We had another big bill
this week with name
image and likeness, or NIL.
Tell us about that, Anya.
You're a huge sports fan.
I know. So NIL deals.
This comes out of a 2021 sort
of change in how college
athletes are treated.
They're no longer amateurs.
They can get paid for their
work and they can kind
of wrangle these deals
according to how popular
the sport is or how good
they are at their sports.
But so what this bill
would do is
put $14.5 million
towards UW-Madison
for athletic facilities fees
in order for the school to have
a pot of money
to make these deals
with players.
So the idea is that
they'd be able to bring in
top football and basketball
talent in particular.
This passed out of the
Assembly
almost unanimously.
And then it became this
big open question at
the Senate
because it was a
LeMahieu bill.
But then he was losing a ton
of support within his caucus.
And so the question up until
basically the day of the
floor vote was will
he spike his own bill in order
to maintain the rule of 17
or will he go to Democrats
for support?
There wasn't a lot of debate
or any that I remember
in the Senate.
But just kind of pulling back
a little bit, I wanted to say
that it's interesting to see
Republicans
any Republicans
send more money to UW-Madison.
Just basically overall
they have been
pretty distrustful
of the university on all kinds of fronts.