SALT LAKE CITY — The journalists won.
The Utah State Records Committee in October ruled in favor of the Deseret News, telling the five public universities -- University of Utah, Utah State, Weber State, Utah Valley and Southern Utah – to provide the newspaper documents concerning name, image and likeness. Known as NIL, it’s how college athletes can earn income from the celebrity that the universities made money from for generations.
Jeff Hunt, an attorney for the Deseret News, said it was the first time anywhere in the United States that a court or administrative body ruled NIL agreements and related documents to be public records.
“The public has a compelling interest in knowing how much money is flowing to the student athletes who attend a public institution,” Hunt said in an interview, “who is paying that money, and what services the athlete the student athlete is performing.”
Then the Utah Legislature changed the rules of the game.
This winter, lawmakers in Salt Lake City changed public record laws to make future NIL agreements confidential. Gov. Spencer Cox is expected to sign the bill.
Similar contests have played out across the country. Connecticut, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas have all changed state law to keep NIL deals secret.
In other states, universities have made the same argument the Utah State Records Committee rejected – that federal student privacy laws prevent the records’ disclosure.
“The NIL deals are not the public's business,” Meb Anderson, an assistant Utah attorney general, argued at the October records hearing. “It’s the students’ business.”
“There are no public funds at issue here,” Anderson added. “Every deal that one of these kids does is done with a private entity.”
Not everyone thinks all the opaqueness is a good thing – not even the athletes.
“I think transparency is incredibly important in NIL,” Meredith Page, a Radford University volleyball player, told a Congressional committee earlier this year.
“I would like to know what another Big South volleyball player is going to make for that deal,” Page said, “and being able to compare, and have my own value, and be able to negotiate.”
Lauren MacKeigan, who researched NIL at the University of Michigan, says colleges wouldn’t have to release individual deals, only demographic data to ensure equity across gender, race and sports.
“The main finding from my research is that women, given the same deal terms will expect around half the amount of compensation as men will,” MacKeigan explained.
“We need some level of information, responsible information transparency,” she added.
The NCAA in January announced plans to collect and disclose aggregated NIL data. The announcement did not say when the numbers would be available or how detailed they would be.
Hunt says universities themselves should still provide NIL details. The scrutiny, Hunt says, ensures laws and NCAA policies are being followed.
“The universities just say, ‘Well, you should leave that up to us and trust that we're doing our job,’” Hunt said. “And that's not the way government works.”