NIL Newsletter #109 | Jim Boeheim's questionable comments on collectives, Horizon League's NIL marketplace, Jolly twins taking over youth basketball, Saint Peter's Doug Edert + ICYMI Ticker
Welcome to the NIL Newsletter by Optimum Sports Consulting - providing valuable, actionable NIL resources for student athletes, administrators, agents and other sport professionals.
Recapping NIL This Week:
Jim Boeheim comments on NIL collectives
Joining Cuse Sports Talk on Wednesday afternoon, Syracuse MBB Head Coach Jim Boeheim painted a questionable picture on NIL collectives.
“One thing I’ve always heard on radio shows is the university needs to spend more money on recruiting,” he said, calling into the radio show. “The university needs to spend more money on facilities. This has been for 20 years we’ve heard this talk. Well, now’s your chance. This is your chance to help recruiting, but NIL is nothing but colleges collecting money and arranging deals for players through their collectives.”
“We have a foundation, but it’s the same basic thing. Ours is a foundation, 315 Foundation, which is tax-deductible money. You can get your tax deductible.” The 315 Foundation has yet to launch — it’s hoping to have a website up in September. Founded by Mike Bristol and Tony DeSorbo, the long-term hope for the collective is to be able to endow positions at Syracuse. The last thing the two founders have set out to do is reel in top-ranked recruits through NIL incentives.
“We have absolutely nothing to do with recruiting,” Bristol said. “And obviously want to be crystal clear about that.”
Horizon League Commissioner Julie Roe Lach talks NIL
Horizon League Commissioner Julie Roe Lach talked to On3 about the leagues approach to NIL through a conference-wide NIL marketplace.
“We really just previewed, ‘What are some opportunities relative to what’s happening on our campuses?’ But more importantly, can we do something league-wide to leverage the collective, so to speak?” she said, before laughing. “And I don’t mean to use ‘the collective’ as a pun there, but to leverage the collective force of bringing us all together.”
The Horizon League partnered with the NIL technology provider Opendorse to provide a league-wide NIL marketplace for its athletes that is open to brands, fans, sponsors and donors. Third parties can browse a database of Horizon League athletes, each of whom has a profile that can include a biography and links to their social media profiles, among other personalized elements. With a few clicks, third parties can offer an athlete an NIL deal through the marketplace or they can work with Opendorse’s campaigns team.
Roe Lach cited the benefits of the Horizon League’s six-state footprint in the Midwest, which is home to both the headquarters of major companies as well as their consumers. “Rather than the one-off institutional approach, can we bring them all together in this marketplace that Opendorse is creating for some schools?” Roe Lach asked rhetorically, when describing the thought process in the league.
“It makes sense for some individual schools I think at the Power 5 level to do it. At our level, we thought, ‘Let’s bring us all together to the extent we can.’ Frankly, I think that’s more attractive to potential companies looking for a broad base of student-athletes, but then also, hopefully our student-athletes can benefit from it.”
Top-ranked basketball players looking to cash in- up next is third grade
Ashton and Henry Jolly IV had already posed for a handful of photos with giddy elementary school kids by the time the NEO Boys National Showcase began on a Saturday morning in late June. The twins had been advertised as headliners on social media by event organizers for weeks, and their father, Henry Jolly III, entered the gym with every promotional material he could carry, a black duffel bag full of gear that included mouth guards, knee pads and arm sleeves provided free by prospective sponsors, along with headbands stamped with the personal logo he created for his kids, “Jolly Boys.”
Jolly has taught his boys that everything they do is part of their brand - from the way they play to their shoulder-length brown braids, which their father has made clear must be allowed by any middle school or high school coach recruiting them. He curates their social media feeds, spends hours editing their YouTube highlight videos and sometimes wears a T-shirt he made with the logos of seven youth basketball rankings websites, all of which have rated his sons the top second-graders in the country.
Jolly posts around a half-dozen times each day on his Instagram account (@nbacoachjolly), where he has more than 6,000 followers, along with a separate account for just the boys, which sports another 3,000 followers. His YouTube page is filled with highlight footage — some videos have garnered thousands of views — and features a new YouTube docuseries called “Born to Go Pro,” which shows clips of the boys training and talking about their favorite NBA players.
“That’s part of my strategy: Build their name up, build the expectations up, build their skills up, build their bodies up, so that by the time they get to high school, these companies are going to pay them to play,” Jolly said. “We want to do it as early as possible. I believe we’re going to be the pioneers.”
