The Hottest Recruiting Pitch in College Sports: We Can Help You Cash In
With a new era of compensation for college athletes about to begin, universities like Nebraska are touting their ability to help students monetize their image under new laws.
By
Laine Higgins
June 24, 2021 8:00 am ET
LINCOLN, Neb.—Through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Nebraska athletic director Bill Moos’s office in Memorial Stadium, you can hear heavy machinery ripping up a sidewalk to make room for a new $155 million indoor training facility. But that’s not the biggest change to campus Moos will oversee this year.
The university is angling hard to be at the front of the pack in persuading recruits it can help them take advantage of a new era of compensation for college athletes that is dawning.
Nebraska will be among the first states to permit college athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness. The state’s law does not take effect until July 1, 2023, but allows universities to give their athletes the right to monetize their names before then, at the school’s discretion.
Moos is using his discretion to start immediately. Laws in at least six states will take effect on July 1 that allow athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness, beginning a new era of compensation for college athletes.
The state moves come just after a landmark Supreme Court decision this week in which justices unanimously ruled that the NCAA unlawfully limited schools from competing for player talent by offering better benefits, to the detriment of college athletes.
Nebraska doesn’t want to be late to the party. “When the guns fire to start the race, we’ll be on the blocks,” Moos said last week.
Nebraska athletic director Bill Moos, right, presents an artists rendering of a new planned $155 million football training facility in 2019.
PHOTO: NATI HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESSMoos said that Nebraska wanted to be a first mover because allowing athletes to sign endorsement deals or start their own businesses is a clear advantage on the recruiting trail. Innovation, he said, is part of the Huskers ethos: Nebraska was one of the first universities to embrace weightlifting as part of its football program in the 1970s and pioneered life skills courses for all athletes in the late 1980s.
It was a natural step to launch “#NILbraska,” as the university is calling it: a three-pronged plan that aims to educate Nebraska’s 650-some athletes enrolled at the Lincoln campus on how to maximize the opportunities afforded them once they own their rights to their name, image and likeness. Unlike many of the other NIL-related partnerships cropping up across the country, #NILbraska will pull resources from several existing academic departments on campus and is designed to benefit all undergraduates, not just athletes.
The first and most central part of Nebraska’s NIL offerings is the “Ready Now” partnership it struck in March 2020 with Opendorse, a platform that facilitates publishing social media content that was founded by Huskers football alums that helps connect athletes with brands interested in making deals.
“That was to help educate and assess all of the social media accounts for our 650 student athletes,” said senior deputy athletic director Garrett Klassy.
A little more than a year into the partnership, Nebraska says it has turned into a recruiting tool. Klassy said the athletic department has dossiers for its current athletes showing how their social-media followings grew from the time they were in high school through their enrollment at Nebraska. It can use this data, as well as Opendorse’s formula for determining the market value of individual athletes based on social following, to show recruits “how much more money that means if you partner with a company that you’re going to start supporting as an influencer” after acquiring a bump in followers after becoming a Nebraska athlete.
This increase in followers is often significant because, unlike universities in major metropolitan areas or in nearly every other state in the Big Ten Conference, “We’re the only show in the state,” said Moos.
“There are tons of families whose vacation budget is seven Saturdays in Lincoln. They will drive [six hours] from Scottsbluff, and have been for generations,” he said.
A general view of Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Neb..
PHOTO: NATI HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESSDuring the 2019-20 academic year, the Cornhuskers sold out every football and men’s basketball game despite winning a combined 12 contests. In some ways, the fervor of the Nebraska fan base acts as a hedge against those teams’ downward-trending win-loss records.
“If our student athletes really use their entrepreneurial skills and start their own business here, this fan base is going to support them for the rest of their life,” said Klassy.
Lexi Sun, a fifth-year senior on the volleyball team, has experienced this first-hand. Since transferring from Texas in 2017, she has amassed more than 75,300 followers on Instagram, the bulk of which she says are fans of Nebraska’s nationally ranked volleyball team.
When Nebraska first passed its NIL law, she thought she would just miss being able to cash in. Then the pandemic hit, the NCAA granted all athletes an extra year of eligibility and she decided to return for a fifth year to get a master’s degree in advertising and public relations.
“When it comes to NIL, I was able to see the opportunities here at Nebraska—the platform we have on the volleyball team here is literally like no other place,” she said, noting that her team has the biggest social media following in the NCAA with 129,200 Twitter followers and 120,000 more on Instagram.
This month she added an email address to her Instagram bio to solicit “business inquiries.” To her surprise, several local businesses have already reached out.
Accelerate, the second and most novel part of the Cornhuskers’ name, image and likeness offerings, will launch this fall. Dreamed up by Klassy and College of Business “executive in residence” Joe Petsick, it aims to create “pop-up” single-credit classes that will arm athletes with entrepreneurial skills.
The College of Journalism and Mass Communications will offer a class on content creation in which athletes looking to start podcasts might rent out recording equipment. Athletes can learn how to create limited liability corporations in the College of Law and take aptitude tests to better understand their strengths as entrepreneurs through the College of Business’s Clifton Strengths Institute.
“NIL will become the new facilities war in college football in terms of what you’re offering,” Petsick said. “We’re going to leverage the incredible assets and courses already being taught and adjust them for a different stakeholder.”
Nebraska will also work elements of brand building, networking and financial literacy into its existing life skills program, which has been available to athletes since 1987.
For all the preparation that Nebraska has done, questions remain about just how much universities will be able to advise athletes in their money-making ventures. Leaders at Nebraska favor federal legislation to help clarify discrepancies, but that won’t come before laws in some states take effect on July 1.
NCAA President Mark Emmert promised to have new rules by then, but the association has yet to ratify new bylaws. The NCAA has indicated that universities won’t be permitted to directly broker deals on behalf of their athletes, but they can arm athletes with the tools to do so themselves. It remains unclear how much advice schools can provide on matters like selecting an agent or filing taxes.
“If we’re unable to help these student athletes vet and make sure they’re going with a reputable marketing agent, that’s a huge concern,” said Klassy.
Nebraska athletic director Bill Moos said that Nebraska wanted to be a first mover because allowing athletes to sign endorsement deals or start their own businesses is a clear advantage on the recruiting trail.
PHOTO: STEVEN BRANSCOMBE/GETTY IMAGESOne way Nebraska plans to initially circumvent this uncertainty is by pairing athletes with “NIL advisers”—older students versed in financial literacy, marketing and other areas that will serve in a similar capacity to academic tutors. Petsick hopes that this, in turn, will give non-athletic students pursuing careers in the sports industry as agents, advertisers or lawyers relevant experience as undergraduates.
This workaround will likely outlast the initial uncertainty governing NIL rules. And Moos isn’t waiting for every question to be cleared up before launch.
“Some form of this was going to occur and we are going to be prepared,” he said. “We’ll be doing what we’re permitted to do through whichever avenue. And we’ll do it better than anybody.”
