‘Horns With Heart’

At Texas, the nonprofit Horns With Heart raised eyebrows when it announced just before the December football national signing day that it would offer all Longhorns scholarship offensive linemen $50,000 NIL deals to support charities. A few days later, Texas signed one of the top recruiting classes in the country, with a bumper crop of blue-chip offensive linemen.

Horns With Heart co-founder Rob Blair was unconcerned by the warning from the NCAA, saying the nonprofit has played by the rules since it launched.

“We realized at the beginning of the NIL era that this Wild West attitude would eventually lead us to a moment like this. That is why we set out to be different,” Blair said in an email. “We have gone above and beyond to ensure we not only follow the letter of the law of NIL regulation, but we feel we also represent the spirit of the NIL laws as they were originally written.”

Aside from NCAA enforcement staff, university compliance directors — long the watchdogs over athletes and their eligibility — are trying to navigate a shifting landscape with murky rules.

Lyla Clerry, Iowa’s senior associate athletics director for compliance, welcomed the NCAA’s renewed guidance on athlete endorsement contracts if it means they will be enforced.

“Honestly, I don’t know that I have a lot of faith that I’m going to see that happening,” Clerry said. “You don’t really know, well, what should we be enforcing, because what is the NCAA going to enforce? So we can’t constantly be beating our heads trying to enforce things that nationally aren’t getting enforced.”