After admitted slow start to NIL, Penn State now has three collectives

Ohio State football coach Ryan Day‘s offseason comment to members of the Columbus, Ohio, business community that his players needed $13 million in NIL compensation for the Buckeyes to keep their roster intact reverberated throughout the conference, but perhaps especially at Penn State.

“If we want to compete with the schools not only in our conference but also nationally, then we must be willing to do similar things,” Penn State coach James Franklin said at Big Ten Football Media Days, when On3 asked for his reaction to Day’s comment. “You can’t have it both ways. The commitment must match the expectations and vice versa.”

Since the Big Ten reorganized its divisions from the Leaders and Legends to East and West, Ohio State is 7-1 against Penn State, including back-to-back one-point wins and four total victories by single digits. The one win for the Nittany Lions in that span — 24-21 in State College in 2016 — came in the year they won the Big Ten Championship Game but it was the Buckeyes that qualified for the College Football Playoff.

“Here’s my assessment: I think we’re behind, just candidly,” Penn State Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Dr. Pat Kraft told Blue White Illustrated in early July, regarding the school’s NIL infrastructure. “But I will tell you this, we’ll have it fixed in three to four weeks.”

Can you have too much of a good thing?

In this case, it’s donors and organizations that are motivated to support a school’s athletes through NIL. Penn State’s administration, athletes and fans might be in the process of finding out, or they will soon.

Penn State now has three collectives

Penn State athletes are now supported by three NIL collectives, two of which are specifically designed to benefit football players.

Last week, the Lions Legacy Club officially launched, branding itself as the first football-specific NIL collective in the school’s ecosystem. The group has launched by former Penn State quarterback Chris Ganter, running back Ki-Jana Carter and linebacker Michael Mauti, with the help of Blueprint Sports, a company that powers NIL collectives.

This week, Nittany Commonwealth, another collective that launched in the spring, will officially rebrand and relaunch its football-first NIL efforts. It also plans to support men’s basketball athletes.

“We definitely want to really be there for the player in the fullness of their life to make them better when they’re done,” Nittany Commonwealth founder and president Michael Krentzman recently told On3. “By the way, again, I’m under no illusions that the dollars don’t matter. They do. I know it. We’re trying to take a really holistic approach.

“Our biggest aim is we want to have a $10 million war chest built quickly. Five to 10 [million dollars], six to 10 is what we really want.”

Meanwhile, Success With Honor, a collective powered by the company Student Athlete NIL (SANIL), supports Penn State athletes across all of the school’s athletic programs and it’s already entrenched in the community. Success With Honor recently announced a partnership with the Chamber of Business and Industry of Centre County to help connect Penn State athletes to local businesses.

Success With Honor has agreements with more than 150 Penn State athletes across 22 different athletic programs. If you’re looking for what is likely the Penn State administration’s preferred collective — more on this idea later — all indications are that this is it.

“What I would say is that it’s all gonna sort itself out,” Krentzman said.

Schools often have a preferred NIL collective

The creation of multiple collectives, school-specific marketing agencies or NIL fan clubs to support athletes at a single school has caused pushback at multiple schools, such as USC and BYU.

In the words of former Georgia running back Keith Marshall, who’s now a co-CEO of the Web3 platform The Players’ Lounge: “Typically, I think the universities have one that’s kind of like, ‘OK, that’s the major [collective].’ Everybody understands that they don’t work with the athletic department but they’re in cahoots a little bit.”

Or listen to former Virginia Tech football player Brenden Hill, who’s a founding partner of Triumph NIL, a marketing agency that helps Virginia Tech athletes and that went through a merger over the summer.

“We’ve heard very early on,” Hill previously told On3, “from different people in the space who have had to deal with ‘collectives’ across the country that the best to do it — the best universities or programs that are well-positioned — have one group that they lean on primarily.”

‘We made every best effort to consolidate’ at Penn State

Krentzman said there were previous discussions between the soon-to-rebrand Nittany Commonwealth and Lions Legacy Club about a potential merger, citing similar benefits as others in the industry.

“The reason that I was attracted to the merger myself was it’s an enormous amount of work to do all this and to have competition, it’s value-destructive,” Krentzman said. “And nip it in the bud and be on the same page at the same time, everybody’s pulling in the same direction.”

However, the first round of discussions didn’t lead to consolidation.

“Mindful of the mission, we made every best effort to consolidate within the marketplace and merge,” Krentzman said. “In the end, it didn’t work out. And I’ll tell you that we parted on good terms and we said, ‘Listen, you know, phone line is always open.'”

Nittany Commonwealth is partnering with the Metaverse innovation and entertainment company ReKTGlobal that Krentzman said is building a “digital twin” of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, as one example of its capabilities. Krentzman said the collective has already provided catastrophic injury insurance for one Penn State football player, with “a lot” of others players who will receive the same.

After the collective rebrands, Krentzman said the organization wants to match players with a career mentor.

‘It’s efficient and smart’ to consolidate

Alignment — institutionally, among boosters or otherwise — is often cited as part of Alabama‘s on-field success during Nick Saban‘s tenure. On the other hand, it’s often reported as being noticeably absent when a high-profile college football program such as Auburn or Texas falls short of expectations.

Despite Kraft, Penn State’s athletic director, publicly saying the school was behind on its NIL efforts when he took over the job, the school might now have first-world NIL problems, with seemingly accomplished, motivated and well-connected individuals fueling competing collectives.

Some of them might even acknowledge the benefits of consolidation. If we’re all the protagonist in our own stories, then we might also be the antagonist in someone else’s. So now it’s up to Penn State’s administration and its supporters to determine whether they co-exist, consolidate or challenge one another.

“We are putting it out there. We want to raise $10 million for this franchise, for this program, this cycle,” Krentzman said. “It’s being addressed right now in an ad-hoc kind of basis here. I think it would be a positive thing to have it be centralized so it’s not competing for the same donors and it’s not marketplace confusion. It’s efficient and smart to have it as a consolidated entity.”