Gloria Nevarez discusses shifting NIL landscape, takeaways from WCC's Russell Rule

Gloria Nevarez was never looking for the next career move.

The former West Coast Conference commissioner was content. With more than two decades in college athletics, she was happy knowing she was going to retire in the position she took back in 2018. As the leader of a 10-school, non-football league, she had been able to initiatives driving real change in her tenure.

“In my heart and soul, I was retiring at the WCC,” Nevarez recently told On3 in a phone interview. “But when this opportunity came up, it was a can’t-miss type job. I had to try for it.”

This opportunity is the Mountain West Conference. She officially started as the conference’s commissioner earlier this month, leaving the WCC after four years. Before her first stint as commissioner, she served as the Pac-12’s senior associate commissioner.

The draw of getting back to a football conference was there. She will only be the MWC’s second commissioner – Craig Thompson held the role since the conference’s formation in 1998. Nevarez has also served in leadership roles assisting with NCAA reform, most recently sitting on the Transformation Committee.

While staying at the WCC would have meant fighting to keep basketball power Gonzaga in the conference – the Bulldogs have had talks with the Big 12 and Pac-12 – there are new challenges she will have to take on in the MWC. Making sure the conference stays relevant while multiple American Athletic Conference schools join the Big 12 is arguably at the top of her list.

But as a commissioner with experience in NCAA reform, she knows how name, image and likeness has strayed from its original purpose. Guiding the MWC through the saga of NIL will be a priority for Nevarez.

“My first six months is going to be focused on listening to everyone, getting on campuses,” she said. “Generally speaking, NIL is the Wild Wild West. In my work on the NCAA in transformation committees, we didn’t really touch NIL. It’s sitting in a subcommittee of the Division I Council – very good people are working on that.

“Personally, I hope we can at least get our arms back around making it not pay-for-play. And then for the Mountain West, specifically, it’s whatever the sandbox we’re playing in, is to ensure we remain competitive. Leagues, by and large, have kind of been operating in an education mode and a best practice sharing mode and exploring wherever we end up with NIL, how the league can add value to that.”

Revenue sharing has also become a topic conferences are starting to discuss. This summer, Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford started to work with the College Football Players Association, which included in its demands a percentage of media rights revenue for the players.

How athletes actually receive a share of media rights revenue seems to be on hold. In the meantime, this summer’s events started to move the discussion forward about a similar model actually happening.

If Gloria Nevarez will help the Mountain West work its way through revenue sharing during her tenure is an unknown. But she will have to start having the discussion and piecing together an answer to the question.

“There are two levels in my mind,” she said. “One is how we divide among the league evenly or with some kind of nod to performance. Then, once you’ve answered that question, how much of media revenue goes to student-athletes? Or is it a bigger, philosophical discussion about how all dollars, not just media revenue, trickle through conference to school to athletes.”

Gloria Nevarez: WCC’s Russell Rule success ‘not one size fits all’

On May, 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. The death of the 46-year-old black man sparked pushes for social reform across the country. Protests sparked across the country, lasting throughout the summer.

With WCC meetings scheduled for later that summer, Gloria Nevarez opted to re-organize the agenda. A focus was placed on social justice, with plans for a discussion on how the league could enact change.

“We rearranged our agendas to talk about social justice because it was such a national issue,” she said. “You know, all the young people on our campuses, those are the prime years when you learn to use your voice and learn about advocacy. So we rearranged our agendas to talk about how that impacts athletics, what schools were doing and what we should do as a league. The presidents really wanted something that created meaningful and lasting change. We all put out statements of support.

“But you could really feel the campuses, their students and student-athletes wanted more. The idea of the hiring commitment had been bouncing around in the back of my head a little bit. When we floated it out there, our league just galvanized around it.”

The WCC eventually implemented the Bill Russell Rule in August 2020. The first-ever Division I hiring commitment, the rule requires each WCC school to include a member of a traditionally underrepresented community in the pool of final candidates for athletic directors, senior administrators and head coaches.

In the rule’s second year, and Nevarez’s final one with the WCC, 56.7% of the candidates hired across the conference were from underrepresented communities. And in 15 head coach searches, seven hires were candidates from underrepresented communities.

The initiative is one of Nevarez’s proudest during her time with the WCC. But it is not an approach that will work in every league. Until she visits campuses across the Mountain West Conference, she won’t know if an idea like the Russell Rule is something she would like to propose.

“DAI [diversity and inclusion] efforts are not one size fits all,” she said. “I haven’t even really been around our campuses yet. But I will share, my interview was with the board of presidents. We have four female presidents, five presidents of color.

“So from my brief experience with just interviewing, I’m not sure that a hiring commitment might be the need.”