NIL roundup

Rivals has put together a six-part series on name, image and likeness rights for college athletes.  If you’re interested, here are the links:

• Answers to biggest questions | NIL 101 – What it is and where it stands
• Who will make the money?
• How athletes build their brand
• What HS athletes think
• How colleges are handling this
• The most marketable college athletes

There’s a lot there.  If you think NIL is inevitable for college athletes, then this particular observation should sink in, if you’re a football coach:

Imaginations can run wild and comprehending the complexities of Name, Image and Likeness, especially without NCAA legislation, can be staggering.

But Blake Lawrence of Opendorse offers an excellent analogy.

The former four-star linebacker who played at Nebraska and now runs the leading platform for athlete marketing from Lincoln compares NIL to any other part of an athletic program. That is what college coaches will have to wrap their minds around: Neglecting NIL will be like having poor facilities or outdated equipment.

“If you think about NIL as a new department within athletics – you have strength and conditioning, you have nutrition, you’ve got your training room, academics, life skills and now NIL,” Lawrence said. “When strength and conditioning became a thing, every school in the country needed a weight room. Within that weight room you needed equipment, you needed to have a standard of measurement of what is strong, what is fast, what is slow, what is weak and you needed to have a strength and conditioning coach.”

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