NCAA Will Move Toward Allowing Student Athletes Name, Image, and Likeness Rights

SI's Pat Forde shares the most recent NCAA development

Big news in the college athletic space on Wednesday as the NCAA announced that it is ready to move forward with significantly enhanced compensation for student athletes. They're ready to go with recommendations from a name, image, and likeness working group that has approved a number of methods in which college athletes can be paid for being college athletes. 

Endorsement opportunities. Social media. Platform usage. There's a lot of new opportunities out there now for athletes to get money that has long been withheld from them. There's a ton of potential stumbling blocks to this. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong. There's a lot that has yet to be determined, including whether or not Congress is going to get on board with these ideas. But the bottom line is the NCAA is willing to try. 

It is moving outside the walls of castle amateurism that have been up forever. But it is happening now. It will be a messy process. It will be complicated. There will be times when it will be rife for abuse. But this is the right step at the right time for college sports. And this will be to the benefit of college athletes and people who've been calling for decades for them to be paid.