By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
A top rules official with the NCAA visited Missouri Western students on Wednesday.
Vice President of NCAA Enforcement Jon Duncan met with students from the Craig School of Business on the St. Joseph campus Wednesday to discuss rule enforcement issues, especially pertaining to name, image and likeness.
The NCAA has recently ruled that schools can now assist student-athletes in finding NIL contracts, which Duncan says will allow schools to do more for athletes than they could before.
"To support those student athletes in seeking out NIL opportunities, managing responsibilities that come with NIL revenue. balancing risks that are connected with those," Duncan tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post.
Duncan says schools are now able to do more for their student-athletes after they enroll than in years past.
Duncan says the purpose of NIL was to provide opportunities to student athletes while reducing the difference between athletes and non-athletes, knowing there would be a challenge in talent acquisition, which now they have run into.
"So, we're trying to work together with schools on a policy level to have guardrails that are defensible with it comes time for court challenges, but also practically. What are schools seeing? What are student athletes seeing? What are third parties doing? So that everybody can keep their finger on the pulse of what's going on," Duncan explains.
Duncan says the goal now is to encourage the good and address the less positive impacts of NIL.
Last year, Missouri Governor Mike Parson signed into law an expansion of the state NIL. Duncan says copycat legislation has been seen to help other states keep up, something the NCAA is discussing with Congress.
"To help address the patchwork of different state laws to set states free from feeling like they need to adopt this copycat legislation to keep up and have a national standard" Duncan says. "So those are conversations that are happening at Congress right now."
The expansion of Missouri NIL allows high school athletes to discuss NIL contracts before they sign with an in-state college and earn compensation once a letter of intent is signed.
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