JP Acosta
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
JP Acosta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
With playoffs kicking off Friday, it's a bigger than usual week for college football, but it's also been a huge year. College athletes have been getting paid. Arch Manning, 3.1 mil, I believe.
About a $2 million deal with Adidas. The biggest deal of the year was a whopping $10 million reportedly paid out to quarterback Bryce Underwood to change his commitment from LSU to Michigan. But what's kind of weird about these deals is that the schools aren't necessarily the ones paying out.
Bryce's millions apparently came at least partly from the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, all because his fifth wife went to the University of Michigan We're going to figure out what's going on in college sports on Today Explained.
This special series from The Verge is presented by Adobe Express.
College athletes are getting paid, at least some of them. At least some of them are getting huge paydays, but the money isn't coming directly from their schools. It's a kind of confusing situation, and it all boils down to something called name, image, and likeness, or NIL.
It is a way for college football and college student athletes to make money off of their name, their image, or their likeness. An example of that would be the new video game that came out, EA College Football 25. Every player that was in that game that is currently an athlete in college football got $600 because their name, image, and likeness was used in the game.
But some athletes, the really good ones, are able to make way more money because of slush funds that college athletic programs have at their disposal. We reached out to JP Acosta from SB Nation to help us understand, and we started with the NCAA.
I think at the crux of it all, the main point behind this is that the NCAA and most of their respective universities did not want to call student athletes employees. calling them employees who require them being paid by the university. The idea of athletes being paid, do you think that will ever happen at the NCAA level?
They have spent years fighting the fact that college football and college student athletes are employees.
While they've been fighting this battle in court, name, image and likeness kind of slipped in through a loophole because it is a third party. So technically,
These boosters that provide the name, image, and likeness deals that you see a lot of, that comes from a booster who is not being paid by the university, but is affiliated with the university to help get this player to either go to their university or stay at their university. So it's kind of been a loophole around the, oh, student athletes aren't employees.
We're going to keep fighting this in court. but name, image, and likeness allows for a little bit of a side road to get to paying the players.
Okay, so now I think we have to explain where this money is coming from, this $10 million that went to a University of Michigan football player. It didn't come from the University of Michigan?
No, it technically does not come from the University of Michigan. The biggest example of this I would point to is the University of Arkansas. The University of Arkansas, their biggest donor and their biggest booster is the founder of Tyson's Chicken Nuggets.
Tyson's Nuggets is an Arkansas alumni. Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is an Arkansas alumni.
Every year, I think Arkansas plays a game in the Dallas Cowboys stadium because Jerry Jones wants to see his alma mater play in his stadium that he spent a billion dollars on. What this owner, founder of Tyson can do is with all the money that he has, he can help give a player money to either get him to come to Arkansas or he can get a player to stay at Arkansas through name, image, and likeness.
And they will get paid via the collectives.
Huh. And is it, like, happening above board? Or are these happening, like, in dark, shadowy rooms with, like, you know, low lighting and, you know, grime or something?
It used to be the latter. It was very under the table.
How did this come about? Allegedly. Now with NIL being legal, everything is over the table. All the deals that were being made under the table can now be made over.
Showing 1–20 of 47 · page 1 of 3
Next →