PHOENIX – College sports are changing rapidly, in part because of conference realignment and the transfer portal, but mostly because of the opportunity athletes have to capitalize on their NOTHING – name, image and picture.
Saturday marks the first anniversary of Senate Bill 1296, which allows student-athletes in Arizona to participate in NO activities with impunity. It doesn’t sound like a long time, but in those 12 months, DIM’s territory has expanded greatly.
The NCAA was founded on the concept of “amateurism” when it was organized in 1906. The term was used as a way to keep student-athletes from receiving financial benefits from playing sports for their institutions because they were playing “for the love of the game.”
How have athletes benefited from NIL?
Student-athletes can pay for their names, images and likeness in a multitude of ways. Smaller deals might include joining the local mom-and-pop pizza joint. Read also : Millions of students experience food security. But campus food pantries can make a difference.. Larger opportunities can also be explored, and there are resources to help student-athletes.
Opendorse, launched in 2012, serves as a marketplace for more than 75,000 athletes across collegiate and professional sports. The purpose is to make it easier for brands, sponsors and fans to find athletes and form partnerships.
Almost every athlete from the state of Arizona has a profile on Opendorse, which anticipates that ASU will be one of the more than 75 school-specific markets the company plans to introduce this fall. This would connect prospective DIM partners more easily with athletes at the school of their choice.
Luther Muhammad, a men’s basketball player at ASU, has embraced NOTHING. His Instagram account has almost 72,000 followers, and his Twitter has about 9,000. This wide audience to which he can post and ultimately “advertise” has helped Muhammad leverage and close deals.
“Social media has helped me get NO deals due to the fact that you can put your contact information in your bio (profile) to make it easier for brands to contact you directly,” he says. “After testing it for a whole year, I think it’s great because of the fact that we as student-athletes are able to generate more income for ourselves.”
On social media alone, Muhammad has promoted products ranging from items at Fry’s Food Store to his own clothing line. Muhammad has taken advantage of every opportunity given to him. An athlete’s presence on social media can give athletes more control over their brand.
Sam Weber, Opendorse’s senior director of communications, noted the massive changes brought about by DIM.
“Thirty years ago,” he said, “the most popular athletes were just the athletes who played on Saturdays on ABC, NBC and Fox, right? Now, you see some of the top winning athletes in men’s football or basketball, I think it’s not a stretch to say that some of the winners, if not the ones who highest earning, current women’s basketball players. That is mainly because they are proactive and build very passionate audiences with their social media profiles.”
Opendorse published a report to highlight the first full year of DIM activities that collected data from “over 100,000 deals reported through Opendorse” and included projections they could calculate with that data. The highest NO activity in the report was content posting (34%), followed by “other activities” (17.8%), licensing rights (15.9%) and signatures (15.1%). The range of NO student-athlete compensation is $3,335 to $53,258 per year. The report also noted that brands peaked in NO spending during the college football postseason. Supporters and donors also began to gradually increase in DIM participation with the development of the market and the birth of cooperatives.
“It’s a very good representation of what’s going on in the market,” Weber said. “More deals have been made or revealed through Opendorse than any other technology. There’s still, you know, thousands of personal or one-to-one deals going on, so it’s not a 100% complete picture.”
Arizona Sun State Devils Guard Luther Muhammad is one of many collegiate athletes who capitalize on large social media followings through DIM deals. (Photo by Kevin Abele/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
The emergence of NIL collectives
DIM co-ops have grown in popularity over the past few months. School-specific co-ops are pools of money, raised primarily through donors and businesses, that can be given to student-athletes under a blanket NOTHING. On the same subject : Tennessee football money: Four-star WR Cameron Seldon commits to volunteers at CBS Sports HQ. Co-ops are independent of school athletics departments.
For example, any athlete at the University of Arizona could be jointly paid by UArizona in exchange for the athlete’s participation in an activity such as an autograph signing or appearance at a charity event (thereby fulfilling the quid-pro-quo requirement).
However, the UArizona group is not allowed to speak with an athlete until he is registered to attend the school, and the group is prohibited from consulting with coaches or the university about how much money they can give an athlete.
Businesses are the other main pillar of co-ops and can be anything from the local burger joint to vehicle dealerships. Instead of just cash, they can pour their products into the group. Through this, athletes can drive luxury brand cars for one Instagram post showing them behind the wheel.
“We used to prevent a booster from giving a kid a ride home in his car, and now we’re giving a kid a car,” former West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck said. “It’s a very positive time to be a student-athlete, just in terms of your ability to make DIM deals and generate some revenue.”
Although the first reported collaborations for Opendorse appeared in August 2021, there has been a surge since January. The relationship between the one-time transfer rule and co-ops has consumed headlines over the first six months of 2022.
