NIL Summit Notebook: Athletes say NIL can impact return to school

ATLANTA – There are current college athletes who still have the benefit of potentially utilizing an extra year of eligibility that the NCAA granted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Veteran college athletes, especially football and basketball players with an uncertain professional future in their sport, might be the most marketable and possess their greatest athletic value while in college.

Name, image and likeness opportunities can impact roster decisions, especially whether a veteran chooses to capitalize on a final year of eligibility.

“I feel like it definitely helps you, like, really question whether to use your COVID year, especially for me, to where you know what you’re going to get, like what your base is,” Michigan State guard Tyson Walker told On3 at the second annual INFLCR NIL Summit. “You try to go professional, it can vary. You don’t know where you’re going to be at. So you know, in college it’s fun. You don’t really get that experience where, like, people genuinely love who you are. It’s good, though. NIL is good, especially having that COVID year. It’s definitely good.”

Walker started his career at Northeastern, where he averaged 18.8 points per game and earned Colonial Athletic Association first-team and Defensive Player of the Year honors before transferring to Michigan State. He averaged a team-high 14.8 points for the Spartans last season.

“Just knowing your price,” Walker said. “After a while, like, you really understand. It has changed drastically with me. Like I didn’t know what I was supposed to do before but now like I have an understanding of it.”

On Saturday night, Michigan State was named the Best Institutional Program at the NIL Awards.

NIL ‘can definitely take over the college world by storm’

North Carolina senior defensive end/outside linebacker Kaimon Rucker had 37 total tackles, seven tackles for loss and 3.5 sacks last season. After the 2023 season, he could choose to pursue a fifth year of college football in 2024.

“I feel like me, personally, I have aspirations to go to the pro level and it’s just like if I have the opportunity to show myself to where I get to be able to be drafted high then of course I’m going to go wherever God calls me to be,” Rucker said. “But I feel like for other people, I feel like this definitely takes a toll, especially for a lot of athletes that are considering going. But the way that NIL is going, how popular it’s getting, how constant it’s growing and whether they come back the next year or not can [dictate] how their NIL evaluations go.

“I feel like that can definitely take over the college world by storm, if it hasn’t done so already. So, I feel like that’s definitely gonna affect people in how they continue with their decisions to continue to go to college, continue to get an education, playing the sport that they came to college for, and I feel like NIL is definitely a huge part of it.”

Athletes communicate, collaborate at NIL Summit

Throughout the NIL Summit, college athletes have had the opportunity to network and learn best practices from each other. For some, that could include asking about the NIL collectives that support their school.

“I would say from a money aspect, not necessarily talk(ing) to the different athletes on that,” Stanford cornerback Terian Williams II told On3. “I’d say more so, especially like yesterday, meeting a lot of athletes I talk to on social media, a lot of the big names. We’re more so talking about the different nonprofits we have going on, different things we’re doing in the community and being able to tap in with their community. Let’s connect, and let’s get in each other’s cities. Let’s try to do something with your nonprofit.”

Rucker described striking a balance between being respectful of the inner workings of the NIL infrastructure at another school while also doing due diligence to compare experiences with other athletes.

“Just a little bit. You don’t want to go too much in detail of how a collective goes for an individual school but you definitely want to be considerate of what they got going on but also you want to be a little curious,” Rucker said. “Because it’s just like NIL. It may be an overarching cloud that we all are under but it works differently in a lot of different places so you definitely want to try to pick the brains of some people.”

Industry executives explain contributions, crux of collectives

The second day of the NIL Summit highlighted both the reliance and potential pitfalls of NIL compensation fueled by donor-driven collectives.

During INFLCR founder and CEO Jim Cavale‘s opening remarks Sunday at the College Football Hall of Fame, he shared that since July 1, 2021 collectives have provided 76% of NIL payments the company has recorded. The data that INFLCR and fellow NIL technology company Opendorse release each provide a large-scale, yet partial window into the NIL landscape.

Nine of INFLCR’s top 10 business vendors, based on their spending, are collectives.

“That’s just something to realize is growing but I really believe that collectives are just a bridge,” Cavale said. “They’re a bridge to help athletes make money and a lot of it is funded by donors but donor money’s gonna run out.”

Jason Belzer, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Student Athlete NIL (SANIL), which hosts the NIL Summit and powers roughly 30 NIL collectives nationally, shared that the top 10 football players in SANIL’s data set who entered the transfer portal this offseason will earn an average of $500,000.

SANIL-backed collectives include Crimson and Cream at Oklahoma, Knights of the Raritan at Rutgers and The Tech Way at Georgia Tech, plus collectives that support athletes at schools such as Bryant, Santa Clara and Utah State.

According to SANIL’s data, starters for football programs in the top half of the Power 5 will earn an average of $45,000 in the 2023-24 school year. Men’s basketball players who compete in the ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-12 or SEC who are among the top three players on their respective rosters will earn an average of $75,000 next school year.

One attendee described two categories of NIL deals as real versus synthetic, depending on the source of the funds and the intention behind them. Saturday night’s NIL Awards highlighted athletes like Elon walk-on lineman Jon Seaton, who has 1.8 million TikTok followers and who was named Male Athlete of the Year, and Innovator of the Year Flau’jae Johnson, who helped LSU win its first women’s basketball national championship while also working as a recording artist.

‘How we got here is a blunt instrument’

Lawmakers in numerous states, such as Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma and Texas, have proposed or passed legislation that could significantly change the NIL landscape, while potentially creating a ripple effect similar to when California legislators passed in 2019 the first state law that protected college athletes’ NIL rights.

The various bills or laws were written with various amendments, such as to prevent the NCAA from opening investigations into NIL activities protected under state law, to allow an independent or nonprofit entity that supports an institution to engage in NIL deals, or to allow high school athletes to sign NIL deals if they commit to or sign a National Letter of Intent with an in-state school.

“We press a lot with this idea that a lot of the rules out there right now don’t feel very good,” Oregon faculty athletics representative Josh Gordon said Sunday during a session titled “Navigating College Athletics’ Legal and Regulatory Environment.” “They feel incomplete, and they feel at times incoherent. They feel like they work counter to the student-athlete experience at times. But where I would remind all of us to stay is this Latin concept of – the attorneys in the room will know – which is lex lata versus lex ferenda. There’s the law as it is and the law as it should be.

“While the rules are in place, we have to figure out how to follow them. And simultaneously, if we don’t like them, we have to figure out all the mechanisms to change them and so looking at both sides of it: being a good compliance person and a good advocate for advancing these rules into ways that actually serve our needs.

“The whole process of how we got here is a blunt instrument and continues to be.”