Warde Manuel opens up on Michigan's approach to NIL

In his role as Michigan athletic director, one of the biggest criticisms of Warde Manuel has been his seeming reticence to have the Wolverines going full-bore into the NIL space. And while he readily acknowledged Michigan wasn’t pushing boundaries in the space, Manuel thinks they’ve done a good job — and sat on their hands in moments for good reason.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Michigan Insider’s Sam Webb, Manuel explained in some depth his perspective on Michigan’s NIL efforts over the first handful of years it’s been allowed, plus how the Wolverines can continue to bolster the operation moving forward. Either way, Manuel seems confident Michigan will have the resources to keep operating as one of the better-performing athletic departments in the country — revenue share included.

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“And I have always been a proponent of our students athletes being able to use their name, image and likeness to make money, to do things that they want to do with their name,” Manuel said. “And it starts as easy as jersey sales. We were the first ones to approve jersey sales for our student athletes and had that.”

But when it comes to Michigan not being a leader when it comes to NIL operations, Manuel pointed to two main reasons: Not wanting to leave the athletic department and school exposed for potential NIL rules violations as the NCAA was already investigating the football program for Covid violations, among others things. And beyond that, Manuel said the donor culture around Michigan athletics has been hard to shift into a space where they’re lining up to give to collectives.

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When it comes to the NCAA, Manuel is fine to have been tagged with being conservative in the space if that guaranteed not opening up any more doors for the NCAA to keep investigating.

“But you have to remember, at the time, in 2021, we had just started to deal with the first NCAA investigation,” Manuel said. “So for me, there’s this sense that, ‘Well, you’re being conservative.’ There’s two reasons: One, we had this NCAA issue so what’re we supposed to do? Go out, be ultra aggressive, break rules? At a time when we’re being investigated for breaking rules. So we didn’t push the envelope like others pushed it because we were dealing with something, in terms of the investigation where if we started to violate more rules, now we’re adding to the rules violations. And then if I’m more aggressive and that happens, then people go, ‘Why was Warde more aggressive? He should’ve know we were dealing with an NCAA investigation.’ So there’s two sides to it.”

Ultimately, while the NCAA did try to proceed with some enforcement over alleged pay-for-play NIL, an injunction in federal court has enjoined the NCAA from enforcing those rules for the time being. Meaning, Michigan likely wouldn’t have faced too much scrutiny from the NCAA, but Manuel is fine have been safe instead of sorry. And during that time, Michigan collectives like Champions Circle — one of On3’s Top 15 collectives entering the 2024 football season — ran success campaigns like the “One More Year Fund” which helped retain the likes of Blake Corum and others to help the Wolverines win a football national championship. The group also has been successful in fundraising for new head men’s basketball coach Dusty May, too.

As for donor culture, Manuel explained that he’s simply trying to shift the thinking around Michigan’s donor base that writing checks to collectives and funding NIL operations is OK.

“And we still find adults who find it unacceptable to give money to student athletes,” Manuel said. “I keep saying to our donor base: It’s OK. It is legal now. But you have to remember now, I played for a coach in Bo Schembechler who would scare anybody who tried to give his players anything. And so we have started to shift the culture of people understanding that it’s OK to support our student athletes. Now, a lot of the people who say that we don’t do enough with NIL, I always say we have Champions Circle, we have other collectives that are there. They’ll take $5, they’ll take $10, they’ll take $100, so if everybody who’s complaining would just go to the Champions Circle website and start donating, we would absolutely accept, and thank you, for the donation. But in other words, we have to have a culture were people start to say, ‘I can do that.'”