Ole Miss goes to Washington: A call to Congress for help with NIL takes place this week

This week is another interesting chapter in the book that is NIL within college athletics. Ole Miss and the Grove Collective is part of the spearhead group that is going to Washington, D.C. to meet with Congress as a call for help.

On Wednesday all of the SEC athletic directors, presidents, chancellors and coaches will be in D.C. to meet with their respective state’s representatives — along with some other one-off meetings — to serve as the precursor to what will transpire on Thursday.

The meetings are part of the annual SEC on the Hill but this year it carries a little more weight and importance with the topics that are on the table.

Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter spoke with The Ole Miss Spirit on Tuesday about this week’s gathering in the nation’s capital.

“We’re trying to make a push,” Carter said. “We need some help from the Federal level and we need kind of a uniform standard that we can all go by. It’s not that simple. There’s a lot of layers to it. It’s a hard puzzle to solve, but we spent basically the whole week in Destin (last week) talking about how we can figure out this model. Something sustainable, something that everybody feels good about.”

A push for lawmakers to come up with a legislative solution for the wild west arena that is currently athlete compensation has been a bell that’s been run for quite some time. But suddenly a sense of urgency has arisen due to a bill passed last week in California.

Lawmakers in California passed legislation that allows athletes at all of the state’s 26 Division I schools to receive a percentage of their respective school’s revenue.

“We’re all about NIL. We think it’s something that all our student-athletes should have,” Carter said. “But where we are right now is not sustainable. So we got to go up there and we got to figure out how we can get some national help and some guidelines and go from there.”

On Thursday Ole Miss will have its Grove Collective as part of a group of Power 5 collectives meeting with lawmakers.

The Grove Collective’s executive director Walker Howard will be part of the panel during Thursday’s hearing.

Joining the panel includes Tennessee, Clemson, Georgia and Washington’s collectives.

Howard is set to speak on the “NIL: What is the state of play?” panel during Arizona’s Future of College Sports Summit that is also taking place in D.C. this week.

Ole Miss was one of the first to get into the NIL pool as Mississippi was the second state to have legislation passed, which was signed into law by Governor Tate Reeves in 2021. Florida was the first state, making the Southeastern Conference the first league to go all in on the new recruiting landscape.

This week in D.C. Ole Miss is front and center in call for help to Congress to help find ways to regulate an aspect of college athletics that is taking on a life of its own at a rapid pace.

“If you look at the way we’re doing things here, we’re doing it the right way,” Carter said. “It’s a lot of credit to our staff, it’s a lot of credit to Walker and his team. We collaborate a lot. We make sure we’re doing it in a compliant and legal way. We want to make sure we’re certainly above board and all that.

“I think it’s pretty cool that we’re going up there and kind of the centerpiece for some of these discussions. We talk about that a lot at Ole Miss. We want to be first movers and we want to be thought leaders in a lot of spaces and I feel like we’ve been able to do that.”

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