Utah's Crimson Collective leasing every scholarship football player Ram truck through NIL deal

The Crimson Collective, the NIL collective for Utah athletics, is making history.

The NIL collective is leasing every scholarship football player a 2024 Ram Big Horn 1500 truck, which retails at $61,000 a pop. In total, the deal is estimated to be roughly $6 million in value.

In the short history of NIL, it’s one of the largest to date. Launched just in April, the collective has quickly made up ground in the last few months. Offering each scholarship player a truck is the headway the organization has made.

The announcement comes in conjunction with the collective launching a partnership with For the Win 360 (FTW360), a new streaming app that will be focused on Utah football and branch out to other varsity sports in the next 60 days.

Leases are six months and will be voided if a player transfers or their eligibility expires.

Car deals have become extremely frequent in the last two years and change of the NIL Era. But this is the first time a collective has signed over leases to every scholarship player. Business of College Sports reporter Kristi Dosh confirmed athletes will have to pay taxes on the lease.

“Like all collectives over the country, they’ve been charged with this mission to raise money to create name, image or likeness opportunities for players,” FTW 360 CEO Derek Mattsson told On3. “They were just founded earlier this year, they were a little late to the party. But since then, they’ve just gone gangbusters, they’ve raised $3.5 million dollars in revenue to date to help benefit athletes. They have donors who have graciously donated more money to provide the trucks for all the players.

“My company is basically to kind of putting a storefront on everything they’re doing. So we are a streaming media application. And we’ve built software for them that will basically cover every aspect of University of Utah athletics. So we’re starting with football, but we’ll expand to all teams. Inside the app, we’re going to feature player profiles, game summaries, highlights behind the scenes, stories. They want to basically create a much better way to create awareness of the collective.”

It’s a major statement for Utah football.