Hendon Hooker and Cedric Tillman get out of a sumptuous Mercedes-Benz shuttle, guarded by an adapted security service and followed by their entourage. They waltz through Times Square and look up at a towering screen that stands at this epicenter of Manhattan.
On one of the most visible jumbotrons in the world, Hooker and Tillman are in the spotlight, at least for a few minutes. Their names, images and likenesses are scrawled on the giant screen that hovers above Nasdaq headquarters in a fitting snapshot of the new era of college sports.
Tennessee football players – Hooker, a senior quarterback, and Tillman, the Vols’ top wide receiver – are whisked around town for meetings with brands, future partners and stock exchange executives, arranged and paid for by the Spyre Sports Group, a marketing agency that represents players. Spyre’s agents paraded players around the Big Apple like a pair of NFL stars or Hollywood celebrities. Before leaving town, they toured the Shake Shack headquarters, met with burger joint CEO Randy Garutti and other executives, and ate some off-menu items that the company’s executive chef cooked in front of them.
Brianna Paciorka/News Sentinel/USA TODAY Network
“A year ago, Tennessee is on probation if we do these things,” says Will Watkins, who oversees athlete and brand marketing at Spyre.
Watkins isn’t wrong. The visit to New York came just three days before the NCAA filed recruiting violation allegations against the former Tennessee coaching staff for providing meals, transportation and money to rookies – the same benefits UT athletes now receive through Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) companies. . Although a rookie and a current athlete are very different in the eyes of the NCAA, the juxtaposition of the two is further evidence of the particular era in which college sport finds itself, caught between amateurism and professionalism.
Using a fund generated by donations from Tennessee boosters and fans, Spyre paid the bill for the players’ two-day trip to Manhattan. It’s a grand example of a collection of fans and boosters, a “collective”, paying athletes through NIL. Donor-led collectives are pushing the sport toward a more professionalized model, blurring the lines between endorsement deals and employment contracts.
Spyre also runs an offshoot, the Volunteer Club, considered one of the largest and most ambitious collectives in the country. The club, which has more than 1,000 members, handed out about $4 million to 130 Tennessee athletes last season, with most coming since January. Spyre’s goal is to raise $25 million, and officials believe it’s doable.
It’s a well-oiled NIL machine, run by a pair of savvy marketers with swelling desks. Spyre is moving to a larger facility in Knoxville after a recent staff expansion. Within months, the company was about half the size of the fundraising arm of the Tennessee Athletic Department.
And they want to set the record straight.
“I think there’s a narrative there and it’s been driven by one side,” says James Clawson, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “I want to change the narrative about collectives.”
But many believe the collectives are exploiting a loophole, using a concept that was not NIL’s intention. College sports industry executives have questioned the collectives’ motives and tactics, in many ways demonizing them for implementing a fee-for-service system and handing out salaries to college athletes.
“They separate professional football [those who have a collective] from amateur football [those who don’t]”, explains David Cutcliffe, the former coach of Duke and Ole Miss who now works for the SEC. “If you’re not in collectives, how do you build a team?”
Even the word “collective” has acquired a connotation. A month ago, Kentucky coach Mark Stoops publicly called them “illegal.”
“We have completely gutted the model that has governed us for decades,” says Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson. “The boosters couldn’t drive a guy in the rain. Now we don’t drive him, we give him the car.
In early June, in front of a hundred business people gathered at the Covelli Center in Youngstown, Ohio, coach Ryan Day put a price tag on his Ohio State football team. Thirteen million dollars are needed from the school collective to fund its roster next year, he said. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh says his program can double, while new Gators coach Billy Napier has given his donors a goal of $20 million.
According to those familiar with player contracts, elite Power 5 program collectives have developed a baseline of approximately $50,000 per football player per year. The price tag for elite recruits is often at least $100,000 in NIL pay, says Gordon McKernan, LSU booster and Baton Rouge attorney, who himself will pay $500,000 in NIL contracts this year.
Day thinks the Buckeyes need $13 million in NIL funds to keep their roster intact.
Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch/USA TODAY NETWORK
Of Power 5’s 65 Affiliate Collectives, About Half Are Deeply Invested In Using NIL And Are Expected To Raise Over $500 Million In Combined Player Funds By The End Of The Year, CEO Says Opendorse, Blake Lawrence. This includes cash as well as free cars, apartment rentals and free meals. “There are certain markets where athletes are poised to earn more than their coaches,” Lawrence says.
Most collective models are similar to Spyre. Donors pay monthly subscriptions or write big checks for exclusive access to athletes through social media chats, event appearances or autograph signings. The more you pay, the greater the access and exclusivity. At Spyre, some pay as little as $5 per month; others cut checks for more than $1 million, Clawson says.
The collective movement has swept across the United States, as detailed in a Sports Illustrated article published in May. Almost all Power 5 programs have at least one collective, and the trend is affecting other entities as well. An annual men’s college basketball tournament, the SoCal Challenge, announced last month that it was forming a collective to benefit participating players.
Chemistry isn’t exclusive to Bluebloods in Power 5, nor is it solely soccer-focused. Texas Tech’s collective, the Matador Club, announced last month that it was distributing $25,000 a year to each player on the soccer team and women’s basketball team.
A group of 5 programs are also getting in on the action. SMU’s NIL group, Boulevard Collective, intends to pay each men’s soccer and basketball player $36,000 this year. It comes 35 years after the NCAA shut down the program with the infamous “death penalty” for recruiting violations under coach Ron Meyer. “I bet Ron Meyer is rolling in his grave,” joked former Clemson coach Tommy Bowden.
“It totally changed recruiting,” Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said of NIL and the collectives. “I joke about it all the time: go ahead and build facilities and these great weight rooms and training rooms, but you won’t have good players if you don’t have NIL money.”
Some have very little NIL money, others have a modest amount, and a few are way ahead of others with more organization and ambition. Tennessee, Miami, USC, Texas, Texas A&M and Nebraska land high-profile college transfers and rock five-star high school players, many of whom are motivated by individual mega-boosters or collectives of high-level donors. The six schools are estimated to be among NIL’s biggest spenders, say those familiar with the collective industry. And they all share one thing in common: well-resourced football programs with deep-pocketed, passionate donors who are aggressively seeking to help their schools return to the glory days of yesteryear.
They are disrupting the status quo and, some say, scaring the blue-blooded universities that have dominated the sport for more than a decade, like Alabama, Clemson, Georgia and Ohio State. This spring, those frustrations spilled over into the public arena, particularly targeting Coach Jimbo Fisher and Texas A&M, who this year signed the best recruiting class in the more than 20-year history of such rankings.
At a press conference with reporters, Kiffin playfully asked if Texas A&M would “incur a luxury tax [for] how much they paid for their signing course.” In May, Alabama coach Nick Saban told a group of businessmen that the Aggies “bought all the players.”
“I guess people don’t like A&M disrupting the power base of college football,” Aggies athletic director Ross Bjork said. “I don’t know why Nick Saban would say what he said, except that he is threatened.”
But should it be? Will this group of top-spending programs turn their recruiting awards into conference or national titles?
“That’s yet to be determined,” Lawrence says. “If USC has a monster year in football and Miami has a great year in football, if some of the young players at Texas A&M are successful, those are the stories that will reverberate throughout the fall.
“If NIL is going to change college football, these are the scenarios that have to happen.”
In its early days, Spyre Sports Group was supposed to be just a marketing agency. Clawson and co-founder Hunter Baddour envisioned representing Vols athletes in a role similar to their past as agents for professional golfers. They would seek dollars from brands and businesses for endorsement and business ventures. But like NIL itself, Spyre has evolved. Clawson and Baddour now spend most of their time raising donor dollars for a subscription-based, crowdfunding entity that pools funds and distributes them to UT athletes.
The fundraising effort led to their staff growing from three to eight people in six weeks last spring, and three of them were hired by Tennessee’s own fundraising arm, the Tennessee Fund.
“If you want to compete, you have to do it at the highest level or you’ll be kicked out of the game,” says Baddour, a 37-year-old Tennessee graduate from Knoxville.
