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    • UNLV Football, Matt Sluka Smashes NIL in First of Many to Come
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    UNLV Football, Matt Sluka Smashes NIL in First of Many to Come

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    Matt Sluka, the little-known quarterback at UNLV, became the most famous player in college football on Wednesday for one of two reasons.

    The first version of the story – his version – is that a UNLV assistant coach verbally promised him a $100,000 name, image and likeness payment after he transferred from Holy Cross and that the money never showed up when he arrived on campus.

    The second version — the story told by those more favorable to UNLV — is that Sluka demanded a raise, so to speak, after becoming the starting quarterback for a team that is 3-0 and in good position to make a run for the College Football Playoff.

    In the Wild West era of NIL, both scenarios are plausible because they’ve happened dozens of times before at schools in college sports. The difference now is that we learned about them in a statement in which Sluka said he was leaving the team and retaining the remainder of this year’s redshirt eligibility.

    This unusual situation has been like rocket fuel for the debates surrounding NIL over the past three years. The lack of oversight surrounding NIL in general, the bad faith scammers and incompetent agents trying to make a quick buck, the fundamental economic rights of student athletes, and the delicate locker room dynamics surrounding money are all characters at the center of this. Depending on your perspective on how student athletes are paid, and given the lack of clear evidence as to how this went wrong, you can choose your own narrative on this.

    But it should be a wake-up call for anyone who has twisted themselves into a pretzel to avoid an employment model for college athletes. Until schools take responsibility for being employers — just like every other multi-billion dollar sports league — the challenges of building and maintaining rosters will continue to result in chaos and fallout that makes the entire operation seem trivial at best and a breeding ground for bad actors at worst.

    Some might argue that all of these hiccups are just part of the growing pains as college sports transitions from an era in which it was taboo to foot the bill for a college athlete’s pizza to one in which assistant coaches wear T-shirts to practice and brag about how much they pay players. Just good ol’ American capitalism at work, baby.

    But there is literally no industry in this country right now where capitalism operates as unfettered as college sports and NIL, without any enforceable regulation to be found. And the result?

    It’s been great mostly for the players, who have the ability to sell themselves on the open market each year for a better deal and a new team if they so choose. It’s been miserable for coaches and executives, whose rosters have to start over almost from scratch each year and operate in a silo of misinformation with every decision about what a player’s true value is on the open market. And it’s been a never-ending treadmill for the collectives, those semi-independent booster entities that can never stop raising money, lest the pot run out to cover the next crop of recruits and transfers.

    Didn’t UNLV’s collective have enough money to make this go away? Did the school want to draw a red line about the consequences of trying to ask for $100,000 in the middle of the season? We may never really know.

    UNLV’s official explanation is that Sluka “made financial demands … to continue playing,” which the school interpreted as a violation of NCAA rules.

    “UNLV does not engage in such activities nor does it respond to implied threats,” the statement said.

    The UNLV collective denied ever making a $100,000 offer and insisted it has fulfilled all contractual and financial obligations this season.

    But whoever you believe, the consequences will be dire for UNLV, whose football team and remaining players have been abandoned by a teammate. Head coach Barry Odom will also have to burnish his team’s reputation.

    While there’s no reasonable way to determine how often this sort of thing has happened behind the scenes, the coaching community in football and men’s basketball in particular has an endless supply of anecdotes from the past three years — ranging from misunderstandings about what was being offered, collectives clinging to pay salaries and agents threatening to pull players from otherwise good situations over financial disputes.

    Sure, college sports are booming. Seats are full, ratings are up, interest continues to explode despite how chaotic the sport may seem.

    But no company with such large interests and sums of money should be run so haphazardly, with so little oversight of the financial transactions that effectively serve as a paycheck.

    There is, however, one major obstacle to gaining control of the NIL environment: Any attempt by schools or the NCAA to restrict the operation of the collectives will trigger legal challenge and scrutiny for antitrust violations.

    Even the settlement in House of Representatives v. NCAA, which for the first time allows schools to share revenue directly with players, was held up by concerns from Judge Claudia Wilken of the Northern District of California about certain restrictions on NIL/collective activities.

    The only answer that will solve this problem is to turn student athletes into employees and standardize and agree on the rules of the road through a collective bargaining process – just like in any professional sport.

    College presidents and NCAA officials have spent tens of millions in legal fees and lobbying in Washington, D.C., in recent years to prevent that outcome. They will seemingly make any concession they can to prevent athletes from becoming employees.

    But as long as NIL collectives continue to exist in their current form, with virtually no rules, standards, oversight or transparency over the deals they make with players, the UNLV-Sluka dispute will undoubtedly be the first of many to explode publicly in the middle of a season.

    If schools are comfortable with that trend, they should definitely continue on their current path. If they want to regain some control and bring some order to athlete compensation, the only solution is really to make them employees.

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