Insight: NIL Deals

Let me just try to give a little insight on NIL from a company’s perspective. I am a fairly high ranking employee at the largest financial institution in Iowa. When NIL first became a thing, I took it upon myself to begin building relationships with athletes at the University of Iowa to represent our company.. Mostly on social media.

First: Every kid has a handler. I’m telling y’all, we have had dozens of people reach out to our team to have their athlete represent our company. There are so many greedy people trying to make a buck off teenagers. It’s uncomfortable.

Second: We know nothing about these kids. I’ll be honest, the vetting process isn’t fun. You don’t want to tie your name to a kid, then have them in a bar fight on a Saturday night after the game. Athletes who don’t emphasize the student aspect of college, will never be represented by our company. We also have to figure out how an 18 year old is going to handle thousands of dollars.

Third: NIL deals aren’t about giving kids money to play at your school.. The marketing dept has to develop an advertising strategy that produces a viable and trackable ROI. We are a 9 billion company, with a board, we can’t just throw money around to get a player to sign with a certain school. That’s foolish.

Lastly: There is a learning curve. It’s all new to us. We don’t quite understand the value quite yet. The coach at Iowa doesn’t necessarily care about his players getting paid. He is a developmental coach. Iowa has more kids in the NFL than Florida, Clemson and Michigan. I believe Iowa is 5th.

LSU is a different animal, but I can’t imagine too many businesses giving out NIL deals to high school students to sign with LSU who they don’t know and don’t have the time to vet.