And be sure to follow me on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: AIDE HEADS DOWNTOWN: Brianna Manzelli has left Sen. What’d we miss over the holiday break? Drop me a line. Welcome back to PI, and welcome to election year. The Coalition for the Future of College Athletics launched in November and includes more than 30 different conferences, while the NCAA, which retains Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, tapped a seasoned politician in Baker to lead the organization in its NIL push. It also comes as colleges, collegiate athletic conferences and athlete advocates have stepped up their lobbying for federal NIL legislation. “You’re going to destroy college athletics,” Graham warned in the October hearing about the consequences of inaction. It also comes as members of Congress increasingly agree on the need for federal intervention (even if there’s far less agreement on how that might look). ![]() TCA’s lobbying hire came days before Baker unveiled a new proposal to allow certain schools to enter into NIL deals directly with athletes, potentially undermining the role of collectives. At the hearing, Jones took barbs from fellow witness and NCAA President Charlie Baker (and dished them back out), defending collectives’ activity and painting the industry as having unique insights into the NIL marketplace and eager to collaborate on “well-informed and effective legislation benefiting collegiate student athletes first.” ![]() After nabbing a meeting on the Hill with Senate Judiciary member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Walker Jones, the head of the collective representing Ole Miss players and a TCA member, testified at an October hearing by the panel on the future of college sports. Despite increasingly urgent calls for a federal NIL framework over the past year, collectives had been left out of official forums on NIL legislation until this past fall. Collectives, which are independent from the schools whose athletes they represent, have doled out millions of dollars to athletes and emerged as a key punching bag in the debate over NIL rights, with critics pointing to their lack of transparency and accusing collectives of facilitating pay-to-play and gender inequities, even as collectives have quickly become ingrained in college athletics, with TCA estimating that collectives account for around 80 percent of of NIL payments to college athletes. ![]() Tidal Basin Advisors retained Yong Choe, a former Rite Aid lobbyist who also served as director of business outreach and member services for the conservative House Republican Study Committee and worked for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as a subcontractor on the account, separate filings show. The coalition in November retained Tidal Basin Advisors’ Jesse McCollum, a former longtime Democratic lobbyist for Nike, to lobby on NIL policy issues and issues related to designating college athletes as employees, according to a disclosure filed late last week. The Collective Association, which launched over the summer, comprises at least two dozen college donor collectives - entities made legal under the NCAA’s 2021 rules changes to allow athletes to profit off their fame that are often formed as tax-exempt charities to facilitate NIL payments to players. NIL COLLECTIVES TAP FORMER NIKE LOBBYIST: A newly formed coalition of college sports collectives has retained federal lobbyists for the first time as the nascent cottage industry for paying college athletes looks for a seat at the table to shape federal guardrails for how student athletes are able to benefit off their name, image and likeness.
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