Jalen Duren's pending decision points to big-money potential of NIL

When 6-foot-10 Jalen Duren, the top high school basketball player in the nation, discloses his future plans tonight, the 90-minute announcement program will bear resemblance to those by so many phenoms of the past — with one wrinkle: Name, Image and Likeness.

It’s uncertain where he is headed, but NIL potential for the elite of the elites like Duren looms as the enticing new variable. It not only enhances the allure of college athletics but in some cases is motivating athletes to fast-track their arrival on campus. Duren, who is considering Kentucky, Miami and Memphis as well as the pro route with the NBA G-League and Australia’s NBL, also is likely to reclassify to the recruiting class of 2021, which means he’d immediately be able to secure endorsement deals. 

NIL could be morphing the college campus into a lucrative pit stop for phenoms en route to the NBA. Duren told On3’s Joe Tipton that the NIL era has “eliminated the money factor” and “leveled the playing field” because it has enabled some athletes to make more money in college than they would otherwise by signing with the G-League or NBL. Duren, who starred at Montverde Academy in central Florida this past season, is the type of talent who potentially could command $1 million or more in endorsement deals. 

Earlier this week, Quinn Ewers, the nation’s top-ranked quarterback in the 2022 class, chose to forgo his senior year at powerhouse Southlake Carroll in the Dallas suburbs to enroll a year early at Ohio State so he can begin profiting from his NIL. Texas state law does not allow athletes to retain high school eligibility if they monetize their NIL. Garland (Texas) High coach Danny Russell told The Dallas Morning News that, if the state law were to change, then “football as we know it will be over and done” and questioned “at what point does the phenom seventh-grader start getting those same deals?”

Beyond Duren, NIL could have a profound effect on the annual basketball recruiting pool. Emoni Bates, a 6-9 forward from Ypsilanti, Mich., who has attracted national attention since middle school, has reclassified to the recruiting class of 2021. Because Bates does not turn 18 until January, he could profit from his NIL for two seasons in college (or elsewhere) before entering the 2023 NBA Draft (athletes must be 19 and at least a year removed from high school to enter the draft.).

Malik S. Jackson, a sports attorney with Jacksonville-based Smith Hulsey & Busey, counsels clients on NIL compensation matters. He told On3 that for the “can’t miss” blue-chip prospect (Duren, Ewers, Bates, etc.), he can envision families and advisors creating an academic road map as early as in middle school; that would enable them to partake in a college acceleration program to be on track to enroll early to enjoy the fruits of their NIL.

“For basketball players particularly, NIL is a total game-changer,” Jackson told On3. “It is awesome that NIL has leveled the playing field with professional leagues and colleges. But it kind of hints at the inherent issue with our amateurism system in America, where we don’t know what that line of professionalism is. So, this young teenager is making a choice about which commercial entity is going to provide him the best benefit. That is an awesome power for him to have.”

The NIL landscape at the high school level is a minefield. Across the country, state laws are disparate, nuanced or nonexistent. While there may not be an NIL market for the vast majority of recruited high school athletes, a robust market potentially exists for the über-talented. And we’re seeing it can hasten their arrival on campus to avoid the restrictive, nebulous world of state high school NIL laws.

“If I were waving a magic wand, I’d say no kid in high school should lose their eligibility for monetizing their name and likeness,” said Zach Maurides, founder and CEO at Teamworks, an athlete engagement platform. “Let’s just get that nonsense out of the way, right? It’s not something that’s going to be so big and so complex that we need to sweat over. If they are in high school as an athlete and can monetize their NIL, great.”

When will Big Tech become a media rights player?

Notre Dame’s Sept. 11 home opener against Toledo will be carried exclusively on NBC’s Peacock streaming service, which seemingly is further evidence that streaming services will be increasingly part of the equation in future media rights deals.

The question is whether future negotiations will include the same cast of characters (ESPN, Fox, CBS, NBC) or expand to the deep-pocketed titans of Big Tech (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.). I asked two prominent former TV executives to look into a crystal ball filled with dollar signs to assess. 

Neal Pilson, former CBS Sports president in the 1980s and ‘90s: “That is not their business. Frankly, I don’t see the Big Tech companies taking a major sports package that any one of the established companies wants to keep. For (the NFL’s) ‘Thursday Night Football,’ Amazon took it because nobody else wanted it. Their audiences aren’t really similar to the traditional TV sports audience, and sports doesn’t stream as well as entertainment programming because there’s only one run. Sports doesn’t have an afterlife. A lot of the programming that you see now being streamed — movies, TV series, made-for-TV stuff — they have an afterlife. They have multiple runs, long term. Texas plays Oklahoma — then the game’s over. Move on to next week, right? Sports is not, in my view, the ideal driver for streaming. I don’t see streaming having a materially major impact on sports for at least five to 10 years, when maybe we’re all in the streaming business.”

