N … I … L.

Name. Image. Likeness.

Besides the transfer portal, no recent addition to the college sports vocabulary draws more discussion or debate. Hell, it was enough to unite Alabama’s Nick Saban and Auburn’s Hugh Freeze to go lobby U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville in the halls of Congress in another sentence this reporter never imagined typing.

But it’s a serious issue — some may argue was existential — to the point college athletics power players went full-court in the press for a federal law to avoid the collegiate sports mushroom cloud.

It’s the latest saga in the high-dollar world of college sports that made previous off-season beefs like satellite camps and over-signing rules look pedestrian.

Now, almost two years after the dam broke and the NCAA lifted restrictions on athletes profiting over their name, image and likeness, the wild-west frontier is only getting more lawless.

Add “collectives” to the new vocab list as every school tries to market itself as NIL leaders while simultaneously arguing NIL shouldn’t be part of the recruiting process.

This murky sea of buzzwords can be equally disorienting and disenchanting.

Perhaps the wordsmith Jimbo Fisher put it best.

“The NIL is a very complex question and it’s complex for major lawyers who’ve done it for their whole life,” the Texas A&M football coach said last week at SEC spring meetings in Destin. “So for us college football coaches … It’s probably one of the most perplexing cases in college athletics, maybe ever when you really get down to it. When you start going down the avenues of what that leads to and what that leads to. I don’t know the answer. I really don’t.”

Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin was equally befuddled.

“I don’t know that anybody — I mean there are the head coaches in there and the commissioner — I don’t know if anybody knows what to do,” he also said last week in Destin. “They know what they don’t like. We all know that. We all know what to complain about but nobody has an answer about what exactly to do.”

We’ll get really basic here for a minute.

First, nobody is arguing (at least in public) that athletes don’t deserve to profit from the fame they’ve created through their hard work and talent. In fact, it was probably illegal for that to be outlawed for so long given no other aspect of American life would limit one’s ability to make money from their own image.

And this is separate from any discussion of players being directly paid by the schools that make hundreds of millions via athletics.

NIL, at least the spirit of it, allowed college athletes to receive compensation from outside entities related to their athletic success. A local business, for example, could feature a football player in a car commercial where such activities in the past would have led to ineligibility. Players could sign autographs for money or get a cut of the profit from jerseys with their names and number on the back.

Simple enough, right?

Never.

When we referenced the dam breaking, we’re talking about the Hoover Dam and using tactical missiles. Where there was once a void, now there’s an arena packed to the ceiling and nowhere to go. Official in-house collectives like ‘Yea Alabama’ and Auburn’s ‘On To Victory’ pool financial resources and create NIL-related events like autograph signings.

Oversight, however, is hard to identify.

In extreme cases, you have boosters working off-book recruiting missions by enticing recruits to campus who coaches don’t necessarily want. Promises have been made, big money promised and nothing.

That need for consumer protection for the athlete is part of the conversation the SEC and other NCAA schools are having with members of Congress in the push to streamline regulation.

The SEC sees an urgent need for federal intervention and a single standard amid an arms race in statehouses that has yielded a patchwork of laws that are, in part, aimed to give their schools a NIL edge.

In fact, most of these new state laws make it illegal for the NCAA and conferences to enforce remaining rules on athlete compensation as university-run collectives take over. States like Missouri, Texas and Arkansas are practically daring a weakened NCAA and conferences to come get them with laws that strip their power to enforce their rules.

“What’s happening at the state level is exactly what I warned about,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last week. “Our states are making a mess of college athletics.”

Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz called it a broken system “in need of guidance” while defending the actions of his state government.

“And we’ve been criticized as a state because of our state law,” he added, “I think that’s unfair. We don’t criticize other people for being innovative in what they try to design for offense and defense and how they run their teams to create an opportunity for success. So why would we be criticized for creating opportunity for success through our state laws.”

And that’s why he sees such an urgent need for a federal law to, well, trump the states.

“Will Congress actually provide the opportunity for a national solution?” Sankey asked before SEC spring meetings. “It’s not necessarily what any of us would have preferred four or five years ago, but it’s our current reality.”

Again, it’s a tangled web and a lack of foresight when the winds were blowing toward today’s NIL reality years before the NCAA opened the gate in the summer of 2021.

So, bottom line, what is the objective of this magic bullet federal law?

New NCAA president Charlie Baker, a former governor of Massachusetts, made his pitch Thursday at a Washington DC summit on the future of college athletics. According to Sports Illustrated, Baker is asking for a registry of NIL deals, certification for agents and uniform NIL standards across all 50 states.

The threat of anti-trust lawsuits limits the NCAA’s ability to make Its national rules so it needs Congress to act. Previous efforts didn’t move the House or Senate so the big-name coaches, administrators and commissioners made their way to Capitol Hill this week.

“There are antitrust laws and things that are involved that are way above my paygrade that we don’t understand,” Drinkwitz said. “So it’s not that easy.”

As USA Today noted in March, a number of NIL-related bills have been proposed but none have advanced to the floor for a vote. They were too broad or too limited to gain the tailwind needed for action. And with anything in Washington, political forces and priorities don’t always align with a petitioning entity’s request for action.

But, as Mississippi State president Mark Keenum told Sports Illustrated last week, a crisis is about the only force that spurs action. And the passage of a new California law that requires all Division I schools in the state to share revenue with athletes could be the five-alarm fire that pushes Congress to find a national solution. California’s law is the most direct shot at the NCAA amateurism model to date.

Dizzy yet?

Still reading?

The whole matter is dense and nuanced — as far as you get from the fourth quarter of a tie game in an SEC football stadium. It’s enough to glaze the eyes of the very coaches in the middle of this discussion.

And with so many competing interests, it’ll take, wait for it … an act of Congress to potentially untangle the web of NIL and the complicating factors that stand in the way of its intended purpose.

Perhaps Drinkwitz put it best last week at the dawn of the SEC spring meetings.

“I’m a history teacher by trade and every time I come to these meetings, I’m blown away that the 13 colonies actually formed a union,” he said to knowing laughter in a room full of reporters. “How in the world they all got together and decided we’re going to defeat the British …”

If only NIL was as simple as forming a more perfect union …

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.