North Carolina Tar Heels coach Mack Brown said he supports the NIL opportunities for his players to make money, but said there needs to be better regulation of the rules.
uh Carolina coach. How is your day to day, week to week change, N I. L. You're now a year into, it can go into that. Yeah, N I. L. Is a wonderful thought and it's a great thing because these guys work so hard. People can't imagine how hard they work, they're like olympic athletes, they work every day and and there's risk with with injury when you're playing. So um a musician from the student body can make money playing at a bar or playing a concert, an artist. He or she could make money selling their art. So why shouldn't our guys be able to make money uh selling their brand and their name image and likeness? Uh It's it's teaching them how to be entrepreneurs and how to make money. It's teaching them how to give back because a lot of them are giving back to charities. It's teaching them how to um pay taxes, which I didn't learn for a long time. It's teaching them how to use agents for marketing purposes before they have to use an agent for the NFL. Um And they're making some money, Tiley craft, our young receiver who has cancer. He's been able to work through some of the cost of his mom not working while she's coming up here because he sold some t shirts and had a golf tournament. So there are so many positive things with name image and likeness, uh where we missed it as a group is that we didn't have any guardrails and then that starts affecting recruiting and and you don't want to ever get to a position where you can't keep recruiting competitive. And if teams just start paying young guys they may make a poor decision because they took the money and the family took the money. But it maybe not it might not be the right education for them. It might not be the school that they should attend because that's where they're gonna live when they get through. And they'll have better jobs to make a whole lot more money than they're being offered in some N. L. Deal in recruiting. Um And before cheaters were cheating but we could at least threaten them some with the, so to me it's going to take the N. C. Double A. To step up and stop some of these people that are throwing around cash so readily. Before that will slow down number one. And secondly then we've got to get a lot of smart people together because this is a new world problem in our business and it's a real problem and we've got to figure out how to stop it because I don't think some of this is healthy for the young people that are involved. Um So um has it changed our life? Yes we worry about them every day. We had a group called booster coming the other day to start helping these guys make more money everybody on our team and coaches would like for everybody to make the money. I don't know how many people on our team are making money from N. I. O. Because I'm not supposed to, and I don't know how many, how much they make. Um That's just the way it's supposed to work. But I want our guys to be able to make as much money as anybody in the country. And I want those opportunities there for them. So I want our collective to be good. I want our boosters to step up and have that money in that collective. And whether we like it or not, we all know that the better you do, the more money you make, the better the players do, the more we win, the more people are willing to give to the collective. So we're all learning as we work through this process. But I think it's a great thing. We just need to get some guardrails.