NIL Newsletter #133 | New Florida NIL Bill, Women's Basketball NIL, + ICYMI
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:
Florida Representative Introduces New NIL Bill
Florida State Representative Chip LaMarca introduced a new NIL bill which, he hopes, will even the playing field for the state’s universities and athletes.
The prospective bill would allow for more institutional involvement in the NIL deals of their collegiate student-athletes. Current legislation prohibits schools from having direct contact with athletes regarding NIL opportunities.
“If you think about what an athlete’s earlier life is like, no matter what their background is, they rely heavily on their coaches, the staff and the administration,” LaMarca said. “For them not to be able to have any conversations about what opportunities are out there was limiting our athletes.”
LaMarca worries that states without NIL laws or those with more relaxed regulations would attract athletes from Florida universities, through transfers, or Florida high schools, through recruiting.
The full story is available HERE.
Women’s Basketball Leads NIL Charge
Opendorse, an NIL technology company, released a recent paper that focuses on women’s college athletics in the first 18 months of NIL. Sponsorships for female athletes grew 20% from September 2021 to September 2022, compared to only a 2% increase for male athletes.
Leading this growth is women’s basketball, which is at the forefront of women’s collegiate athletics after the 2022 National Championship brought in nearly 5 million viewers, the most in two decades for the game.
Programs like Texas Tech and South Carolina have major NIL deals, which provide each student-athlete on their women’s basketball roster with $25,000 a year.
UCONN guard Paige Bueckers (pictured above) was the first collegiate athlete to partner with Gatorade.
An average NIL deal for the starting five members of a Power-5 women’s basketball team is approximately $8,000 per athlete, over 50% more than the average for collegiate softball or volleyball.
The full paper is available HERE.
ICYMI Ticker
Sportico’s McCann made five bold predictions for sports law this year, including one that college athletes will become employees. LINK
Athletic directors from a number of schools threw their support behind collectives, encouraging fans to donate: Maryland, Temple, Syracuse, Nebraska, and Pittsburg.
NCAA Managing Director of Enforcement Mark Hicks remarks that NIL collectives are not a new phenomenon, and are acting just as the older “booster clubs” used to. LINK
UTSA Football Head Coach Jeff Traylor expressed concern about the direction of NIL: You’ve got agents talking to your kids, communicate with another school — can’t prove any of this — and they’re charging those kids a percentage and they’re getting paid. It’s not good for those kids when you’re in the middle of the season and, you know, that can get cloudy for a young man. I feel for them. LINK
The NIL Store announced Maryland as an official partner for NIL merchandising opportunities. LINK
Valiant’s “One More Year Fund,” announced last week, has been quite a success. Football players Blake Corum, Zak Zinter, and Trevor Keegan all announced their return this week.