Alabama men’s basketball head coach Nate Oats expressed his support for players profiting from the NCAA’s relaxed rules on name, image likeness (NIL) deals, but has concerns about what it could become.
“I’m all for kids being able to profit off of their name, image and likeness,” Oats said Tuesday while speaking at Musgrove Country Club. “If Mark Sears wants to go back to Muscle Shoals and people want to pay him to promote something, I’m all for it.”
Where Oats sees a problem is on the recruiting trail and in the transfer portal where NIL is being used as a pay-to-play tool to get kids to a particular school.
“(Pay-for-play) is what it was never supposed to be,” he said, adding that his staff ran into some issues this spring in the transfer portal. “I wasn’t going to promise a kid x amount of dollars like they were being promised somewhere else. That’s where we ran into some issues.”
Oats said some of is just vernacular, such as saying “Here’s some kids on our roster and they go x,y and z. You can expect to get something similar if you come here.” He said he doesn’t even do that.
“Between the transfer portal and the NIL thing, everything has been through a huge change even since I got to Alabama three years ago,” Oats said.
The momentum for players to profit off of the name, image and likeness picked up steam when, in 2019, California became the first state to pass legislation to allow for NIL deals, despite the NCAA’s commitment otherwise.
After several states followed suit, the NCAA and president Mark Emertt suspended its long-standing rules against NIL and put in place an “interim” policy to allow students to being making promotional deals.
Alabama head football coach Nick Saban expressed his frustration during a meeting in Birmingham in May when he said that Texas A&M “bought every player” on its top-ranked recruiting class.
Aggies head coach Jimbo Fisher denied the allegations as the feud played out publicly.
In July, the University of Alabama signed a deal with sports retailer Fanatics which will further enhance student-athlete’s opportunities to profit from NIL.
Fanatics – valued at $27 billion as the nation’s leading sports retailer – will not only have exclusive e-commerce rights to Alabama athletics, but will also build a storefront inside of Bryant-Denny Stadium.
“For Fanatics, in order to get the store here, they had to give some money (to the players),” Oats said Tuesday. “Every scholarship kid on our team is going to get a set amount of money from the Fanatics deal before they even sell anything.”
Oats joked that the football program got a little bit more than his basketball team.
“I’m not complaining, football is pretty good around here,” he said with a smile. “Every once and a while someone in the office will say something about it. I mean, we’re only 18 National Championships behind them, so we have a little catching up to do.”
Oats said that while he supports his players having the opportunity make money off of their name, image and likeness, he does not want to see student-athletes “out hustling every minute.”
“To be honest, we have a lot of guys that want to play in the pros and we have a decent amount that can,” he said. “We’ve had three guys drafted in the four years we’ve been here. If they’re spending their time hustling their name, image and likeness instead of being in the gym, then they’re costing themselves millions of dollars for pennies now. So I don’t want to see that. We’re doing a good job as a staff and as a University handling that.”
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