Some of football’s biggest brands, most famous programs, most iconic logos, brands and colors are all on historical slides. Tennessee last won a conference title in 1998. Miami, Texas A&M, and Nebraska have yet to win a league championship since joining their current conferences. Texas is experiencing its longest league title drought (12 years) since the 1930s, and USC has won only one league title in 13 years.
So what’s the best way to roll back? Silver.
Spyre has raised enough capital to sign five-star California quarterback Nico Yamaleava to an $8 million deal, a figure first reported by The Athletic and confirmed by SI. At College Station, there is The Fund, a group of donors who have worked quietly behind the scenes to help provide NIL opportunities for A&M athletes.
Texas and Nebraska each have multiple collectives that have distributed at least $6 million combined to their athletes. Meanwhile, in Miami, billionaire John Ruiz has spent around $7 million on NIL contracts with more than 100 athletes, most of them Hurricanes football players.
“The irrational passion for college sports feeds this NIL beast,” Lawrence says.
Jim Cavale, CEO of INFLCR, a technology company that has created one of the leading content and compliance software in the NIL space, believes that college sports is in a temporary period where some programs are taking advantage of obscure rules and little regulation. He compares it to the steroid era of Major League Baseball. “Eventually,” he says, “there will be rules.”
Whether through NIL or not, these programs have attracted talent. Miami poached from UCLA and West Virginia for a total of four players, all starters. Tennessee won the toss for USC off Bru McCoy and landed transfers from Ohio State and Florida.
One of the collectives in Texas announced last year that it was giving each offensive lineman $50,000 a year in ZERO money. That same year, the Longhorns signed three of the top 13 offensive linemen in the nation. At USC, coach Lincoln Riley exploited his old school, sweeping Oklahoma’s star quarterback, receiver and cornerback, and landed one of the transfer portal’s biggest prizes this year – Jordan Addison, the nation’s leading receiver in 2021 at Pitt. A&M’s top-ranked signing class includes eight five-star prospects, the most in a single class and three more than the Aggies have signed in the previous six years combined.
Those in the collective world wonder: What’s so bad about all this?
“We’re considered a necessary evil, and it doesn’t have to be that way,” says Brandon Spurlock, Spyre’s fundraiser who was hired from UT’s athletic department in April.
“The narrative comes from sports administrators,” Watkins says, “because they don’t have control of it.”
Hendon Hooker stood atop the Nasdaq Stock Exchange and then witnessed the ringing of the closing bell. These were special times, especially for Hooker. Why?
“I’m a day trader,” he replies. Of course, Hooker is the 6’4″, 218-pound quarterback who set the school record last year for passing efficiency, completed 31 touchdowns with just three interceptions and helped the Volunteers. to their second most winning record in the past five years.But he is also a day-trading stock money man.His NIL income has opened up a whole new world,where he finds himself with a financial advisor and manager,his sister Nile, who introduced him to the stock market.
“NIL broadens our perspective and positions us to be business people before entering the real world,” says Hooker.
Tillman and Hooker’s trip to New York included a visit to Nasdaq.
While some say the collectives are nothing more than recruiting machines that fund teams with one motive (winning championships), those in the collective world say they provide vast opportunities for young people who cannot progress to practice professional sports. Their winning time is now.
“We’ve tried to do a good job educating our donors in and around Knoxville on why this is so important,” says Clawson, 40. “There is a limited window for these children.”
Hooker, in his sixth year in college, keeps his annual NIL earnings private, but it’s enough (in the six figures) to have kept him out of the 2022 NFL Draft. He makes money by satisfying about 10 public appearances each year, as well as signing memorabilia. Spyre athletes earn between $1,500 and six figures a year, Clawson says.
Unlike many collectives, Clawson’s group does not distribute NIL funds evenly among teams. “You can’t point to any other industry doing this,” he says. The hardest thing about NIL, Hooker says, is “learning to say no.” With class and training schedules, he can’t do everything. He took three days off from off-season training to travel to New York for that mid-July trip, which coach Josh Heupel approved after a brief shock.