A former TV executive who negotiated several major rights deals: “It is inevitable that those deals will happen because the existing business model, or linear television, is getting squeezed. So, when that happens, there’s less money available to be spent on rights of these sorts from traditional sources. There is going to be a continued appetite for revenue, and appetite causes behavior. The likelihood is that some properties are going to migrate over time. If you go back far enough, there was a time when the expectation was that everything was going to be on broadcast TV, right? Now our expectation is all that stuff is going to be on cable. Well, the business changes, it morphs over a period of time, and now in a world where, increasingly, there’s going to be digital, which properties go first?”

While the overall viewing trend may be headed toward streaming, TV remains king. Sports Business Journal reported that NBC Digital’s best Summer Olympics streaming audience so far (746,000 viewers on July 26) accounted for only 4.45% of that night’s audience. 

An enforcement void

One early takeaway from the first month of the NIL era is the enforcement vacuum.

The NCAA would love nothing more than for Congress to issue uniform federal law. That hasn’t happened to date, and the folks in Indianapolis essentially have thrown up their hands. Maurides said the big question is the level of enforcement and where will that enforcement derive. 

“A lot of schools got caught flat-footed, assuming that rules and structure enforcement were all going to come from the NCAA,” said Maurides, whose company in 2019 acquired INFLCR, which provides a compliance platform to more than 100,000 athletes at 170 Division I schools. “And I can tell you, we have seen an absolute landslide — in a good way — of schools that are like, ‘We realize we have to have our own system in place. We have to have our own — in some cases where there’s not a state law — we have to develop our own rules. We have to build our own process of internal enforcement until there’s a clear authority.’ ”

Jackson, the sports attorney, said he envisions a fragmented NIL space for at least the next year, with institutions, state legislatures, school boards and school districts providing guardrails because “until we get a top-down approach from the Feds, it is probably going to build from the ground up.”

Maurides said the wisest athletes and schools are the ones taking a deliberate approach to NIL this summer. As much as this appears like a quasi-gold rush for athletes now, he said, NIL will exist in perpetuity. Ultimately, an organization will step forward, whether it be state attorneys general or conferences, and create an enforcement apparatus, he said, adding that “the last thing the school wants is all of the sudden they’ve got eligibility issues all over the place. I think that’s a great concern right now.”

An interesting NIL anecdote came from Jim Cavale, the CEO of INFLCR, who told On3 he talked with two SEC quarterbacks last week, pushing them to be more active on social. Both said they were about to go to camp and just wanted to keep their jobs. Cavale asked how many hours they spend on their phones each day. Both said about nine hours.

Cavale said he told them, “ ‘You can take 20 minutes and post something about camp. ESPN will pay hundreds of thousands, if not seven figures, to send a truck to your campus to get behind the scenes — and you can just use your phone.’ I knocked that home, and some athletes listen, some don’t. But the reason I knocked that home is because I’m a big believer that whether or not that branding initiative on social media creates money now, it’s going to establish your brand for whatever is next.”

Quick hits

• Keep an eye on group licensing deals. After North Carolina became the first college athletics program to announce a group licensing deal for current athletes, Ohio State announced its program. Athletes will be able to opt-in and use their NIL in conjunction with the school’s trademarks and logos as part of a group licensing program. After offering jerseys, it eventually will include merchandise such as video games, apparel, trading cards and bobbleheads.

• Jennifer Heppel, the commissioner of the Patriot League, was on point for tweeting that the NCAA’s response to the report highlighting the wide gender equity gap in the respective men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments was unacceptable. The NCAA’s statement characterized the 100-plus page report as “useful guidance.” The NCAA’s board also said it had directed NCAA president Mark Emmert to act “urgently to address any organizational issues.”

• The NCAA Division I Board of Directors on Wednesday approved an immediate change to the Independent Accountability Resolution Process (IARP). Going forward, unless additional investigative work is required, the Complex Case Unit now will accept the work of the enforcement staff. Without the CCU needing to essentially re-investigate cases, the hope is a more efficient, streamlined process. A number of high-profile cases remain backlogged. In response to the changes, one source involved with a current infractions case told On3: “It’s been a long, painful” process.

(Top photo of Duren: Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)