Column: Penn State football pleas show critical push for NIL support

The final full week in March has been monumental for Penn State football and the ever-evolving NIL landscape.

With the unveiling of the Success With Honor NIL collective on Wednesday, backed by powerful former board of trustees chair Ira Lubert, with a who’s who of Nittany Lions for an advisory panel, the most organized NIL outfit supporting Penn State athletics is now off the ground. Presenting an opportunity to exponentially expand the pool of donors toward NIL, the group promises to “work tirelessly to ensure that every current and future Nittany Lion has the opportunity to maximize the power of their name, image and likeness during their time in State College.”

Penn State football is counting on it.

Two senior support staff members joined host Steve Jones on the Penn State’s coaches show Thursday night to say so. And through their comments, they demonstrated just how critical the program believes NIL will be to its immediate future.

“This is going to differentiate programs going forward,” said Andy Frank, Penn State’s Director of Player Personnel. “There will be obviously a lot of other factors that go into it, but this is a major key to success. 

“There are people that have jumped in already for us, and we need a whole lot more. It’s the future, and it’s the present of college football and college athletics as a whole. I think that where we go from here is going to determine our course.”

Penn State’s sounds NIL warning

In Frank and Dann Kabala, the program’s Director of Football Player Relations, no closer vantage point exists.

Point men for Penn State’s recruiting efforts, the lifeblood of college football and the foundational element toward building success, NIL is no longer a hypothetical. Rather, the prospect of putting off NIL initiatives as a problem to be solved for future recruiting cycles, Frank clarified the immediacy of the subject.

“As we get going in this and as people across the country are being as aggressive as they possibly can, it’s starting to come up earlier and earlier in the process (in recruiting),” Frank said. “And there’s going to be a day here very, very soon where it’s going to be our first conversation in some cases.

“The schools that are competing in the playoffs… they don’t have a class that slips even a little bit. Every class that they sign is a top tier class, and we need to do the same thing. It’s still about everything. It’s about the education, it’s about the passion that people have for this place, it’s how great a college town it is… it’s the professors who care about them as individuals. But it’s also about name, image, and likeness, and it’s also about money. Now that’s the reality that we’re in.”

Kabala predicted the Class of 2022 to be the final cycle that “wasn’t going to be significantly impacted by NIL.”

Embracing the opportunity

The alarm sounded on the show by Penn State’s personnel was not the only tone to emerge on NIL, though.

Reflecting on a history of strong values within the Penn State fan base, and its resistance to competing outside the rules, the appearance also acted as a reframing of the conversation. Urging fans to see NIL as an opportunity for Penn State student-athletes and the program as a whole, broad acceptance will hinge on reluctance evolving into an embrace.

“You can look at it from an old school perspective and say, ‘Hey, I don’t know if I like this.’ The reality is, we didn’t like it because of the negative connotations to it. Now, those aren’t there, and I think that it can be a great thing,” Frank said. “For all of us as we get older, we don’t want to be that old guy that says, ‘Back in the day, it was better.’ This is an opportunity for a bright future, and those that embrace change are always the people that are most successful moving forward in any aspect of life.

“(It’s) something that we need to embrace, and that’s okay. We’ve got the power of over 740,000 living alumni. And a huge percentage of those people care deeply about this place. If we can get all those people pulling the rope in the same direction, this is an opportunity for us. We just need to convince everybody that this is the right way forward for us. And I think that’s a huge piece of this.”

Penn State’s next steps

With the Success With Honor Collective announcing Thursday morning more than $50,000 in annual subscription revenue in its first 24 hours of operation, that process has started.

Linking the success of Penn State football to that of other endeavors, NIL is likely to have a broad impact.

“You can’t spell Nittany Lion without NIL. And you can’t spell alumni without NIL,” Kabala said. “This is critical to the success of the football team, the success of athletic department, the success of the community. This is the era we’re living in and it’s exciting. We need to look at it as an exciting opportunity to be a leader in the space.”