“He was like, ‘You’ll be gone in three days?!'” Hooker recalled. “But he understands.”
The money UT athletes make “indirectly speaks to rookies,” Clawson says.
For many athletes, NIL has been a financial boon like they have never seen. Georgia coach Kirby Smart said one of his players, offensive lineman Micah Morris, was supporting his father on dialysis with NIL money. In Florida State, a gambler’s mom no longer has to work three jobs because her son sends ZERO income home, says Matt Quigley, a longtime recall who’s in real estate and now guides Rising Spear from FSU.
“It’s time they were allowed to take advantage of this,” says Quigley. “They are risking their life and future longevity and cannot be compensated for it? It made no sense.
The opportunities go beyond cash offers. For example, this was Tillman’s first trip to New York. Starting out in Manhattan, the All-SEC receiver got to eat his first slice of New York-style pizza — the thin-crust, charcoal pie from John’s Pizzeria. After lunch, the shuttle was heading up 8th Avenue when a giant structure loomed up in front of the driver’s side window.
“What is that?” asks Tillman.
Someone replies, “It’s Penn Station.”
“You see,” Baddour said, “that’s what it’s all about.”
Although the NCAA’s facade of amateurism has largely crumbled under the weight of legal challenges, rules still exist, for now. Earlier this summer, law enforcement personnel from the organization traveled to Miami to conduct interviews in what is called an “investigation.” NCAA investigators also investigated Tennessee, but the organization did not contact Spyre.
Of the many threats to the existence of collectives—sustained fundraising, athlete employment, federal NIL regulation—the NCAA presents the greatest obstacle if the association seriously sanctions schools for not monitoring their boosters and collectives. Many believe such penalties will end in a court battle – the NCAA versus the boosters.
“We have three law firms that we work with. We didn’t do anything without a lot of people approving it,” Clawson says. “We’ve been very careful to make sure we’re on the right side of state law and NCAA rules.”
NCAA indiscretions further fuel the narrative around these booster-led groups. Are they good for the game? Will they ultimately survive? Are they…legal?
Many expect the end of this evolution to come with schools paying athletes as employees and/or sharing revenue with them, but there is still room for collectives and marketing agencies to provide a second source of income, says Spurlock, 37 from Spyre. years who oversees fundraising. This is the case in the NFL, where players supplement their salaries with endorsement contracts.
Spurlock acknowledges he took a terrible risk leaving the Tennessee Athletic Department and joining the company in April. He worked as a college administrator for more than a decade, with stops at Western Kentucky, Boston College, and then his alma mater, Tennessee. He seemed to be on a promising upward trajectory in the industry.
“We don’t know what’s coming in a week, a month, a year. It changes from day to day,” he said. “But there is a way for us no matter what.”
Although their confidence in their future is high, Spyre officials are exploring ways to operate a more sustainable model. Instead of relying on a handful of millionaire boosters to fund the operation annually, they hope to gain thousands more subscribers, each donating a modest amount each month.
However, in this unique era of college sport, where decades-old rules of amateurism have been shunned, raising such funds poses a problem. “We still talk to people today who can’t believe we can do what we can do,” Clawson says.
Donors who have contributed for years to one school are also invited to contribute to a second entity. “The last thing we want to do is steal dollars. But it’s a new way of giving,” says Baddour.
Some question the sustainability of boosters that donate money to a collection for, in many cases, athletes who have never played college football and can freely transfer.
“Do we want a new weight room or do we want to spend it on a 17-year-old who may or may not be able to get by?” asks Greg McElroy, the former Alabama quarterback who is now an ESPN analyst.
Ruiz, Miami’s billionaire booster, says he’s not sure if he’ll continue to sign so many athletes with NIL deals, expecting those deals to lose value after their inaugural year. “Next year it becomes the norm,” he said. “People pay less attention, so you get less return on your investment.”
When raising funds for this pool of NIL athletes, Spyre and other collectives must walk a tightrope with their own university. It’s a delicate dance on both sides. Schools are prohibited from becoming involved in groups led by reminders supporting NIL. Tennessee must distance itself while providing a level of oversight that keeps investigators away from the NCAA. There are “friction” between some athletic departments and their collectives, Baddour says. He claims that is not the case with Tennessee and Spyre. But that relationship has been tested in recent months, when communication breakdowns have sometimes caused anxiety.
