(Part 1 of a two-part story)
On Friday, March 6, the White House convened a high-level collegiate sports meeting — with no student-athletes attending — to discuss fixing the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) issue.
Currently, student-athletes can be handsomely paid to stay or use the transfer portal to switch to another university. “It’s like the wild, wild west with not enough rules, regulations, and guidelines,” said Billy Joe, 85, an HBCU head coach for 34.
He may be correct, but one long-time athletic director at a pre-eminent Historically Black College or University (HBCU) disagrees.
“That’s a very simplistic characterization of the landscape — we have now to call it the wild, wild west,” said Kerry Davis, who has spent 10 years as athletic director at Howard University in Washington, DC. He recently added the title of vice president of athletics. Davis oversees 21 sports teams and 500 athletes. This year, both men’s and women’s basketball teams made it to the NCAA tournament. The men’s program is doing so well that John Wall, former five-time NBA All-Star with the Washington Wizards, just joined the Bison as president of basketball operations.
Three missions collide
“What we have here is the collision of three different missions,” Davis said. “How do you compensate athletes fairly for their contribution to the entire overall ecosystem of college athletics?
“The second competing factor is the transfer portal. The autonomy that students now have to move every year to become quote, unquote, free agents every year has fundamentally changed.
“The third thing is, how do we interchange and interweave education? At the end of the day, we’re educational institutions. We have to figure out how to operate.”
With that in mind, can Davis envision the day where a student-athlete uses the transfer portal and captures four national championships at four different schools?
“It’s certainly possible,” Davis said. Would NIL money keep them in school instead of transferring? “No, I think it’s just the opposite. Because of the transfer portal, it behooves many of the students to basically become free agents every year.”
Davis has seen the sports landscape from all angles. He played high school basketball at Cardinal Hayes in the Bronx and graduated from Dartmouth University with a bachelor’s degree in political science while playing basketball for two years. Davis got his law degree from Cornell University and was a TV executive at HBO Sports, creating big-time fights (Lewis vs. Tyson) and documentaries (“Hard Knocks”) for the network. His work at HBO led him to be cited as one of the most influential minorities in sports by Sports Illustrated and Black Enterprise magazines.
If that’s not enough, Davis’s first job out of college was working with civil rights activist Vernon Jordan, a former Howard Bison.
The NIL/transfer dilemma
Which brings him back to the NIL/transfer portal dilemma. Makes sense for student-athletes to stay where they are, right?
“It’s keeping them in school longer because oftentimes, they can make money by competing at the college level,” said Davis.
Davis has done his work: He has negotiated deals with AT&T, Rocket Mortgage, and Nissan for Howard. He also partnered with the Jordan Brand of merchandise and apparel for the football and basketball programs.
His job is not easy as bigger schools look to pick off talent. This also makes his job more complicated.
“We don’t simply want to be a development program for bigger schools,” he explained. “That’s not our mission right now. “I want our athletes to benefit from their name, image, and likeness. That’s incredibly fair where it reaches a point where we can’t afford them and they have to move on.
“That’s not great for us, but we understand that if somebody becomes unaffordable, that means we’ve done a great job.”