Title-winning coach, former AD on NIL: ‘I mean, what a mess right now’

Phil Fulmer won a national championship in 1998 during his successful 17-year tenure as Tennessee’s football coach. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2012. And most recently he served as the university’s athletic director.

Now he’s pivoting once again. Fulmer, 71, has joined the software startup Athlete Licensing Company as a founding advisory board member and seed capital investor. ALC is a tech-enabled, brand management company that seeks to be at the forefront of providing NIL compliance and support. Its custom-built software aims to empower athletes, agents, universities, collectives, donors and sponsors to manage NIL rights. 

On3 caught up to Fulmer on Thursday, one day after the first football signing day of the NIL era, for a wide-ranging discussion about his early impressions of NIL, the enforcement void, the new-age bidding war landscape and, of course, how Peyton Manning would have monetized his brand had he been allowed to in the 1990s.

The interview has been slightly edited for clarity and context.

Q: What is the aim of ALC and what will your role entail?

Fulmer: Well, my role basically is in an advisory capacity and using my experience as a football coach, and three years as an athletic director, just working with a team that we’ve developed. I’m pretty excited about it because the software that we’re using has been proven in the music industry for 40 years or so. And basically what we are is back-office accounting, and this is a big word in this whole conversation — compliance for all the stakeholders. Number one, the athletes. We’re here to help them monetize their opportunities, but also for the collectives or universities or from a compliance NCAA standpoint, creating transparency so that everyone can operate on simpler rules and standards but everybody knows what each other’s doing. It is a crazy time, and as an older coach, I guess now a retired coach, you look at what it was and what it is now, it has absolutely changed. Whether it’s the coaching world or the administrative world, this NIL thing has created chaos. And we’re here to try to put some reasonableness into the chaos.

Q: How many schools do you work with?

Fulmer: We’re just getting started. We’ve got, gosh, I guess six or eight larger groups right now that we are working with and that’s growing daily. And I expect that it will continue as people find out more about us. We can work with any level. We could work with conferences, with universities, certainly with donors and collectives. But mainly we want to work on behalf of the athlete so that he or she has a chance to monetize their opportunities.

Q: The NIL era is almost six months old. What’s been your biggest surprise? What have you found most striking?

Fulmer: The most striking to me is that the NCAA didn’t get in front of this. I mean, what a mess right now. What a mess right now. You’ve got already with this recruiting class, and football and other sports as well, you’ve got issues being raised about the exact thing that they did not want to happen, and that’s kids go to schools only because of NIL. The best deal going. It was absolutely bound to happen, and that’s why the transparency and compliance monitoring is so important.

An NIL arms race?

Q: You’ve seen a lot in recruiting. What was your reaction to how the Travis Hunter drama played out on signing day?

Fulmer: It’s hard for me to comment because I don’t know the kid. The circumstances around it, there might be a lot more to it. But how are you surprised that one school versus another gives a kid a better NIL deal and they take it? That’s the business world, right? Like it or not, we’ve taken it from some semblance of amateurism that most people were following to wide open now. But it’s the law. You can sit around and not like it or do something about it. With the group that ALC is putting together, let’s just help the chaos. And I’m sure there’s going to be tons and tons of bumps in the road and conversations about different things. But in the end, if you can create transparency, and you can create a compliant environment, then you’ve got a much better product, I think.

Q: What was your reaction to the news that Texas boosters will pool funds to create an NIL deal for every offensive lineman, allowing each to receive a $50,000 annual stipend?

Fulmer: That’s not illegal under these circumstances. And our effort is to make that transparent. If Texas can do it, everybody can do it. Or not, depending on the governing body, whether it ends up being the NCAA or another governing body or the federal government. Eventually this will be channeled, in some way, to some kind of governance. 

Q: Do you think it could lead to a new arms race among deep-pocketed boosters of blue blood programs?

Fulmer: It already has.That’s just the natural evolution of it. ALC is able to study all the laws in each state. Well, nobody’s paying much attention to that right now. So you got federal laws, you got IRS issues. You’ve got, eventually, compliance issues. I don’t know that anybody really totally knows everything that everybody’s doing, you know. And so eventually, I do believe that there’ll be some regulation as to how things need to operate. As you know, this all goes back to the Alston case. And it has just evolved faster than then the governing bodies can put rules in place.

Q: Should the NCAA be acting as an enforcement arm in NIL cases?

Fulmer: Well, they are our enforcement arm. I don’t know why they wouldn’t be if they feel like there’s been violations. How do you define what is a violation? Right? I don’t know that anybody knows the answer to that right now. And, again, I go back to transparency, you know, monthly statements. Everybody seeing what everybody’s doing. And that takes some significant effort in software, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Q: Determining whether a NIL deal serves as a recruiting inducement could boil down to intent — what was the intent? How hard is it to prove that?

Fulmer: I mean, the intent is to get the best players you can get to your school within the rules. So I think it’s more like, what are the rules? That needs to be defined.

