ACC Commish talks up SCORE Act: They’re student-athletes, not employees

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips signaled on Tuesday his support for a bill in Congress that would provide guardrails on the new NIL era by clearly defining athletes as student-athletes, not employees.

How Phillips justifies trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube is borderline Orwellian.

“I haven’t had one student-athlete come up to me to say that they want to be an employee. I think they appreciate being in college, going to school, working critically hard to earn a valuable degree, and playing a sport at the highest level,” said Phillips, addressing the media at the 2025 ACC Kickoff in Charlotte.

I’m not sure who Phillips has been talking with, but it can’t be any of the kids on their second, third or fourth school getting low seven figures to play football this fall, or in the six- to seven-figure range to play men’s basketball.

The SCORE Act – the contrived acronym spells out “Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements” – was introduced on July 10, and is technically bipartisan, because two Democrats, Janelle Bynum and Shomari Figures, signed on as co-patrons.

The legislation, otherwise, has no support from Democrats, which won’t be a problem in the House, which has a slim Republican majority, but could be an issue in the Senate, with 60 votes needed to get a bill to the floor, meaning there would need to be seven Democrats willing to advance debate.

I’m not sensing that being possible, not with the way the bill is crafted at this early stage.

There’s plenty of good stuff in the details – the establishment of federal standards for NIL, regulations for agents, mandates to schools to provide academic support and out-of-pocket healthcare coverage for ex-athletes up to three years after leaving school.

The not-so-good:

“Establishing school liability protections ensures compliance with fair rules and reduces the threat of frivolous lawsuits that strain university budgets and jeopardize athletic programs themselves,” said South Carolina Republican Scott Fry, making the case that the raft of legislation that is now allowing college athletes to get a piece of the multibillion-dollar pie is in the crosshairs here.

This is why New York Democrat Yvette Clark has called the SCORE Act “the NCAA Wishlist Act,” and Massachusetts Democrat Lori Trahan said the bill is an effort to “guarantee the people in power always win, and the athletes who fuel this multibillion-dollar industry always lose.”

You listen to Jim Phillips on what he wants out of the SCORE Act, and you see that what Clark and Trahan said is pretty much on point.

“One of the major facets that we’re looking at in the SCORE Act is this reaffirmation that these are student-athletes, that these aren’t employees,” Phillips said Tuesday, adding later:

“It’s wonderful that we can now pay our student-athletes. I think it’s fantastic. How that distribution comes out and who gets those dollars, et cetera, those are still to be determined by schools, but that’s the next step in the modernization of college sports is to get that reaffirmation that these indeed are student-athletes.”