Texas A&M runner Ryan Trahan has been ruled ineligible due to his YouTube account, and the proposed compromise that will allow him to continue his athletics career while also keeping up his social media presence is laughable.
Ryan Trahan is caught between a rock and a hard place because he is an NCAA athlete who owns a business.
As he awaits the fate of his application for a waiver from the NCAA that would allow him to continue promoting his business on YouTube and compete in cross country and track and field for the Aggies simultaneously, the compromise he has been presented with competes for the title of most moronic plan ever.
According to Chris Chavez of Sports Illustrated, Trahan has filed two waiver applications with the NCAA, seeking the reinstatement of his eligibility which was taken from him due to the promotion of his water bottle business on his YouTube channel.
Because Trahan had been using his status as an Aggie freshman athlete to promote his business, Trahan was in violation of NCAA by-laws. Trahan wants to pursue both ventures simultaneously, which has him in the precarious position. He may ultimately have to choose, like former UCF football player Donald De La Haye, but for now, it seems that there might be a compromise. Trahan explained the possible solution to Chavez:
"“Just left my meeting with compliance and it sounds like the compromise is this: operate as two separate entities,” Trahan wrote in a message to SI.com. “I am allowed to have a collegiate running alias (with no promotion) and a personal business alias (with no collegiate running), but they must be separate accounts on all platforms. It blows my mind that I have to put up a wall between my two personas. We are working on filing a formal waiver request. Have to send our compliance officer a few more documents and then we can get rolling! Eligibility will not be an issue, I should get approved rather quickly. It’s a matter of fighting for an athlete’s right to own and operate a business just like everyone else.”"
As Trahan alluded to, the potential solution is for him to pretend like he is two different people. By day, he can be a mild-mannered Texas A&M student-athlete who enjoys studying, running in the woods and is just learning the basics of growing a business. At night, he can put on his disguise and moonlight as a heroic entrepreneur with an already-established business that he is using social media to market. It’s all fine, as long as he keeps his secret identity a secret, like a comic book character.
What’s most idiotic about this fix is that it doesn’t just require Trahan to pretend that he is two different people, but it requires every person who watches one of his YouTube videos to pretend that they don’t know he is part of the Texas A&M cross country or track and field teams as well. It asks intelligent people to pretend that they are like actress Teri Hatcher in a 1996 Saturday Night Live monologue, in which she jokingly thought Will Ferrell became a different person when he put on a pair of glasses.
This is the best-case scenario because of the NCAA’s short-sighted rule which says that athletes at member institutions are the only adults in the United States who can’t profit off the use of their own image, likeness and name. The NCAA, the SEC Texas A&M, or another student at Texas A&M who isn’t an athlete could all make the exact same videos that Trahan has, monetize them to an even greater extent than Trahan has, and it wouldn’t affect Trahan’s eligibility whatsoever.
Next: Top 5 NCAA teams that never won a title
Until the NCAA adjust or repeals the by-laws which govern this situation, more nonsensical compromises like this will be presented as possible solutions for the problem. In the meantime, it’s athletes like Trahan and fans of college sports that have to suffer the consequences.