A situation that may have brought these to the forefront of the discussion occurred shortly after former Kansas State basketball player Nigel Pack announced that he was transferring to the University of Miami. Once Pack committed to Miami, attorney John H. Ruiz tweeted the details of the NO deal his company, LifeWallet, made with Pack. Although Ruiz and LifeWallet are not a collection, the act of publicly fortifying the monetary amount caught the attention of the masses.
***BREAKING NEWS*** @LifeWallet is proud to announce that @NijelPack24 has officially committed to UM as a basketball player. Largest LifeWallet deal to date, two years total $800,000.00 at $400,000.00 per year plus car. Congratulations!!! @johnnyruiz4 @alex7ruiz @ddiazon7 pic.twitter.com/SzKHag8qnG
— John H. Ruiz, Attorney at Law (@JohnHRuiz) April 23, 2022
In a new version of the college athletics arms race, collegiates began to form to match the market, now that the price had been set for top-tier college basketball talent.
“Some schools were very aggressive with their collegiates early, or at least the boosters working alongside the universities,” 247Sports publisher Chris Karpman said. “Some universities have established markets where boosters can look after student-athletes, but on the recruiting side, I would say, that’s where there’s a lot of gray area that some of these schools operate within .”
On May 9, the NCAA Board of Directors reiterated that recruiting rules prevent boosters from contacting recruits, including collegiates. A violation would be committed if the groups are in contact with student-athletes. The mission of this publication was to shut down any talk of pay for play.
According to Opendorse, nine of the 12 schools in the Pac-12 have at least one known group. In Power 5 conferences, 92% of schools have at least one group established or in the process of forming.
“(DIM) has changed in a number of different ways,” said Luck, who also served as executive vice president of regulatory affairs for the NCAA from 2014 to 2018. “The horse is out of the barn, way out in the pasture. It’s not coming back to the barn. I think it’s going to take a long time, certainly many years, for the market to have to balance itself out. … this is a brand new market. “
What’s the future of NIL?
The United States is projected to spend $1.14 billion in year two, according to the Opendorse report. This may interest you : Politics should not take precedence over priorities. The company broke down the spending breakdown by region.
Arizona is ranked in the bottom half of states for projected NO compensation, and its region (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming) has an estimated $60.7 million in NO spending. By comparison, that’s nearly a quarter of the highest-prospect region in the southeast (Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina), which is estimated to gross $234.5 million.
“(NO profit) goes hand in hand with the amount of passion people feel for college athletics in the market,” Karpman said. “So it’s not really surprising that you wouldn’t see the South West or the West, in general, being able to be competitive in that regard.”
Besides co-ops, the third component of DIM is fan participation. It has slowly picked up, but the fan-to-student athlete exchange is still very rare in the DIM space. In year two, Weber predicts that will change.
“Fans accounted for less than two percent of all compensation in the first year and really, that’s because the infrastructure isn’t there for them yet – and I emphasize ‘yet,'” Weber said. “That’s going to change a little bit in a big way. Fans need education and need one place to go. They need to know where to go, what they can do, and how much it costs. That hasn’t really existed for them yet.”
This remains a new era in college sports where student-athletes can capitalize on their name, image and likeness, and there is no sign of slowing down. It may be some time until there is some equilibrium in the DIM market. For now, it will remain the wild, wild west of college sports.
That can even expand down to the high school level. This past March, The Athletic reported that the five-star recruit in 2023 could be paid more than $8 million by the end of his junior year in college (around 2026).
On June 7, Karissa Niehoff, executive director and CEO of the Federation of State High School Associations, reiterated that NO developments in college sports affect high school athletes.
Arizona is one of 24 states that “expressly prohibit” high school athletes from participating in DIM activities, according to Opendorse. There are 13 states that have laws that allow NO high school deals. The remaining states are either considering NO laws or reviewing unclear legislation.
Now that the student-athletes are being paid, they can be considered professional athletes. This change may have to force the NCAA to act like a professional sports league when it comes to player acquisition rules.
“One of the things that college athletics hasn’t been subject to is regulations about having a hard cap or a soft cap,” Karpman said. “That leads to more freedom of action where the programs that generate the highest revenue with the best support can grab players more easily. I think it’s likely you’ll see some attempt (by the NCAA) to regulate that in some form with boosters.”
That pillar of college athletics began to crumble when the Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Alston (2021) that student-athletes may receive academic-related compensation. Although the ruling did not directly apply to DIM, it prompted the NCAA to adopt its interim DIM Policy and implement the decision nine days later.
The NO interim policy only allows student-athletes to obtain a “quid-pro-quo” agreement while they are enrolled at an institution and prohibits them from paying on an incentive basis. Money is not allowed to be paid directly from the schools. The regulations do not include the individual restrictions added by state laws.
Now, just one year after DIM went into full effect in Arizona, there’s no better time to reflect on the past 365 days and look forward to what the future may hold.
