While NCAA tries to enforce its own murky rules, NIL collectives left hanging in limbo — ‘The NCAA is grasping at straws’

In Orlando this week, a group of college athletics stakeholders are gathering for meetings. Many of these people are influential to building rosters, compensating athletes and steering the future of major college football and basketball programs.

They are not coaches, nor are they athletic directors or commissioners.

They are leaders of more than two dozen NIL collectives.

Nearly 20 months into the NIL era, the governing body of college athletics is attempting to rectify years worth of widespread and quite obvious rule-breaking across the industry during a somewhat ambiguous time in college athletics. At the center of many of the cases are school-affiliated booster-led collectives, the third-party entities that sprung up as a way to compensate athletes through, what many college leaders contend, are phony endorsement and commercial deals.