Saint Peter’s star Doug Edert still inking deals after his Cinderella moment
The Saint Peter’s Peacocks wrote one of the greatest Cinderella stories in the history of men’s college basketball this year. The belle of that ball was junior guard Doug Edert, who scored 20 points off the bench to help take down mighty Kentucky - and continued to be integral to the Peacocks’ Elite Eight run. March launched Edert into fame - from his iconic mustache to his swaggy style of play despite his thin frame.
“I had never had any of this - ever,” Edert said. So while he prioritized prepping for games, he enlisted his father and a couple of close confidants to help him procure a select few deals. In March and April, he signed with Buffalo Wild Wings and Cameo, and launched an apparel line with Barstool Sports. “That was a little tricky - with focusing on basketball along with these new companies. I’m focused on basketball … but at the same time I couldn’t pass up on that opportunity.”
Edert has since transferred to Bryant University. He’s still doing Cameo, which he said was definitely one of the more fun activities. He signed a deal with an intramural league called Volo Sports and has promoted it on his Instagram. He also announced a launch with Campus Ink.
“I was lucky enough to be on the big stage,” he said. He hopes other athletes will get a similar opportunity. “I’m still looking to get a deal with one of these razor companies,” he said. Full story HERE.
ICYMI Ticker
Orlando North, Seminole County (ONSC) Tourism announced a partnership with Dreamfield. ONSC announced its NIL program a few weeks ago with a new slate of athletes for their destinatiON ambassador program, which included 10 student athletes. Back on July 1, 2021 ONSC was the first economic development and tourism organization to hire college student-athletes through NIL. This year ONSC is expanding its program and will be utilizing the expertise of Dreamfield to help make this process more efficient. Full story HERE.
Within 24 hours - BYU, Oregon and North Carolina - all announced team-wide collectives through YOKE Gaming. Provo NIL Club (BYU), Eugene NIL Club (Oregon), and Chapel Hill NIL Club (North Carolina) all made announcements in the middle of the week, mostly by players.
The college football landscape may be shifting, but its fans remain among the most engaged and loyal fanbases in all of sports, according to data from Kantar Sports Monitor. The audience is culturally more conservative, traditional and hesitant about the sport’s new financial model. Regarding new NIL legislation, 51% of fans said that it “would make no difference on my enjoyment of the game,” although more are negative about the changes (31%) than positive (18%).
After practice on Friday, USC Football Head Coach Lincoln Riley shared his thoughts on the Student Body Right initiative, expressing hope that all parties could work together in USC’s best interest. “I think we’ve had a lot of signs internally that people want to support our program and are excited about what’s going on here. So I think that that notion, we’re not surprised of,” Riley said. “We very much believe in the BLVD concept, not only for what it can do for our student-athletes but also making sure that we stay within the rules and having people that have been in this business and are experts in this field is very, very important to us … Listen, this is new to all of us. It’s still evolving all kinds of places all over the country and I’m confident that we will be able to bring everyone together and make sure it’s one, united effort.”
4 Kansas State Soccer players are using NIL not just to profit, but to give back to athletes once in their shoes. Joey Lujan, Porter List, Roo Yarnell and Alaina Werremeyer are all using Next Step Mentoring, an online company aiming towards mentoring high school athletes that are going through the recruiting process. The company gets the recruits in contact with the athletes, so that the college players can give advice to the up-and-comers. “We’re helping the next generation of student-athletes and helping them through the recruiting process,” Lujan said. Full story HERE.
Former University of Missouri football player Brandon Lee has been appointed Assistant Athletic Director for Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), AD Desireé Reed-Francois announced this week. “Brandon's fundraising background and passion for Mizzou from his time as a student-athlete makes him the ideal candidate to lead our evolving NIL program,” Reed-Francois said. “Maximizing every NIL opportunity for our SAs is critically important and we are positioning Mizzou to be one of the nation's innovators in NIL in the months and years ahead.”
Michigan MBB HC Juwan Howard: “Have conversations of NIL been brought up in recruiting? Yes it has,” Howard said. “Would I like to see more done for the program in the sense of some of the things that are happening with other basketball programs? Yes … I know this is going to be a story line and it’s OK. Do we have a collective here? No. Do other programs have collectives? Yes. Could we be more proactive with NIL and be more forward-thinking? Yes. And I say we -- I’m including myself, our athletic department, and Michigan as a whole. We can do better.” Full story HERE.
Hawai'i is partnering with both The Brandr Group (TBG) and Icon Source.
Campus Ink and Purdue now have an NIL Merchandising Partnership. Depaul also announced a similar deal with Campus Ink.
Duke, in partnership with INFLCR, has launched Blue Devil Exchange.
North Florida announced that its SAs now have access to NOCAP Sports.