The NIL impact of the five-collective merger into Texas One Fund

The Texas athletic department has never lacked in finances or resources. It reported a national-high $223 million in revenue in 2019, the last pre-pandemic fiscal year. It’s also true of the Longhorns’ fan and donor base, which launched five NIL collectives and supports two player-focused, membership-based communities. Last week the five Texas-driven collectives announced a merger as the rebranded Texas One Fund.

The phrase NIL collective is a catch-all term for various organizations that facilitate NIL opportunities. Texas One Fund is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Other schools and their fan bases have experienced a similar dynamic in the NIL landscape with the creation of multiple organizations and clubs that compete for athletes and donors. There’s often overlap among the athletic programs whose athletes they support, too.

Virginia Tech has four collectives.

Nebraska has three collectives and two membership-based communities.

Michigan, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Tennessee each has three collectives and one membership-based community.

However, prior to the merger at Texas, no school’s fans, donors and local business community had more potential NIL-related avenues than the Longhorns, based on the publicly announced collectives and membership-based communities that are tracked in On3’s database.

“I had one person say, ‘You know, I feel like I’m getting hit up by five different organizations every week,'” Texas One Fund’s Nick Shuley said in a phone interview.

Shuley served as the CEO of the Clark Field Collective, which is one of the five organizations that merged, along with Horns With Heart, Occupy Left Field, 40 Pack and the National Championship Golf Foundation.

“To me, that’s tough because how do you know what’s real?” Shuley said of the collectives’ previous arrangement. “How do you know what the right way to do this is?”

Texas One Fund’s ‘biggest win’ is amount spent on lawyers, accountants

To be clear, three of the five Texas-focused collectives that were involved in the merger had a sport-specific focus. Occupy Left Field was focused on baseball, 40 Pack on basketball and National Championship Golf Foundation on golf.

Now, they’re all under one roof.

“I think that’s the biggest win on this thing, I think, is the amount everybody seemed to be spending on whether it was lawyers or accounting or all of these things,” Shuley said. “I think bringing that together, it kind of streamlines that.”

Texas One Fund’s website states, “Donors can direct their funds to the sport of their choice, or have the option of contributing to the general fund to be disseminated amongst all sports. Each sport will have their own advisory boards made up of former athletes, donors, and caring parties.”

Shuley said discussions about the merger started about a month before the announcement. It follows mergers of collectives designed to support athletes at Florida State, TCU and Virginia Tech.

“For me, it was an easy conversation of just trying to get everybody to the table and to everyone’s credit, it was easy to get everyone to say, ‘Hey, we’re all working for the greater good here,'” Shuley said.

Texas’ athletic department has blessed the new collective, too.

“Obviously, the most fortuitous piece of it was the NCAA coming out with the new guidance,” Shuley said. “I think that helped open things up a lot to where a university could actually start participating or working together in a sense.”

After the NCAA released its latest NIL guidance, an athletic department’s promotion of a collective is not only explicitly allowed, but almost required in order to remain competitive in the landscape.

“We are very pleased with the formation of Texas One Fund,” Texas Vice President and Director of Athletics Chris Del Conte said in a statement that was part of Texas One Fund’s press release. “As a 501(c)(3) organization, it provides our fans, donors, and supporters a way to contribute to NIL opportunities for our student-athletes and for our student-athletes to support important community programs.

“We believe this is the best way to bolster NIL initiatives for our student-athletes and support the meaningful interactions they can make in the charitable community.”

An athletic department spokesperson referred On3 to Del Conte’s statement in response to an interview request.

The Twitter account for Texas’ athletic department also promoted the Texas One Fund to more than 262,000 followers.

Support @TexasOneFund and our student-athletes 🤘#HookEm

— Texas Longhorns (@TexasLonghorns) November 10, 2022

At Texas One Fund, ‘we don’t share numbers yet’

When Clark Field Collective launched last December, it announced it received a $10-million pledge “with the ultimate goal of having the largest dedicated fund in the country for college athletes.”

However, Texas One Fund is keeping its finances close to the vest in its early stages.

“I think there’s a time for that but we won’t share numbers yet,” Shuley said. “I think you’ll start to see more of that in the future. It’s an impressive number of what’s already happened and what’s going to happen, I think, is the best way to say it…

“You know it, the second that somebody throws out a number, everybody picks it up and it goes crazy everywhere and I think we wanted to focus on getting it right and doing this the right way.”

Shuley pointed to Texas’ success in the Capital One Cup to show the interest and opportunities for fans to support athletes across athletic programs. The Longhorns won the 2021-22 Capital One Women’s Cup and they finished second in the Men’s Cup. The Cups are awarded to schools for their success across athletic programs.

“We already had good standing. We already have people who care about those programs,” Shuley said. “I think that’s why the One Fund is such a cool thing that you can still care for the programs you care about the most, but also what it’ll do is benefit everyone across the board. That’s why we have the general fund piece.”

Shuley said when he grew up in Austin, there were only a few opportunities per year for fans to meet members of the football or men’s basketball teams.

Now, it’s “nonstop.”

“We’re putting these kids out in the community nonstop,” Shuley said. “They’re getting a chance to actually meet the fans, talk to them and create those relationships all while doing it for a good cause as well.”