A few more NIL collectives pop up, plus other college sports business notes

As donor-led collectives — and their perceived importance in winning ultra-competitive recruiting battles — continue to dominate the NIL conversation, boosters, athletic directors and coaches who had taken a wait-and-see approach now are suddenly adopting a new mindset as they witness success at rival schools. 

One prominent industry source told On3, “Let me put it this way: Everyone is finally going all-in. All the ADs, all the coaches are going, ‘Holy crap, this is it. This is the game-changer. This is bigger than I had thought.’ ”

Collectives now are launching by the week. These are companies, independent of the university, that most often pool funds from supporters and/or help facilitate NIL deals in the community with athletes. On3’s up-to-the-minute snapshot of collectives nationwide and background on each can be found here.

The “Fear the Wave” crowd-sourcing collective at Tulane launched this week. And two collectives launched to assist the University of Arizona athletes: “Friends of Wilbur & Wilma” will initially help football players with NIL deals, and “Arizona Assist” will benefit men’s basketball players.

There also are so-called “silent” collectives that have been in operation for some time but have chosen to keep a low profile, avoiding the limelight others have sought. One example is Nebraska-centric Athlete Branding & Marketing, which has existed under the radar since the summer. It has been spearheaded by Jon Bruning, the former Nebraska attorney general and a longtime friend of football coach Scott Frost, and Gerrod Lambrecht, Frost’s former chief of staff. 

Few details are available about the operation’s setup or what the specific NIL-focused strategy is at this time. But it is believed to entail several major program supporters operating together. 

Across the country, the message resonating loudest is “Get your school affiliated with a powerful donor-led collective, or get left in the recruiting dust.” It will be interesting to see which is the last Power 5 school left standing with no affiliated collective in the coming months. 

Ohio State and NIL a good match

Data from Opendorse released by Ohio State shows the Buckeyes rank first nationally in total NIL compensation. In total, 225 Ohio State athletes have disclosed 619 NIL deals for a total value of $2.986 million since July 1.

Ohio State also leads the nation in number of athletes with at least one NIL activity.

Of the total compensation, $2.679 million went to football players through 173 deals. Its football players earned an average of $5,968 per Instagram post, $569 per Twitter post and $553 per Instagram story. Men’s basketball players earned an average of $9,508 per Instagram post, $410 per Twitter post and $124 per Instagram story. Among Ohio State’s women’s sports, gymnastics had athletes earning the most compensation— $31,767 through 35 deals.

The figures were first reported by ElevenWarriors.com.

SEC’s revenue shows significant increase

The SEC was one sports entity that actually grew more financially robust during the second year of the pandemic, which began to impact schools and leagues in March 2020.

College sports’ most powerful conference increased its annual revenue by $105 million during the year that ended Aug. 31, 2021, according to the league’s federal tax records. Total revenue was just over $833 million. The amount distributed to each member school averaged about $54.6 million, an increase of a little more than $9 million. That does not include the $23 million the league distributed to each school to address pandemic-related shortfalls.

Nearly all the revenue increase came in TV and radio rights fees, USA Today noted, which improved from $497 million in 2020 to $588 million in 2021.

ESPN+ keeps getting stronger

With a strong amount of new content exclusive to the streaming platform, the ESPN+ audience continues to grow. ESPN+ now has 21.3 million subscribers, a significant increase from the 12.1 million it had in the first quarter of 2021.