Tennessee football head coach Josh Heupel threw his name into the mix on Friday, submitting an official statement in support of the State of Tennessee and the Commonwealth of Virginia’s fight against the NCAA.
The news on Friday follows a week in which Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti and the NCAA went back and forth through written submissions and a Circuit Court Judge denying Tennessee and Virginia’s request for a temporary restraining order against the NCAA on Tuesday.
Josh Heupel’s statement, first reported by the Knoxville News-Sentinel on Friday, shows his support for Attorney General Skrmetti, the State of Tennessee, and the Commonwealth of Virginia in their ongoing fight against the NCAA. The argument that the Tennessee Attorney General is fighting for is that the NCAA’s NIL recruiting ban will negatively and unfairly impact college programs and college athletes. AG Skrmetti is also arguing that the NCAA is trying to defend “a world that doesn’t exist.”
Heupel’s statement points to the complicated nature of the NIL landscape and the ever-changing nature of the NCAA’s own rules as NIL-related activity and importance continue to quickly rise. Heupel’s argument, in layman’s terms, is that restricting and/or disallowing specific communication between a prospective athlete and a program’s NIL collective can lead to potentially irreparable mistakes and harmful situations.
“Harms like these are impossible to fix after the fact. You only get one playing career and you cannot go back in time. These harms can drastically alter the course of an athlete’s college education and their professional career (whether as a professional athlete or in another industry),” Heupel wrote, according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel. “Many of these players don’t go on so these four to five years are all they get. We need to put them in position to make the right choice and make the most of their opportunities.”
Heupel, entering his fourth season as the head coach of the Volunteers, also directed his attention to the fact that NIL information given to prospective athletes can be “incomplete” and “not always reliable.”
“Because we’re unable to help recruits navigate these issues, they don’t have the full picture of all the opportunities that are available to them, which can cause them to make poor decisions,” Heupel penned to the NCAA. “Recruits often don’t know, like we do, the reputation and trustworthiness of who they are working with; without that information, they can pick a school that isn’t the best fit for them based on false promises of NIL that never come to fruition.”
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As a former National Championship-winning college athlete turned college football coach, Heupel has been around the game for many years and has seen the ever-changing landscape from when he was playing at the turn of the century to now his second head coaching job in college football 24 years later. Heupel even ran through some of his accomplishments early in his letter to the NCAA to portray an understanding of the college football world and his role as a coaching figure in it.
“I am familiar with the NCAA’s rules restricting the use of NIL during the recruiting process (‘NIL-recruiting ban’),” UT HC Josh Heupel wrote. “Only a small minority of student athletes go on to play pro. Because of the risk of injuries in college sports, an early NIL deal could be the best or only NIL they might ever secure. The current NIL environment is complicated for everyone involved: current student-athletes, prospective student athletes, coaches, schools, collectives, and fans. NCAA rules are vague and confusing. They frequently change and they sometimes conflict with NCAA’s prior guidance.”
Heupel’s entire statement shows strong support for AG Skrmetti’s fight against the NCAA and provided examples, thoughts, and insight that are based on a mix of intellectual knowledge of the game and an understanding of the day-to-day life for a prospective athlete, a college athlete, and a program in general. The Tennessee coach’s statement to the NCAA was a strong play in the State’s fight against the NCAA in court.
Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024, will mark an important day in the timeline of the legal battle as the preliminary injunction between the State of Tennessee and the Commonwealth of Virginia against the NCAA begins at a federal courthouse.
The full statement from Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel, containing more than 1,500 words directed toward the NCAA, can be read in its entirety thanks to Knoxville’s WBIR News.
For more on the ongoing legal saga against the NCAA, check out some of RTI’s informative publications from the last two weeks below:
