The Utah House passed a bill Friday that would exempt college athletes’ name, image and likeness agreements submitted to universities for review from the state’s public records law.
As reported by the Deseret News, HB202 sponsor Jordan Teuscher, a Republican from South Jordan, amended the legislation to ensure the exemption would apply not only to NIL contracts moving forward but also to those already signed.
NIL deals are contracts between private entities and student-athletes, he said during a brief floor discussion about the bill, as reported by Dennis Romboy of the Deseret News.
“The only involvement that a university has is just to review to make sure it doesn’t violate their rules. But even then, they don’t have the ability to tell an athlete they can or can’t enter into an agreement,” he said.
“We just want to ensure that just because they hand that over to the university that private contract doesn’t become a public document.”
Only Brett Garner, a West Valley City Democrat, argued against the bill, which passed 62-8 and now moves to the Senate, Romboy reported.
Garner noted that college football coaches’ salaries and endorsement deals are publicly known. He said the proposed law would create a double standard among coaches and players.
“I feel like the openness and transparency is what we need more of in college sports,” he said.
Republican Kera Birkeland from Morgan accused the media of wanting to exploit college athletes.
“The people that don’t want this legislation to go forward are people who want to sell this information for clicks. They want to take private information between individuals that contract with businesses and they want to use that to drive people to their website, to their news articles,” she said. “We shouldn’t sell out our college athletes for clicks.”
