In an attempt to stay tapped into all things NIL, I’ve sorted through and gathered some interesting NIL-centered news items today. The title of each section will redirect you to the initial article, as I did not translate all of the columns into this page. Just the best cliff notes.
Today’s Topics
1. NIL Has Birthed a Third-Party Cottage Industry—and It’s a Mess (Front Office Sports)
2. Student-athlete pay will account for 13 percent of UI, ISU athletics budgets (The Gazette)
3. Friend of the Program Commits Multi-Million Dollar Gift to Virginia Football (VirginiaSports.com)
4. College Football’s Buyout Mania Was 20 Years in the Making (The Sportico)
5. Clark Lea opens up on Vanderbilt’s growth in NIL space, rise to CFP contender (ON3)
6. Alabama football QB Ty Simpson says three-year wait to play was ‘miserable’ (TuscaloosaNews)
7. How a former Rivals recruiting analyst maximized his hit rate and built a top-10 team (The Athletic)
1. NIL Has Birthed a Third-Party Cottage Industry—and It’s a Mess(Front Office Sports)
The opening of the NIL floodgates in college sports three years ago birthed an entire cottage industry of third-party NIL services companies that have raced to amass contracts with big school clients. In just the past month, one of those companies has collapsed and another is under fire. How did we get here?
It hasn’t played out that way so far. Top players are still being lured mainly by ever-ballooning NIL payments, independently of a school’s stated revenue-sharing plan. But the move away from collectives by some schools has prompted an ensuing move toward third-party platforms or marketplaces that connect athletes with NIL deal offers.
“Collectives, for the most part, should only exist in markets where the school is at the [revenue-sharing] cap—they’ve exceeded how much they can pay directly,” NIL marketplace Opendorse cofounder Blake Lawrence tells Front Office Sports. “That’s where a collective actually makes sense.”
2. Student-athlete pay will account for 13 percent of UI, ISU athletics budgets(The Gazette)
Revenue sharing with student athletes will account for at least $41 million, or 13 percent, of Iowa’s public university athletic department expenses this budget year. According to the first higher education-related research report from the two-year-old Iowa branch of the nonpartisan Common Sense Institute.
That $41 million of a total $326 million in athletic department expenses across the Iowa Board of Regents system. Is the combined $20.5 million that both Iowa State University and the University of Iowa have budgeted to pay athletes. The most allowed for the year that started July 1 based on a percent of the average media revenue of Power Five conference schools.
The $20.5 million cap can increase about 4 percent annually. Up to about $32 million over the next decade. Each school deciding how and on whom it wants to spend the money.
3. Clark Lea opens up on Vanderbilt’s growth in NIL space, rise to CFP contender(ON3)
Lea addressed this on the weekly SEC teleconference. There, he was very honest, admitting that Vanderbilt got caught flat-footed by those changes in college sports. However, since embracing them, it’s the foundation he had previously built there that’s made the program a contender.
“We did not really have a plan to participate in the transfer portal or in NIL,” Clark Lea said. “In really what amounted to the first three seasons I was here. In ’21, it was all new. We lost our best o-lineman in ’21, we lost our best player in ’22 in Ray Davis, both to league opponents. So, we kind of had a reckoning there in the Winter of ’23 to say, ‘Hey, we have to get busy raising some money and build some level of NIL support for this program or else were weren’t going to have a program.’”
Clark Lea and Vanderbilt are hardly alone in this regard. Many expected NIL to just be sponsorships with third parties, not expecting the reality that it became with collectives. Add in the challenges that come with adding transfers to Vanderbilt as an institution, and it took a proverbial come-to-Jesus moment for the staff after finishing the 2023 season at 2-10.
