Weekly Word: NIL guardrails, Jay Wright and more

Here's my guess as to what happens within the next few years: Power 5 football basically secedes from the NCAA, allowing the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and their ilk to formally — as opposed to informally — do whatever the hell they want, at which time high-major basketball might have a similar decision to make.

But in the meantime, the NCAA is still the NCAA, the very NCAA that somehow allowed Name-Image-Likeness to take hold without any sort of structure in place, surrendering all authority on the transformative event to state governments, of which there are 50, not all of which view the world the same way and some of which can't get out of their own way.

At some point, a national standard would be nice, preferably not decided upon by the federal government, though that would make for some of C-SPAN's greatest-ever programming.

"College athletes shouldn't be paid nil," some 87-year-old senator might declare. "They should be paid something, not nothing."

Some rules would be nice.

First time in history anyone has ever said, "Hey, the NCAA needs more rules."

For its part, to this point, college sports' governing body — made up and guided solely by the wishes of university presidents (and occasionally by bad press) — has issued Three NIL Commandments as opposed to an actual plan, rules, oversight, accountability, transparency, authority, formal grammatical style and so on.

An agency with a rulebook legendary for its girth's "interim" policy toward NIL is two paragraphs and boils down to these three stone tablets.

1. Adhere to your state laws. (Haha, thanks.)

2. Do not use NIL to recruit athletes.

3. Do not use NIL to retain athletes.

One must look no further than the freaking newspaper to find egregious and amazingly public examples of 2 and 3 being gleefully flouted.