There was a significant revelation for Kurtis Gregory during Missouri’s Senior Day festivities in 2009. The fifth-year offensive lineman was completing his career as a happy, smiling native son of the Show-Me State whose parents had never missed one of his games. Meanwhile …
“I had teammates, that was the very first game their parents came to see them play in person. It’s heartbreaking,” said Gregory, now a Missouri state representative. “I had teammates that would send … 75% of [their scholarship] money back home — and they were living on someone’s couch. Their family needed the money back home more than they needed it in Columbia.”
Gregory relayed the memory last week as an inspiration after rushing at the last minute to push through an amendment that would relax the state’s name, image and likeness law in hopes of further compensating athletes. In a move that should resonate from the SEC to NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis, a proposed bill would allow any athletic department official — including coaches — to assist with NIL deals.
After passing both the Missouri house and senate on Friday — less than a day before the end of the legislative session for the year — SB 718 now awaits only Gov. Mike Parson’s signature to become law.
“I want Missouri to have the best players,” said Gregory, now a farmer who grows corn, soybeans and wheat on 1,100 acres in the western half of the state.
That’s as plain as it gets in this hyper-competitive NIL era. It’s also obvious in the increasingly liberalized NIL space. In fact, a week into the NCAA’s crackdown on NIL policy, cracks are already appearing in the association’s initiative.
“It wasn’t much of anything except a restatement of expectations,” said attorney Jason Montgomery of last week’s headline-grabbing attempt by the NCAA to retain some authority in the NIL space. “The first tenet of the NCAA’s interim [NIL] policy is you have…
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