Wisconsin Eye
Chris McIntosh at a public hearing on February 11, 2026.
UW-Madison athletics director Chris McIntosh, right, told legislators that the world of college athletics 'has changed' since name, image and likeness agreements were permitted.
UW-Madison is looking for an additional $14.6 million from taxpayers annually to maintain its athletics facilities.
But the state’s flagship public university also wants to ensure that name, image and likeness (NIL) contracts for the student athletes who train in them — and all other Badgers athletes — aren’t viewable by the public. Legislators on the Assembly Committee on State Affairs on Feb. 11 unanimously passed a bill which would exempt NIL contracts and revenue sharing for any UW campus from Wisconsin’s public records law.
Wisconsin law holds that government records, including records of financial operations at the state’s public universities, are generally property of the public.
The proposed legislation would also allow universities to make NIL deals with students, require students to report third-party NIL deals, prevent student athletes from entering third-party agreements that would conflict with UW Board of Regents, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) or specific institutions’ policies, and would allocate $14.6 million in annual taxpayer funding for the maintenance of UW-Madison athletics facilities, rather than redirecting some program revenues for those buildings.
The world of college athletics burst wide-open in 2021, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA cannot prohibit student athletes from profiting off of brand deals using their name, image or likeness. As part of a court-approved settlement in 2025, universities also were allowed to pay up to $20.5 million in revenue sharing directly to student athletes.
With those two events combined, UW-Madison athletics director Chris McIntosh, who testified at the hearing, said “the world around us has changed.”
“Collegiate athletics has experienced more volatility in the last five years than the previous 50 years,” McIntosh said. “I worry that the instability of the industry jeopardizes our ability to sustain success across all three pillars of our mission.”
Bill author Rep. Alex Dallman, R-Markesan, noted that 32 other states have implemented NIL regulations: “By not having meaningful regulations in place, Wisconsin universities and our state as a whole will be at a distinct disadvantage both competitively and economically."
Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, is a co-sponsor of the legislation. Spokespeople for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Gov. Tony Evers did not immediately respond to questions asking whether the officials support the bill.
Dallman did not mention the public records exemption in his opening testimony. In response to a question from Rep. Christine Sinicki, D-Milwaukee, Dallman said “there are specific contracting, competitive strategic things the university is doing to try to get some of these contracts. It would not be beneficial for our schools to give our strategic plan out to other schools.”
Still, some transparency advocates say that such deals should be open to the public.
“The public has a right to see what deals are being made, and how, and who is benefitting,” says Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council and an Isthmus contributor. “To change the open records law to allow secrecy is just a bad idea, and I hope that the governor considers vetoing it.”
Universities nationwide have put up fierce fights to keep contracts from going public. Nancy Lynch, UW-Madison vice chancellor of legal affairs, in testimony at the hearing, said that the exemption is needed to “protect competitive interests and student privacy.”
“We seek only to codify our existing practice of denying access to student athlete NIL agreements and certain university records related to NIL strategy, allocation, revenue generation and use, the release of which would put us at an incredible disadvantage with our competitors,” said Lynch.
Lynch says that the university currently operates with a “patchwork of protective provisions” to deny requests and that such denials are made to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a federal law that requires academic institutions to keep educational records related to students private.
Though FERPA covers NIL agreements made with current students, Lynch said, the university has to rely on the state’s public records balancing test, citing FERPA and “competitive interests,” to reject records requests related to incoming students. Using that balancing test, she said, puts the university at a greater risk of court action.
“Relying on balancing test arguments always presents a higher risk of litigation, which is costly and time-consuming,” Lynch said.
She cited one example in Utah when local news outlet The Deseret News requested NIL agreements from all five of the state’s Division I public schools in 2023. Though the universities claimed a FERPA exemption, the state’s public records committee ruled that the NIL contracts were not “education records” protected by the act and ordered the universities to release the records. They appealed, and Utah's legislature enacted legislation to exempt such deals from public records law, preventing the universities from having to argue in court that such rejections were necessary under FERPA.
Lynch said that the exemption would not prohibit the university from releasing any NIL-related records that do not implicate "student privacy or competitive interests." But it would prevent the release of contracts between the university and students, payments to students, the university’s contract template, and any records revealing “our strategy” for NIL allocation.
“All of these are examples of records requests that we have denied,” said Lynch.
[Editor's note: This article has been updated to clarify that Lynch said the exemption wouldn't prohibit releasing records that do not involve "competitive interests," in addition to those that do not involve student privacy.]
