Vetoing

I WAS LISTENING TO THE NEWS with only half an ear, a habit of mine. I heard the announcer say something about the governor of Oklahoma vetoing a bill, and two thoughts came to mind. One, since both the governor and the state legislature of that red state are conservative Republican, a veto by the governor, of anything, would seem to indicate some sort of split in the G.O.P. party ranks, always a good thing. Secondly, why would the gov veto anything passed by his or her fellow conservative Republicans? Anything crazy enough to have the support of a Republican state legislature will surely have the support of a Republican governor, right? It turned out that the bill in question was one which had to do with funding college athletes, more specifically, helping them get more N.I.L. (Name, Image, & Likeness). Unless I badly misunderstood, the legislature had actually passed a bill which would have provided state money (exactly how much state money remains unclear) to enhance the amount of money athletes receive for using their name, image, and likeness for personal profit, in accordance with the fairly new NCAA policy which permits that, permits a college athlete to actually make money while helping their school make millions. Most is not nearly all fans of collegiate athletics agree on two things: One; this is long overdue. the athletes deserve to have the right to make some mony for themselves, since for decades they have been making it, tens of millions of dollars, for their schools, but not for themselves. And, Two: This current situation is so unregualted and confusing that it is essentially the wild, wild west of collegiate athletics, and anything goes, and, soner or later, preferably sooner, something will have to be done about it, to provide at least some remote semblance of a framework of regulation, organization, and sanity to the entire NIL process. The best guesss is that the Oklahoma state legislature had their eye on the state's two premier Unviersity athletic departments, teh beloved University of Oklahoma Sooners, and the beloved Oklahoma State University Cowboys. IN Oklahoma, as in most states, folks love their public university sports teams. So the Oklahoma state legislature got a bit carried away with itself, with its OU and OSU sports fan fervor. NO problem, that can happen to anybody. No harm, no foul, the governor simply steps in, with a cool head and a veto pen. The next step, one might suppose, is to wait for a similar scenario to play out in many, many other football happy states, and to wonder: in how many of them will the governor fall prey to the same bad idea, and refrain from vetoing? As they say: stay tuned.