Football player says school told him to ‘quit YouTube or quit college sports’
Donald De La Haye has one of the lowest-profile jobs in all of college football: He’s a kickoff specialist, meaning he doesn’t even kick field goals or extra points. In short, you’d probably only notice him on the field if something went wrong.
But now, De La Haye, a junior at the University of Central Florida, is making headlines for his exploits off the field, and whether they may impact his eligibility on it.
De La Haye runs a fairly popular YouTube channel, where he posts videos like “Quarterbacks Be Like...”, “How I Practice My Kicking” and “How I Became a D-1 Football Player.” Some have as many as 220,000 views, other have only 2,000. All told, he has around 53,700 subscribers.
And that YouTube channel is at the heart of his current dilemma. In a video titled “Quit YouTube or Quit College Sports” that was posted Saturday, De La Haye told viewers that “some people upstairs,” referencing UCF’s NCAA compliance office, had met with him to discuss his videos, which he says the office told him violated NCAA rules.
(Warning: The video below contains strong language)
Specifically, NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from profiting off their likeness or status as a student-athlete, according to Deadspin, and because De La Haye earns a small amount of revenue from the advertisements that run before his YouTube videos, he is technically in violation of the rules.
Because of this, De La Haye says, the school gave him a choice: stop referencing the fact that he’s a student-athlete in his videos or quit the team.
The university says that’s not quite true, according to the Orlando Sentinel. A source told the paper that De La Haye was not given an ultimatum, although existing rules would prevent him from making money on the videos.
However, De La Haye argued in his video that as a marketing major, the videos were part of his career beyond football, and he also said that he sends some of the revenue he has already received to his parents, who live in Puerto Rico.
“I feel like they’re making me pick between my passion in what I love to do, make videos and entertain, be creative and my other passion, which is playing football. I really have some decisions to make and not a lot of time to make those decisions. We’ll see what happens,” De La Haye said in the video.
“I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not making money illegally. I’m not selling dope. I’m not kidnapping people or robbing people. I’m not selling my autographs for money. I’m not sitting here getting Nike checks and Nike deals and all these sponsorships. I’m literally filming stuff. I’m sitting here, editing things on my computer for hours and developing my own brand. I put in the work, and I’m not allowed to get any benefits from the work.”
De La Haye’s fight with the school’s NCAA compliance office is hardly the first time college athletes have run into difficulties with the NCAA over profiting on their likenesses. A landmark lawsuit filed by former athletes forced Electronic Arts, the makers of the popular “NCAA Football” video game series, to discontinue the series rather than pay players for their likenesses.
How much money De La Haye is actually making from his YouTube channel is uncertain. In 2014, the New York Times estimated that YouTube creators usually make $2,000 for every 1 million views, and then 45 percent of that is taken by Google, YouTube’s parent company. De La Haye’s channel has 2.5 million total views. By those measures, De La Haye would have made $2,250 before taxes over a four-month period.
This story was originally published June 12, 2017 at 10:59 PM with the headline "Football player says school told him to ‘quit YouTube or quit college sports’."