Kirby Smart shares his thoughts on NCAA’s NIL rights announcement
By Andrew Olson
Published:
The NCAA made big news on Tuesday with the announcement that The Board of Governors has voted unanimously to allow students participating in athletics to earn benefits for the use of their name, image and likeness.
While some media members have debated the significance of the announcement with a debate over whether the news is legitimate or just a press release with deceivingly positive language, the announcement made headlines nationally. Georgia’s Kirby Smart was one of the college football head coaches to speak to the media on Tuesday, making him one of the first college football head coaches to publicly comment on the development.
“To be honest with you, I don’t know,” Smart told reporters. “I’m not smart enough to know and understand exactly how it’s going to affect the future. I do trust the hands that it’s in and the committee that’s been formed to look into it. I think they’ll do a tremendous job. It looks like to me that they would come up with a proposal somewhere around January 2021 maybe. That still seems like a long way off in my mind. We’ll have to prepare and whatever they decide to go with, we’ll deal with it.
“I don’t have enough information to form a complete opinion on it or understand it completely. Our biggest concern as coaches across the country, is it going to be an even playing field? The biggest concern is state to state of not being balanced. If it comes out balanced state to state, we’re all playing on the same playing field.”
Andrew writes about sports to fund his love of live music and collection of concert posters. He strongly endorses the Hall of Fame campaign of Fred Taylor.