A firm set of rules should be forthcoming

Q: Are you in favor of federal NIL legislation?

Fulmer: I have never been in favor of the federal government getting involved in universities’ policies. They do already on the academic side and other ways. But, yes, to answer the question directly. Yes. There needs to be some guidance. Now we’re talking about IRS issues, different state laws that are popping up. We need some compliance as to what can happen. 

Q: What exactly is a mess right now in the NIL space, as you termed it? What were you referencing?

Fulmer: The coaches, the universities have been thrown into this. I sat in meetings three or four years ago as an athletic director following the Alston case, and if we lost you knew it was coming. And you’re dependent on the NCAA, our governing body, to be out in front and fighting the battle they’re supposed to fight. And whatever happened, we came out of that on the short end of the lawsuit, but that just created this chaos because the states are all different in how they view the regulations and what’s real or not. Some trying to gain an advantage, most trying not to be disadvantaged. Now you’ve got what you’ve got. It’s just, as I said, chaos. I can think of another word.

Q: If you were a coach right now, how would you handle NIL?

Fulmer:  It’s not really what you think of the rule. It’s how you’ve managed to rule and the chaos. It wouldn’t make it harder. And you throw in the portal with this. It’s almost professional. Whether we like it or not, it is free agency. 

Q: What’s stopping recruiting from becoming above-the-table bidding wars with NIL deals for top recruits?

Fulmer: Nothing — there is nothing stopping it. It is business right now. You’ve got people with collectives of some sort that are putting together dollars to recruit. That’s the rule now. That’s the law right now. You can do that right now.

Q: For decades, some rogue coaches and boosters provided under-the-table inducements to land top recruits. Does the landscape now almost give fans a peek behind the curtain at deals to land recruits — but now it’s more legitimate?

Fulmer: Wasn’t very many of those schools, but there were some, yeah. And from that sense, it levels the playing field. But again, and this is important, you’re only talking about a few kids, a few difference-makers, which was always the case. I can’t say that it’s a bad thing, you know, that a second-team offensive guard can do an autograph session in his hometown and get $1,000 for it or something. That’s really where the law comes from. It’s just that people take advantage. Eventually there will be some compliance put to the test here, and we will come out of it with some rules.

‘You want it to be the wild, wild west?’

Q: A few months ago, we published our rankings of which former players would have been most marketable while in college had NIL been allowed. Peyton Manning ranked high on that list. How marketable would he have been?

Fulmer: You’re about the third person to ask me that. It would have been incredible for him. Peyton would have, and some of the kids are, shared it with the team, shared it with the university. I don’t think there’s any question Peyton would have done that. Some of these kids will do that. That’s another area that I’m a little bit concerned — people (boosters) putting money into these collectives and then the universities all of the sudden aren’t getting those dollars for facilities or scholarship dollars. That’s still probably the minority versus the majority. But it could affect it. 

Q: How important is it for coaches now to not only understand NIL but also embrace it?

Fulmer: It is crucial that you do that. It is just part of the landscape now. And I’m just telling you, if I were in this world now, I would want exactly what we do at ALC. And that’s something that creates the transparency and the compliance part of it and sees that the dollars are tracked. I’d be concerned about a young man being paid for something he absolutely does, or marketed a certain way or branded a certain way, or whatever unique way that people can come up with to pay them, but all of a sudden, he’s got issues with maybe a third party that didn’t get paid, maybe a vendor that didn’t get paid. First of all, he’s got issues with the government, that they didn’t pay their taxes like they’re supposed to. So that’s what ALC is centered around — helping them monetize their opportunities, but at the same time making sure that we’re working in compliance and with all parties.

Q: Some in the NIL space say a certain deal may be a recruiting inducement, but so what? Who is going to enforce the rules?

Fulmer: You are right. That is the way it is. And there has to be some governing body that inserts itself. It might come from the conferences, I guess; it could come from the NCAA. That hasn’t worked. And it certainly looks like it could come from the federal government. A body of the federal government that feels like guys can’t get on the same page and it’s not working — how can we help fix it?

Q: What’s the next NIL phase coming?

Fulmer: I still think it’s education of parents, agents, third parties, collectives, obviously universities, fans. Where do you want it to be? You want it to be the wild, wild west? Or do you want it to be where the young person involved can have the ability to earn dollars, which is the intent of the whole thing, that are reasonable and practical but not inducements. And everybody knows what everybody else is doing. I don’t know how long it will take to get that done or if it will be done, but that is what our intent at ALC is. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. It’s really a new dynamic. I’ve been through a lot of different changes in my years of player and coach and administrator. Scholarship numbers and the student-athlete fund was brand new to me when I got to be an athletic director. You could pay their way home and just monies I wasn’t accustomed to. This is a whole other level of that. The consequences? Some will be good, I suppose. But I just think that there are some significant consequences that are not going to be good for the game or universities coming out of this.