Sports & Entertainment Beat

Welcome back to the Spotlight! How better to close out the madness wrought by March than with an ode to March Madness (and a special shout-out to my Wisconsin Badgers women’s hockey team on their 7th national championship)? If you correctly picked all of the final four teams (for either the men’s or women’s tournaments) then you’re probably a liar. Indeed, parity has been the name of the game for the NCAA’s cash cow sporting events. 

Concerns about the demise of college athletics due to allowing athletes to make endorsement dollars have apparently been overblown. This year has yielded some of the most shocking upsets in recent memory, as schools that were supposed to have been knocked out of contention by those with better marketing opportunities that could attract top talent. NIL has also certainly had its own benefits—it cannot be an accident that women’s basketball has enjoyed a meteoric rise to the point that its viewership of tournament games on ESPN have topped that of the most watched NBA games on ESPN. 

But don’t tell that to members of Congress, who were warned of “NIL Chaos” just yesterday in a congressional hearing entitled “Taking the Buzzer Beater to the Bank: Protecting College Athletes’ NIL Dealmaking Rights” focusing on the need for federal legislation to address such questions as to whether to classify college athletes as employees and whether uniformity is needed in the marketplace to afford greater protections to athletes. Unfortunately, it did not appear as if we are any closer to the answers. Still in the early days of NIL, much is left to be worked out, but there are definitely plenty of reasons to be pleased with where we are, much to the dismay of college sports doomsday-ers. With that upbeat note, let’s dive into what else is in the Spotlight this week.