Illini AD asks congress for universal rules governing college athletics

DECATUR, Ill. (WAND) - University of Illinois Athletic Director Josh Whitman testified before a congressional committee in Washington, D.C. Tuesday.

Whitman was joined by University of South Carolina Head Football Coach Shane Beamer and three former and current collegiate athletes.

Whitman asked for the committee's help in creating universal rules governing college athletics instead of on a state-by-state basis.

"Right now we have this environment that makes it very difficult to compete on a level playing field, which is the point of college sports," Whitman said. "In states like Missouri and Arkansas, they now allow NIL payments to high school athletes who have signed letters of intent to compete at in-state institutions."

Illinois allows high school athletes to receive Name, Image, and Likeness deals, but it is not tied to where they commit to play in college, giving Missouri and Arkansas a better chance at landing in-state high school athletes.

College sports are everchanging with the introduction of NIL, the transfer portal, and conference realignment.

More changes are coming next year when revenue sharing is expected to be added.

A House settlement, expected to be approved in April, will allow Power 5 universities, including the University of Illinois, to pay its athletes directly under a cap system.

The total money per school is expected to be around $22 million dollars for the 2025-26 school year.

"The payments to our student-athletes will come in the form of NIL licenses," Whitman told the committee. "The idea being, the better a student-athlete performs, the more valuable their license becomes for the use by the institution or by the athletics program."

There are still multiple factors to be ironed out. It is still unclear whether Title IX rules apply to revenue sharing with college athletes.

"If we were to apply Title IX, we would potentially be diverting money away from the athletes that generate that revenue," Whitman said. "On the flip side, we understand that if we were to maintain those revenues with the student-athletes who generate it, we would not, potentially, be passing as much of it along to our female student-athletes."

Whitman is also an advocate against college athletes becoming institutional employees, saying, "The efforts to recast student-athletes as institutional employees, would be catastrophic to the vast majority of the NCAA's membership."