A college QB testified about NIL. He says Congress is missing the point.

Chase Griffin heard the question over and over Thursday: What policies should Congress consider to regulate college sports’ name, image and likeness (NIL) market? And no matter where he was on Capitol Hill — in a representative’s office, in a hallway, in the middle of testifying in the 11th congressional hearing on NIL — Griffin’s answer didn’t change.

None.

Griffin, a 23-year-old quarterback at UCLA, wasn’t in Washington long. He landed around 2 a.m. Thursday, only eight hours before he walked into the Rayburn Building and strongly opposed an NIL reform bill introduced by Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.). By early evening, Griffin was on a flight home. But in that time, he was an unwavering counterweight to those pushing for federal regulation of NIL, including NCAA President Charlie Baker, two other college athletes and many of the legislators who questioned him.

Still, Baker, the politicians and Jeff Jackson, commissioner of the Missouri Valley Conference, kept holding up Griffin as the gold standard of NIL, of what it should and could be with federal oversight. They praised him for landing more than 40 brand deals. They used him as an example of a “good actor” thriving despite the many “bad actors” in the shadows.

This, though, is where Griffin felt they all missed the point.

“I always appreciate people who recognize that I do work hard in the space,” Griffin told The Washington Post after the hearing. “But at the same time, I hope that when they recognize me, they realize they are recognizing the majority of college athletes who are partaking in NIL right now. … When you say that I’m the poster child of what college athletes should be doing, no, I’m just another example of what college athletes are already doing. And when you look at what I’m doing and say, ‘This is what’s right with NIL,’ no, you’re saying: ‘NIL is what’s right with NIL.’”

Aside from Griffin, the witnesses were Baker, Jeff Jackson, Victoria Jackson (a sports historian and professor at Arizona State), Meredith Page (a women’s volleyball player at Radford) and Keke Tholl (a softball player at Michigan). Griffin was the first active college football player to testify in a congressional hearing on NIL. From the beginning, he picked Bilirakis’s draft apart, breaking from Baker, Jeff Jackson, Page and Tholl. Then he didn’t let up.

The bill, titled the “FAIR College Sports Act,” would grant the NCAA two of its major asks: an antitrust exemption (to shield it from pending and future litigation) and codifying that athletes cannot be considered employees. But it would also bar schools from paying athletes directly through NIL deals, contradicting a key part of Baker’s agenda.

Beyond that, the bill looks to eliminate the use of NIL money as a recruiting inducement by donor-funded collectives and boosters, something the NCAA technically forbids but is obviously happening in revenue sports. And the bill calls for disclosure and registration requirements that Griffin argued would dissuade companies from striking NIL agreements, disproportionately hurting female athletes who, like him, almost solely profit off brand deals.

If everyone sipped a beer at each mention of “inducements” or “pay for play” Thursday, no one would have been able to drive home.

“Viewership is up. The amount of money that players are making is up. It sounds like every single piece of the business model is working when it comes to NIL,” Griffin said. “The only place where I think it can get better is by establishing pay for play and revenue share [between schools and athletes].”

So when Trahan had her five minutes to question the witnesses, she turned right to Griffin (but not before saying “Congress as a whole has lost its credibility on this issue”).

“Mr. Griffin, you recently helped lead a survey of college athletes, which among other things asked what stakeholders they trust,” Trahan said. “Who were the people athletes trust the least?”

“Congress,” he said, prompting a few laughs in the gallery.

“That should concern each one of us here today,” Trahan continued. “That the very people this committee is seeking to ‘protect’ don’t have any trust that we have their best interests at heart.”

Of course, that varied among the athletes in the room, let alone college athletes across the country. At one point, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) asked Page and Tholl whether they wanted to be employees of their schools. Both said no. But Miller-Meeks skipped the initial question with Griffin, instead asking whether he would be okay with a coach being able to fire him if he were an employee. She assumed his stance and challenged him with a hypothetical consequence.

Later, Griffin told another legislator he feels as if he’s treated like an employee at UCLA, though he would otherwise defer to what the National Labor Relations Board decides in the coming months.

Once the hearing wrapped, Baker approached Griffin with an outstretched hand. They then took a picture together, snapped by Griffin’s beaming father. Griffin, a quarterback with just 67 college passing attempts to his name, stood next to the NCAA president after they went head to- head on a number of issues across 3½ hours.

That, Griffin might point out, was only possible because of this version of the NIL world. That was his whole point.

“The fact that we’re hung up on NIL shows how far ahead the courts, college athletes and public opinion are compared to Congress,” Griffin said. “And that’s where a large source of the distrust in Congress comes from.”