests last year, and a third of them were directed at the athletic department.
For the past several seasons student athletes have been able to sign third-party NIL deals with Gatorade or Nike, for instance, totaling millions of dollars. Universities like CU Boulder get substantial revenue from media rights deals and ticket sales, and now they must share that revenue with the athletes.
Salaries paid to university employees from the president to the physicians at the medical school and individual professors are all available for public disclosure. Republican Minority leader Sen. Paul Lundeen tried to offer an amendment that would have allowed disclosure of the fee paid by public universities to individual athletes.
“I think it's critically important that we retain some degree of transparency in college athletics since student athletes participate in a publicly-regulated and taxpayer-funded system,” argued Lundeen. “The public has an interest in understanding how NIL deals impact the landscape of college sports.”
The amendment was rejected, and the bill passed the Education Committee with Lundeen as the only ‘no’ vote.
Republican Sen. Janice Rich voted ‘yes’ but reluctantly.
“I’ll be a ‘yes’ today, we’ll see what you do for the floor,” Rich said, indicating to the sponsors she expected changes before the bill comes to a vote of the full Senate.
But that has been a common refrain as the bill has made its way through the State House and now the State Senate: lawmakers keep moving the bill forward, expecting changes that strengthen transparency. Yet bill sponsors have never budged on the one thing that advocates and lawmakers have asked for: public disclosure of the potential multi-million dollar deals CU and other universities are poised to sign with their athletes.
