Payday arriving for college athletes
The NIL Era is upon us. The starting gun will be fired Thursday, figuratively, setting off the American college athletes’ version of the Oklahoma Land Rush.
Sure to be trampled in the stampede of college athletes seeking to cash in legally on their fame will be tradition, including the old amateur system, and maybe a rule or two, although nobody is sure exactly what the rules are, or will be.
Only one thing is sure: A lot of college athletes are about to start making money from the use of their own name, image and likeness.
Thursday is the day decreed by the NCAA as the start of the new order. The change can be traced back to a California law passed in 2019 (scheduled to take effect in 2023, though it may hit as soon as September), granting the state’s studentathletes the legal right to be paid for their fame.
Other states jumped into the water, passing their own NIL laws, for fear that schools in California and other NILfriendly states would be a bigger draw for all the good athletes. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the athletes a week
ago, and the NCAA was dragged along into the future.
What does that future look like? Well, it’s going to be kind of like spelunking without a flashlight, during an earthquake — everyone will be feeling their way along shaky ground. But some themes are emerging, such as:
In the old days, like last week, corporations seeking athlete endorsers started with athletes leaving college. Now the chase will start the minute a player graduates from high school. The NIL crew will get a lot of help, from their schools, agents and others. From vultures to guardian angels, it will be a mixed bag.
Colleges and universities might not be thrilled about NIL, but most will put on a happy face, because Sourpuss Sam is a lousy recruiter.
Despite fears that all the cashingin would be done by only the biggest stars in the major sports, there are encouraging signs that minor sports and female athletes won’t be left out.
If you’re a high school athlete dreaming of an NIL cashin, and you’re not already frantically building your socialmedia platform, you’d better get off your lazy butt.
We might see a decrease in the number of star basketball and football players leaving college early for the pros, because now college is pro.
“This is an exciting time,” said Cal athletic director Jim Knowlton, in an interview with The Chronicle on Wednesday.
Knowlton did sound excited. Enthusiastic, for sure. He explained that Cal is wellpositioned to benefit from NIL because the university can offer prospective studentathletes highlevel help from its famed schools of business and law. Plus, the nearby potential endorsement goldmine of Silicon Valley is well stocked with Cal alums.
Knowlton’s excitement is a bit at odds with the fact that California’s 2019 Fair Pay for Play Act (authored by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, DBerkeley) was opposed by Cal and Stanford, along with other schools, at least in part because they feared expulsion from the NCAA.
“I don’t know if we opposed it as (much as) we just wanted to be part of it as we developed the ... guardrails,” Knowlton said. “I think we were more, ‘Hey, we want to be in the room . ... We want to look at the longterm impact of it and how can we best support our studentathletes.’ ”
That was then. Now, any school not fired with enthusiasm for NIL, at least publicly, risks being left in the dust.
The big college stars will cash in big, but ...
“Everyone benefits, because this goes well beyond the usual suspects,” said Jake Duhaime of Six Star Pro Nutrition, a national supplement company that is taking an aggressive approach to NIL. “I think female athletes will benefit tremendously, because of the social (media) component.
“A lot of female athletes have built really great social followings, and they’re very, very familiar with the platforms. (UConn basketball star) Paige Bueckers has 800,000 Instagram followers. She’s tied to the New York market, so the brands she’s going to have the opportunity to work with may make her the highestpaid athlete in college sports, male or female.”
Women athletes “may take a swing at that (malefemale) pay gap, because social media has changed everything. The digital age of Gen Z and how to reach people has changed everything . ... Now athletes are coming onto campus and they’ve been covered since they were 16, via Rivals and recruiting sites, and it’s completely changed the dynamic. They come with an audience in hand.”
Duhaime pointed out that athletes like swimmers Missy Franklin and Katie Ledecky could have benefited from NIL. Franklin accepted a scholarship at Cal as a superstar in 2012, but she ultimately turned pro. Ledecky chose to stay at Stanford and graduate, forfeiting her chance (until now) to make millions off her Olympics fame. Now an athlete doesn’t have to choose between education and money.
And remember last year’s NCAA women’s basketball Final Four, when a tweet from a Stanford staffer went viral showing the difference between the women’s weight room and the men’s?
“That doesn’t happen now,” Duhaime said. “They were defenseless because they couldn’t (accept equipment donated by a corporation). Now they would have 17 brands sending them stuff at their hotel.”
Duhaime said many athletes in minor sports will benefit from what he calls a microathlete strategy. Six Star has worked with superstars like J.J. Watt, Russell Westbrook and Giancarlo Stanton, but the company is starting to think smaller.
“We may find more value with a volleyball player at University X, versus a professional baseball player in MLB,” Duhaime said. “There’s a lot more than can be done in terms of targeting.”
NIL won’t put an end to the oneanddone college basketball stars, or the gridders departing early for the NFL. But it might have some impact.
A basketball star not projected as a firstround draft pick, for example, might hang around campus another year or two rather than take a gamble on a nonguaranteed NBA contract or an overseas gig, if he’s making $100,000 or so.
Take another year or two to grow and develop as a player, enjoy college life, maybe even get some education.
Every college and university is scrambling to draft an NIL policy, which must conform to NCAA policy, any applicable state laws, and eventually with any federally enacted rules and laws.
Cal began formulating its NIL policy two months ago, with input from staff, faculty, athletes and former athletes. The smart schools are jumping a step beyond that.
“We’ve got a contract with an outside third party,” Cal AD Knowlton said, “and we’ll be making a big announcement this week or next about the partnership, the program, and all the things we’ve got in place to support our studentathletes.”
The agency “will give us the ability to help studentathletes with an educational platform, it’ll help them register the deals they get into, it’ll help them with taxes and financial literacy.”
An army of agents is ready to pounce.
“We’ve been targeting July 1 for a while,” Duhaime said. “Every agency out there that’s used to signing college football players and college basketball players for their draft has begun preparations (to start signing college athletes). I would say that every bigtime sports agency has had this date circled on their calendar for the last two months.”
Corporations are elbowing under the boards. Six Star is positioning itself as a champion of students’ NIL rights. Apex Ammunition, a small business in Columbus, Miss., hopes to land a studentathletehunter or two to give the company campus exposure. 3Kings Grooming, a Blackowned online retailer in Cincinnati, has NIL plans for recruiting studentathletes at HBCU schools, to enhance the company brand and to support HBCU athletics.
Duhaime could have been speaking for a million athletes and a thousand endorsees when he said, “We’re excited for the winds to change in college sports.”