Shady Agents Must Be Held Accountable

Press Release

The University of Georgia is the latest entry to the growing list of schools tagged by the NCAA for investigation of unscrupulous sports agent activity on campus. These charges can do enormous damage to schools, to student athletes, and to the integrity of college athletics. The NCAA's campaign appears to only be getting bigger as new information comes to light.

As the investigations get bigger, so do the calls for sports agent accountability. This weekend, ACC commissioner John Swofford called for steeper fines and tougher penalties for agents who break the rules. Last week at SEC Media Days, Alabama head football coach Nick Saban had some choice words for the profession.

"They are entrapping and taking advantage of young people at a very difficult time in their lives," Saban said. "Although the players are responsible, and the players should have consequences if they do it, the agents should have consequences as well."

Coach Saban is right on. As fans well know, schools can stand to lose big from the unethical actions of one shady agent. As the current division-wide drama plays out, we may find out just how big the stakes are.

Colleges need a way to fight back. Federal legislation I sponsored and passed in 2004, known as SPARTA, gives schools one more weapon in their battle with rogue agents.

The Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act is designed to act as a federal backstop to state law, ensuring continuity between a patchwork of state policies. Under SPARTA, the attorney general of any state, or the Federal Trade Commission, can step in and prosecute agents for ethics violations such as misleading students with false contracts.

Perhaps more importantly, SPARTA also gives schools the ability to seek civil remedies against the agent for damages or expenses incurred. That means if one of the schools currently under investigation finds itself out millions of dollars because an agent took advantage of a player, with no university actions to blame, that institution may be able to use SPARTA to help recover their losses.

This issue is a personal one for me. In 2002, former NFL Coach Ken Shipp, a constituent of mine in Tennessee, came to me with a problem. Tennessee had strong agent licensing laws that kept predatory sports agents at bay, but when our state's teams left for away games in states with weak laws, there was little a school could do to hold agents accountable. Unscrupulous agents knew kids could lose their eligibility for accepting gifts and the school could be slapped with massive sanctions--but the agents themselves could expect to get off scot free.

With Coach Shipp's story in mind and Tennessee's law as a model, I introduced SPARTA along with Nebraska's coach-turned-Congressman Tom Osborne. SPARTA gives states and schools one more way of holding unscrupulous agents accountable, no matter what state they're in. Tom and MTSU coach Boots Donnelly testified at our congressional hearings about the kinds of tactics agents use to get players to sign contracts, including threats of physical harm. The bill was endorsed by the NCAA and a number of college athletic directors across the country, and was successfully signed into law in 2004.

SPARTA is not the only mechanism for enforcing agent accountability, nor are shady agents the only problem in the messy world of college sports. But one thing's for sure: when agents face consequences for breaking the rules, everyone benefits. SPARTA helps level the playing field--for players, for coaches, for ethical agents, for the NCAA, and for sports fans like us who just want to watch a game.

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