RULES OF THE GAME — NCAA President Charlie Baker will return to lobby lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, roughly one year after the biggest player in college sports hired Massachusetts’ Republican former governor to protect its amateur-based business model from a cascade of lawsuits. — College leaders want Congress to preempt a battery of state laws and set national standards for the chaotic market that allows athletes to make money off their publicity rights — also known as their name, image and likeness or “NIL”. The NCAA also wants something more sweeping: A legal ban on players from being classified as school employees, plus protection from the country’s antitrust laws. — Years of intensive lobbying, multiple congressional hearings and backroom legislative debates over the NCAA’s wish list have so far failed to yield a single vote in the House or Senate. But Baker says higher education leaders and college athletics officials are making progress. — “There's a lot more clarity around where the opportunities are for congressional intervention,” Baker told POLITICO on the sidelines of the NCAA’s annual convention in Phoenix. — “We now have multiple examples of why preemption is a worthy discussion, because of not just state laws that have been enacted that create very different rules around NIL and a whole variety of other things — but you also now have multiple attorneys general who have weighed in on a variety of other policies,” Baker said. — To Baker, the disruption helps the NCAA show some evidence of how hard it is to manage a beloved national enterprise without one set of rules. Which brings us back to Congress. — A new “discussion draft” of legislation, unveiled by Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) will be the center of attention Thursday during a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing that will feature testimony from Baker. The draft language would create a congressionally-appointed panel that oversees and helps enforce national rules on publicity rights deals, override state laws, establish legal cover for the NCAA and its members and bar athletes from being classified as employees. — Two congressional Democrats, Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, issued supportive statements for at least some of the ideas in the proposal. Still, the document lands atop a pile of other draft congressional plans for the future of college sports that have already exposed fault lines among lawmakers. — “As somebody who spent a bunch of time in government myself, sometimes stuff takes a long time because it takes a long time for people to figure out where the pressure points and the legitimate issues and concerns are,” Baker said. “And sometimes history or time literally starts to write a bit of a story for you about why something might be problematic. On the preemption piece in particular, and on the antitrust piece on a limited basis, there's been a lot of activity outside of Congress that would certainly lend itself to why those would be important issues to discuss.” — “The thing that you need to have most of all,” he added, “is a bunch of interested and engaged members who have committed staff time and their own time to these issues and to these discussions. And some genuine interest at the leadership level. I would argue, in the House and in the Senate, there is evidence of both.” IT’S TUESDAY, JAN. 16. WELCOME TO WEEKLY EDUCATION. LET’S GRAB COFFEE. Drop me a line at bquilantan@politico.com. Send tips to my colleagues Mackenzie Wilkes at mwilkes@politico.com, Juan Perez Jr. at jperez@politico.com and Michael Stratford at mstratford@politico.com. And follow us: @Morning_Edu and @POLITICOPro.
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