Pay a player who just hit an NCAA Tourney buzzer beater? There’s now an app for that

The first game of the 2025 NCAA Tournament was decided by a Hail Mary.

Tied with St. Francis (Pa.) late in a play-in game Tuesday to decide who faces top-seeded Auburn on Thursday, Alabama State junior Micah Simpson flung a pass that traveled to the opposite free-throw line, and, after a few detours, wound up in the hands of Hornets sophomore Amarr Knox. Knox dropped in a layup with one second remaining to lift Alabama State to a 70-68 win.

We’ve now reached the point in the NIL era when — if Alabama State fans or anyone else were so inclined — they could watch that play and deposit money in accounts belonging to Simpson and Knox to reward them directly for their March Madness heroics. There’s only one catch: They’d have to stay at Alabama State next season to get the money.

Cale Johnston is a former Division II tight end who never saw a penny of NIL money, but he did make millions creating a banking service called ClickSWITCH that he sold in 2021. Before he played at Concordia University in Minnesota, Johnston was a diehard Iowa fan — and he remains loyal to the Hawkeyes. But after his first experience donating to an NIL collective, Johnston decided his next creation would attempt to cut out the middleman between fans and athletes.

“I was like ‘Here you go,’ and then I never heard from the collective again,” Johnston said. “Except a year later. They were like ‘Hey, can we get more money?’ And I asked ‘Where did the money go?’ And they said ‘We’re not going to tell you.’”

That inspired Johnston to create ROY (Return On You), which drew on his previous experience with financial technology software to create a platform that allows fans to pay into accounts earmarked for individual athletes. The athletes can claim the accounts and money in exchange for creating custom content to be sent to fans who paid them. A fan watching the NCAA Tournament this year can search any player’s name in the ROY app and find that player’s account.

The twist Johnston added is that players with eligibility remaining must stay at their current school to collect. If the player transfers, the fans get their money back. A good NCAA Tournament example would be the case of Daryl Banks III. Banks was the best player on the St. Peter’s team that shocked Kentucky in the 2022 NCAA Tournament. He scored 27 points when the Peacocks upset the Wildcats. After the tournament run, he transferred to St. Bonaventure. Could fans have mounted a campaign to keep him at St. Peter’s? They might not have been able to, but they’d have an easier way to try now.

Will this work? Will fans be willing to pay players directly rather than go through collectives or schools? Johnston wonders the same thing. He freely admits he’s experimenting here because no one really knows how the player compensation market will continue to evolve. (ROY also isn’t taking a cut of any money given to players because it’s still “in burn mode,” Johnston said.) If the House v. NCAA settlement is approved next month, it will usher in an era of revenue sharing in which schools can pay players directly.

But players will still be able to accept outside NIL deals, so ROY could provide supplemental income. Or, in the lower subdivisions and the non-revenue sports where most players won’t be getting any payments from their schools, Johnston hopes ROY could be the primary conduit between fans and their favorite athletes. ROY only launched in October 2024, but one of the most successful campaigns so far has been for Iowa women’s wrestler Kennedy Blades. 

Johnston also gave LSU tailback Caden Durham an NIL deal to help promote the app to fans on social media. On Instagram, Durham explained how fans could support individual players directly — “even the kicker,” Durham said — instead of giving to a collective that would parcel the dollars as it saw fit. And because Johnston came up through the financial technology sector, he’s hoping the platform can serve another purpose. Because athletes would effectively be opening a bank account with ROY, he hopes some might stick around as banking customers. “They can be significant deposit-holders in perpetuity,” he said. “I don’t think Chase or Bank of America is going down that far.”

Whether ROY succeeds or fails probably depends on fans’ appetites for making direct payments to players. Johnston created the company because he felt like the collective system was set up for huge donors and not common fans. But the question is whether common fans want to make those payments. As the NIL era heads toward its fifth year, donors and rank-and-file fans alike have expressed fatigue.

They feel they’re getting double charged by schools — once to pay for the administration of the athletic department (facilities, coaches’ salaries, etc) and once to pay for player salaries. Fans of pro teams understand that when they buy tickets that the money goes to pay for administration of the organization and player salaries. The Jacksonville Jaguars or Chicago Bulls don’t come back and hit up the fans or corporate sponsors again because they need to re-sign a player. It’s all baked into the original transaction.

But fans can still support individual players by buying autographs or signature shoes. And perhaps that’s where something like ROY could fit into the new college financial ecosystem. It could provide another conduit for someone who only wants to give to their favorite.

The revenue share era — and the eventual logical conclusion of collective bargaining — likely will end the double-charging of donors. They may be asked for the same amount of money, but they’ll probably only be asked once. But that might be effectively limited to football and men’s basketball at power conference schools.

That mid-major player who becomes an overnight celebrity because he hit a buzzer-beater or helped his team slay a No. 3 seed? This may be the way to slide him a few extra bucks.