In summary
After leading the way nationally, efforts by California lawmakers to advance the rights of student athletes have stalled. No lawmakers appear poised to take up the issue in the near future.
In 2019, California changed the course of college athletics by allowing student athletes to cash in on the big business of college sports. For the first time, students could make brand deals, earning thousands of dollars from companies such as Gatorade or Body Armor.
“This is the beginning of a national movement,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom in a statement after signing the 2019 bill, which allowed athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness. Other states soon followed, and the NCAA, which governs college sports, changed its rules.
Lately, though, the state has stepped away from that leadership role. California recently failed to pass legislation that would have set new, national precedents, and the state leaders behind those failed bills — Sen. Nancy Skinner, Sen. Steven Bradford, and Assemblymember Chris Holden — won’t have another chance to pass them. All three legislators are reaching their term limits this year.
Skinner, an Oakland Democrat, and Bradford, a Democrat from Inglewood, co-authored the 2019 name, image and likeness bill that Newsom once touted. But last month, the governor vetoed a bill by Skinner that focused once again on athletes’ compensation. “Further changes to this dynamic should be done nationally,” Newsom said in a statement.
Last year, Holden, a Pasadena Democrat, proposed a bill that would have compelled college sports teams to share their profits with their athletes. It also would have created an independent oversight body to safeguard California student athletes’ health. Had it passed, it would partially address a long-running concern that college trainers and coaches may be placing injured athletes back on the field before they are fully recovered.
Holden said that bill represented part of the next frontier in athlete legislation. But he said he withdrew the bill this summer because the chair of the Senate Education Committee, Fullerton Democrat Josh Newman, no longer supported it.
Holden said he didn’t know why Newman didn’t support it. Newman declined to comment. An analysis of public data showed that USA Swimming, the national governing body for the sport, spent over $10,000 fighting the bill. Stanford University spent $21,000 lobbying against the bill last fall, plus an additional $72,000 lobbying against it and another Holden bill that focused on college student hazing.
In recent years, the vanguard legislation on athlete compensation has come not from California or other Democratic strongholds but from the “red states,” said Matt Brown, who runs a newsletter called Extra Points that explains the business of college sports. Since the passage of the watershed 2019 bill, Brown said he’s been “pretty unimpressed” with how California lawmakers have grappled with the next generation of sports legislation.
‘A period of transition’ for college sports
By monetizing their name, image or likeness, student athletes in the U.S. could earn around $1.7 billion this school year, according to one estimate by Opendorse, a tech platform for athletes’ name, image and likeness deals. The market is growing as red states pass new bills that further deregulate the ways college athletes make money, Brown said. “This isn’t because lawmakers in Missouri and Georgia and Mississippi have a deep, heartfelt conviction about economic justice for college athletes. It’s because the head coach says we need to do this so we can get recruits.”
Other changes are afoot: A Northern California judge is at the center of a high-profile federal class-action lawsuit, brought by college athletes, which would allow college athletic departments to share their profits with students. In another case, the National Labor Relations Board is considering arguments that student athletes at the University of Southern California should be school employees — and entitled to compensation and the right to unionize. And this year, two of the biggest leaders in California college sports, UCLA and USC, moved into a different athletic conference, altering decades-old sports rivalries and lucrative TV deals.
Newsom said these changes are the reason why he vetoed the athlete compensation bill last month. “College sports are in a period of transition as many schools are changing athletic conferences and relevant issues are currently pending in the courts,” he said in the statement. “As Governor, I want to ensure California’s colleges continue to be competitive with other states.”
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Oakland, at a news conference at the Capitol in Sacramento on Jan. 20, 2022. Photo by Rich Pedroncelli, AP Photo
The vetoed bill would have required companies to report the money they give to students and for colleges and universities to disclose those transactions. There is little publicly available data about which athletes or sports generate the most revenue — or whether any disparities exist, especially between men’s and women’s athletics.
It’s an issue that is playing out in other states. In an ongoing federal lawsuit, students at the University of Oregon allege that the disparities in name, image and likeness deals between men’s and women’s sports constitute a Title IX violation.
“Very commonly a state or states have to act first in order to pave the way for national legislation,” Skinner said. She said the bill Newsom vetoed would not have created any additional costs for schools, so it wouldn’t have stifled competition.
Skinner declined to comment about the governor’s evolution on this issue of athlete compensation. Newsom’s press office said the veto statement speaks for itself.
California’s sports legislation may hinge on the White House
When Newsom came into office in 2019 — the same year he signed the state’s watershed athlete compensation bill — he positioned himself and his policies as a contrast to the leadership of then-president Donald Trump. But now, Newsom is an ardent supporter of President Joe Biden, and Biden’s administration has been supportive of antitrust labor issues, including student athletes’ rights, said Andy Schwarz, a partner at the law firm OSKR and a consultant on the state’s 2019 name, image and likeness bill.
“Right now, the best thing [for California] is just to get out of the way,” he said.
Schwarz said he worries that even Skinner’s most recent bill, though well-intentioned, could have adverse impacts on the market for college athletes. Companies could use public data about compensation to collude and offer the state’s athletes less money, he said.
The November presidential election, however, could put California back in a leadership role. “If there’s a Harris administration, then California is in the White House,” he said. But if Trump wins, Schwarz said it will be harder for athletes to gain more rights. “It very much will go backwards.”
In California, it’s not clear who, if anyone, would take on the issue of student athletes’ rights next year. Often, a legislator will re-introduce a failed bill with the help of new supporters or after changing controversial language. But Skinner, Bradford and Holden will be termed out of the Legislature in December.
In interviews with CalMatters, none of three legislators could name a person who was well-positioned to introduce similar bills moving forward. “I’m guessing that there’ll be a future legislator, maybe not next year but in a year or two or in a couple years, who will bring this back to the table,” said Skinner, referring to her vetoed bill. “This is not going away.”
So far, only a small number of athletes actually profit off their name, image and likeness, such as those students with social media followings and those in popular sports like football. In the long term, Skinner said she wants colleges to treat student athletes as employees so that everyone gets paid equally.
Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.