There is no subtlety: The age of NIL bidding wars has arrived

The timeless practice of rogue boosters, coaches and agents trying to entice some of the nation’s top football prospects with old-fashioned under-the-table, money-funneling schemes is dead.

In its place, as Wednesday’s start of the early signing period spotlighted, is a new landscape in which lucrative NIL deals can be used in above-the-table bidding wars. And one national championship-winning coach says there is nothing stopping this high-speed train.

“Nothing — there is nothing stopping it,” Phil Fulmer, the College Football Hall of Fame coach who led Tennessee to the BCS national title in 1998, told On3 on Thursday. “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.”

Fulmer, who served most recently as athletic director at Tennessee, 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. 

A wide-ranging NIL-focused discussion with Fulmer came one day after the nation’s top recruit, cornerback Travis Hunter of Suwanee (Ga.) Collins Hill, shockingly flipped from Florida State to Jackson State. The recruiting coup by Jackson State coach Deion Sanders occurred amid whispers about a potential seven-figure NIL deal, though no deal has been announced.

When asked specifically about the significance of Hunter’s flip, Fulmer said, “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.”

NIL will further divide haves and have-nots

While the nation’s top player choosing to attend an HBCU is a watershed moment, Athliance CEO Peter Schoenthal — whose company aims to educate and protect universities and athletes from challenges surrounding NIL — said it’s not indicative of a broader trend at play. With high-stakes recruiting battles potentially morphing into NIL bidding wars, he said, it will only create a larger divide between the haves and the have-nots, widening the gap between Power 5 schools and everyone else. 

“It is becoming a bidding war,” Schoenthal told On3. “Everyone that wants to make jokes about, ‘Oh, there was bidding before.’ Sure. But it wasn’t as widespread as it is now. It wasn’t pertaining to as many prospects as it is now. It’s just getting chaotic because how do you regulate the space where nobody thinks there is regulation and nobody has shown actual regulations?”

Amid debate over what exactly constitutes an impermissible NIL recruiting inducement and doubt about whether any agency even has the will to punish those who run afoul, mayhem reigns. 

After showing no appetite for operating as an enforcement arm in NIL activity, NCAA president Mark Emmert last week said the governing body has opened investigations into “a number” of NIL deals. Then came Sportico’s report that the NCAA is probing group NIL deals at BYU and Miami. And Thursday, less than 24 hours after Florida State lost its prized prospect (a coincidence, of course), Florida state representative Chip LaMarca filed a bill to amend the state’s NIL law, making it easier for its schools to facilitate deals for their athletes. 

“What a mess right now,” Fulmer said. “Already with this recruiting class, and in football and other sports, you’ve got issues being raised about the exact thing they did not want to happen — kids going to schools only because of NIL. The best deal going. It was absolutely bound to happen, which is why transparency and compliance monitoring are so important.”

Over its first nearly six months of existence, NIL has taken on many forms, from the soccer player earning a few hundred dollars promoting the local taco spot on social media to deep-pocketed boosters uniting to give each player in a position group a five-figure annual stipend … and everything in between. What Wednesday day did was cast a bright spotlight on some of the perceived excesses of the NIL era. And according to Schoenthal, no one was happier to see it unfold that way than the NCAA.

“I truly believe that the NCAA could not have been more excited for how [Wednesday] played out,” Schoenthal told On3, “because the way it was perceived was, ‘This is chaos. This is crazy. This is a bidding war. This is not college athletics. And while we’re all in favor of NIL, this is too much.’ And so the NCAA taking a step back and letting the space become chaos, they now get to say, ‘See, this is what we warned you all about.’ ”

And as Fulmer said, like it or not, there’s nothing stopping it.