Oregon NIL bill advances in Legislature; could conflict with House settlement

A bill that modifies existing Oregon law around student-athletes earning money from their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) advanced in the state legislature last week.

On April 10, House Bill 3694 passed in the Oregon House with 46 votes in favor, nine against, and five not voting. It moves to the Senate chamber, where a first reading is scheduled for Monday.

HB 3694 has the backing of the University of Oregon and a letter of support from Oregon State student-athlete and U.S. Olympian Jade Carey. But OSU athletic director Scott Barnes and some outside legal experts have expressed skepticism over the bill’s potential conflict with the forthcoming House settlement, which seeks to provide universal standards for NIL distribution among NCAA member institutions.

“We’re trying to build infrastructure to create consistency and standards at a national level,” Barnes, who is part of the committee that helped craft proposed NIL standards, said last month. “Any variation of those standards limits the effectiveness of what we’re building. It’s not unlike past years with NIL where there is a patchwork of different state legislation, and the standards aren’t consistent, so you have different opportunities for different student-athletes instead of the same access and same opportunities.”

Critics of HB 3694 point out it could prevent the NCAA and conferences from enforcing limits on NIL payments — a key component of the House settlement, which would include a roughly $20.5 million NIL “salary cap” per school. Defending national champion Ohio State’s athletic director once claimed it spent that much on its 2024 football roster alone.

Schools like Oregon State say they won’t come close to the proposed cap, with multiple sources telling The Oregonian/OregonLive that the Beavers’ men’s basketball NIL budget was roughly $800,000 last season, and their roster was soon decimated in the transfer portal. But powerhouse institutions like Ohio State, Georgia and the Phil Knight-backed Oregon conceivably have more than enough capital to go beyond the cap if there was a legal basis to do so.

While none of those schools have publicly expressed a desire to skirt the House settlement rules — nor will they say so, considering every major institution is expected to sign on to the agreement — legal experts question whether the rules are even enforceable without the additional backing of federal legislation. Particularly with potentially conflicting state legislation popping up around the country.

“A federal bill coming alongside the settlement in a constructive way that creates synergy around correcting this out of control marketplace, that is crucial,” Barnes, also among the power brokers pushing federal legislators for a comprehensive NIL bill, said in March.

Back to the details of HB 3694. While a sentence about preventing limits on “institutions’ support of student athletes’ economic rights” has been removed from the Oregon bill’s staff summary, the latest version of the bill includes language that critics say could still conflict with the House settlement standards.

“A post-secondary institution of education or an athletic association, conference or organization with authority over intercollegiate sports may not ... prohibit, prevent or restrict a student athlete from exercising [the student’s] economic rights,” the bill reads.

“An athletic association, conference or organization with authority over intercollegiate sports may not prohibit a post-secondary institution of education from identifying, facilitating, enabling or supporting opportunities for a current student athlete to exercise the student athlete’s [student’s] economic rights at the student athlete’s post-secondary institution of education,” it later says.

If a school is running up against the cap, and a student-athlete wishes to pursue a NIL deal that might put the school over the $20.5 million limit, would stopping that deal be a violation of the athlete’s “economic rights,” as described in HB 3694? And what if a school “identifies, facilitates and enables” a NIL deal, but the NCAA says no, citing the cap?

Those questions, industry sources and some NIL legal experts say, put the cap and potentially the settlement itself on shaky legal ground in states with legislation similar to HB 3694. Unless, of course, federal legislation addresses that issue and renders the conflict between states and the NCAA moot.

HB 3694 would also prevent the NCAA and conferences from accepting “a complaint, open(ing) an investigation or tak(ing) any other adverse action against a post-secondary institution of education or a student athlete as a result of a violation, or an alleged violation, of the rules or regulations of the athletic association, conference or organization related to a student athlete exercising [the student’s] economic rights.”

Critics worry that could create a scenario where, even if a school in Oregon did violate NIL rules including but not limited to the $20.5 million cap, there would be no mechanism of enforcement. Not only could the NCAA and conferences not investigate or take action against that school for such an alleged violation, they couldn’t even accept a complaint about it in the first place.

The chief sponsor of HB 3694, Rep. John Lively (D-Springfield), previously said the bill was amended so it would not “prevent student-athletes from participating in the (House) settlement or create compliance issues for institutions.”

Whether that rings true remains to be seen, and the debate itself could eventually be silenced by a sweeping, federal NIL bill that matches the House terms.

-- Ryan Clarke covers college sports for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach him at RClarke@Oregonian.com or on Twitter/X: @RyanTClarke. Find him on Bluesky: @ryantclarke.bsky.social.