Nebraska Football: NIL legislation could arrive by summer

Nebraska football fans might be seeing the NIL game change yet again in the very near future as congress mulls legislation by this summer.

Every Nebraska football fan knows that the college football world has changed immensely in the last few years thanks to Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rights. One of the reasons the changes have taken place as fast as they have is that the rules governing NIL aren’t really known or established. That could be changing in the very near future as congress appears to be just months away from finally coming up with legislation about the subject.

The following steps towards this legislation will take place on Wednesday morning as a congressional committee holds its first hearing on NIL since June of 2021. That date is significant because it was only a month later that the NCAA enacted its interim NIL policy that Nebraska football and all other schools are currently governed by.

The House Innovation, Data, and Commerce Subcommittee’s hearing at 9:30 am this morning -which can be live-streamed here – will feature quite a bit of talk about where the NCAA is when it comes to NIL. That’s despite the fact that new NCAA president Charlie Baker won’t be there though he might join remotely.

While today’s hearing isn’t likely the final step in getting national legislation, it will be a significant one with more to come after that. In fact, an attorney who is in the midst of the efforts to really come up with uniform rules about NIL, Luke Fedlam told On3 there is something coming soon.

"“I think that there is a movement – and we’re seeing it on the House side; I know that there’s movement going on on the Senate side as well – to potentially get to a place where this summer, before football season, where we potentially see some national legislation around name, image and likeness.”"

Whether that’s good or bad news for Nebraska football and the rest of the college football world is still an open question.

But this does appear to be an area where congress getting involved has actually been more positive than negative in regards to making sure that players are getting a piece of the massive hundreds of billion-dollar pie.