Hooker says his NUL wins have opened up a whole new world.
While it’s against NCAA rules and some state laws to offer inducement through NIL, such moves happen across the landscape. Collectives and boosters use NIL funds to (1) poach players from other teams, (2) prevent their own players from being poached, and (3) recruit athletes out of the transfer portal or high school ranks.
Many of them are cheeky about it. Just last week, in fact, the president of Arizona State’s new collective, Sun Angel, told AZCentral.com that one of his goals is “to attract top talent.”
Somehow, Clawson and Spyre control the gears on Tennessee’s roster. At one point, he even refers to it as a “general manager” type role. His phone often buzzes with Vols athletes looking for better deals, either because another school is after them or because players have read big offers that other players are receiving – many of which, he says, are not real.
The NIL numbers are inflated, according to Spyre officials. Many others within the industry agree. “There are a lot of fake numbers floating around,” Baddour says.
A story shared anonymously with SI reveals this. During the last recruiting round, an ACC school was approached by a player’s agent asking his client to be paid $1 million a year to sign with the school. The player eventually signed with the program for around a fifth of that amount.
In another recruiting story, a prospect’s agent told the coaching staff at School A that School B was offering $100,000 a year. A coach from school A contacted a coach from school B.
“You’re offering $100,000? ” He asked.
“No,” School B’s coach told him, “but we were told you were offering $100,000.”
When recruiting McElroy in the mid-2000s, a prospect chose a school based on its path to the pros, proximity to home, team success history, and campus life . Now? “For a large majority, NIL is the #1 priority,” he says. And yet, McElroy doubts that big-spending NIL schools will suddenly rise above the top echelon of the sport. “The Yankees have the highest payroll in baseball, but they don’t win the World Series every year,” he says.
There is a downside to building a team based solely on NIL, the coaches say. Unequal pay could lead to locker room issues. Players who earn high NIL salaries might not find playing time or might be transferred after a short time with the team. Will there be entanglements between boosters and coaches on roster management? After all, in many places donors who once funded only facilities and coaches’ salaries financially support a roster.
“I think you’re really going to see some people crumble,” Cincinnati coach Luke Fickell said. “It’s all about the money, and I don’t think we’re ready for that.”
A football roster has 85 players. There can only be 22 starters, and most teams for a full game don’t play much more than 55 guys. “Just because you gave someone a lot of money doesn’t make them play,” says Gerry DiNardo, the former LSU and Indiana coach who works for the Big Ten Network. “What happens if they spend money on bad players?
That’s life. How many high NFL draft picks have ultimately failed? As is the case in current recruiting, those who rate and identify themselves correctly will have fewer busts and more wins. And wouldn’t you know, these same programs are the richest in sport.
Andy Schwarz, an economist specializing in sports economics, says NIL will not alter a recruitment landscape or impact parity that is already trending toward the rich. From 1998 to 2020, six teams have won 74% of national football championships: Alabama (six), LSU (three), Clemson (two), Florida State (two), Florida (two), and Ohio State (two). Five of the six not only make the top 12 national pre-pandemic sports budgets of 2019, but have attracted the country’s top talent over the past decade, according to recruiting rankings.
DiNardo doesn’t expect a noticeable change at the top. “I strongly believe that college football is about the have-nots and the have-nots, and no matter how the rules change, it will never make a have-not a have-not and never make a have-not a have-not.”
But what about those ambitious collectives in Knoxville, Miami and College Station? “Maybe it’s the bands that will move the needle,” he says.
Many questions still remain. But one thing is clear from the Times Square scene: College athletes are no longer amateurs.
Surrounded by marketing agents, NIL fundraisers and Nasdaq team members, Hooker and Tillman posed for photos with their images and Twitter names scribbled on the giant screen above. A man, strolling up to one of their security guards, points to the two players: “Who are they?”
“They’re football players,” he was told, “from Knoxville, Tennessee.”
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