Georgia TE Brock Bowers explains focus on NIL brand deals

NASHVILLE – Last winter, sources close to Georgia junior tight end Brock Bowers shared that Bowers didn’t pursue an NIL deal with the Classic City Collective that supports the Bulldogs.

At the SEC Football Media Days, On3 asked Bowers – the reigning winner of the John Mackey Award that’s given to the best tight end in the country – if the report is true and if so, what the motivation was behind it.

“The main motivation behind it was just cause I kind of work with other people for NIL,” Bowers said. “I feel like I had kind of my own stuff going on that I didn’t really need that kind of support and I felt like they could just focus on some of the other guys or other sports.”

NIL collectives have budgets, not salary caps

In professional sports leagues with salary caps, there have been cases of high-profile players, such as a quarterback, leaving money on the table in order to provide the franchise more financial flexibility to improve the team’s roster.

There are a couple of examples of star college athletes who have publicly declined an NIL deal for a similar purpose. UCF quarterback John Rhys Plumlee reportedly elected to redirect money from the collective Kingdom NIL to his teammates.

While there are no salary caps for NIL collectives, they are still bound by the budgetary limits of their donors’ discretional expenses and partner companies’ marketing budgets.

The resulting media coverage of an athlete who doesn’t sign with a collective because of their independent opportunities can reflect positively on the player, too, for what fans might interpret as selflessness or generosity.

However, the other part of the strategy is also that the most marketable college athletes are capable of receiving significant deals from brands, rather than collectives that are often donor-driven.

It’s sort of an NIL life hack. The more marketable an athlete is or the more successful he or she is in competition, the more likely regional and national brands are to partner with the athlete, especially if the athlete has representation whose role is to maximize those opportunities.

For example, Iowa guard Caitlin Clark was the only member of her team last season who didn’t partner with The Swarm Collective. She signed with marketing representation early in the NCAA’s NIL era and The Swarm Collective CEO Brad Heinrichs previously told On3 the collective launched “long after NIL became a thing.”

The athletes who choose not to sign with a collective aren’t necessarily earning less money, per se, but the athletes and their representation are focusing on the segment of the NIL market that’s often branded as “real NIL” or “true NIL.”

Everett Sports Marketing represents Brock Bowers

Everett Sports Marketing represents Brock Bowers for his NIL opportunities. Bowers has partnered with companies such as Dick’s Sporting Goods, NOBULL and Morgan & Morgan.

Bowers is a multitalented tight end who caught 63 passes for 942 yards and seven touchdowns last season while rushing for 12.1 yards per carry and three touchdowns on nine attempts.

Georgia’s Mackey Award-winning tight end and Napa, Calif., native Brock Bowers on if he ever played quarterback.

“I actually played quarterback my freshman year in high school but it was triple option so I’d kind of just keep it most of the time.

“That was really fun.” pic.twitter.com/f1udx5bu9w

— Andy Wittry (@AndyWittry) July 18, 2023

He has an On3 NIL Valuation of $721,000, which ranks No. 41 among current college football players.

Whatever sum a collective might typically pay a skill-position player who was named the best nationally at his position – say, low-to-mid six figures – is now presumably funded through national apparel brands, sporting goods stores and law firms, rather than Georgia fans or local businesses.