The state of NIL at Florida and beyond

NIL has been a hot topic on the Gator Internet this week. Maryland defensive tackle transfer Darrell Jackson was nearing a decision, and UF appeared to be trending for his services. On Monday, however, he abruptly committed to Miami and shut down his recruitment. The Gators lost out on one of the top available portal players in a position of need.

Immediately fans’ thoughts went to NIL. The general mood was split between “Miami must be spending money that we don’t have” and “trust the coaches”. The debate has gone about as well as you’d think.

As it happens this week has also shed some light on NIL at UF in general, on top of exposing some larger issues outside of Gainesville. Here is a snapshot of where some things stand.

The Gator Collective

Eddie Rojas, founder of the Gator Collective, made an appearance on the Swamp247 podcast and also spoke with Andy Staples and G. Allan Taylor at The Athletic for a feature on NIL. It’s the second time that the Collective has shared some of its data, with the first coming in late December with The Alligator, so we can get some idea of the organization’s growth.

Some of the details seemed a bit fuzzy to me, so I contacted the Collective and was able to speak to Jen Grosso to clear things up.

In December, the Gator Collective reported having 1,200 paying members and a monthly subscription income of over $13,000. If you go with those numbers exactly, you get an estimated monthly subscription of $10.83. There is a higher average figure than that in the article, but Grosso told me it was the result of a glitch with their reporting software and that the other two numbers were correct.

Rojas disclosed on the podcast and in the Athletic article this week that the Gator Collective now has around 2,200 paying members. Some membership fees are as low $5.99 per month, though that option seems to be gone now. I went to the Collective’s website this week. The lowest monthly tier is $9.99, and the lowest weekly tier comes out to about $8.62 per month.

Rojas said on the podcast that those memberships translate to around $600,000 in recurring annual revenue. Grosso clarified that the figure represents the annualized amount if all current subscribers stay on for the next 12 months. Rojas also said they have “millions in influx of one-time donations and things like that” without giving a specific amount. The Athletic article stated that the Collective “raised more than $500,000”, but without speaking to Staples or Taylor, that appears to be a reference to the expected annual subscription revenue.

Using the round numbers again, the average monthly subscription has risen to around $22.72. The new subscriber rate may seem to have slowed, with 1,200 in the first four months and 1,000 in the four months since. However, Rojas said that the Collective had a surge of new subscribers after Napier mentioned NIL in a press conference. I don’t know for sure, but I believe it’s a reference to Napier’s introductory presser on December 5. If so, that may have brought forward some future subscriptions to the then-present and affected the shape of the growth curve.

The goal, Rojas said on the podcast, is to get to “ten, to fifteen, to twenty thousand” subscribing members before later dropping thirty thousand as a more distant goal. The average subscription value would probably fall in any of those cases, since mass scale tends to be skewed towards the lower end.

Whether the average can hold not a small issue. The Athletic article quotes Billy Napier as wanting $20 million per year for NIL, presumably just for football, while the Gator Collective aims to provide NIL opportunities for all UF athletes. It’d take an implausible average subscription of $83.33 per month at 20,000 members to just to hit Napier’s $20 million goal.

Room for Growth

If you’re reading something about college football NIL issues in April, you are by definition among the most engaged fans out there. You probably already know about the Gator Collective. I can assure you that everyone who subscribes to the various paid Gator message boards know about it too since it comes up frequently as a topic of conversation. Those message board creatures are exactly the target audience for a collective, since they already spend money outside of official university channels on their passion.

I can also tell you that, from seeing it on multiple boards, there is some skepticism around the Gator Collective. Some folks instinctively worry about being scammed any time someone comes to them asking for money. For its part, the Gator Collective says that only an administrative and bookkeeping assistant and also legal counsel are getting paid out of everyone who’s involved with it. It projects that 85-90% of its money will go to athletes. It also provides value to members via access to athletes online and off, so it’s not like it’s asking for straight-up donations with nothing provided in return.

I think some super fans also want to see results before committing, which creates something of a chicken-or-egg problem. I’m not sure how much more of this population is going to join before UF starts getting some splashy commits that are due in large part to NIL deals.

There are plenty more people who might want to become members than just those folks who live on message boards. NIL is still pretty new, and collectives aren’t ubiquitously known yet. Getting the word out is a real challenge.

Rojas said this on the podcast: “Right now we are basically a Twitter company. Right, 99% of people that have become members found us on Twitter.” That quote tells you some of why the Collective isn’t a massive player just yet.

I hate to say it because Twitter is my favorite social network, but it’s just not that great a place to build a far-reaching movement outside the bounds of the site itself. It has far fewer regular members than the other big majors, and people just don’t click on links there that much. It’s a medium that by its nature encourages people to stay put and quickly scroll through post after post. I’ve been on Twitter more than a decade, and while it’s great for creating communities within Twitter itself, it only rarely translates to the areas beyond its bounds.

Rojas mentioned in the podcast that they know plenty of potential members aren’t on Twitter, and the Collective started a successful campaign of phone calling people starting in November to bring in some higher dollar amounts. You can see that reflected in the rise in average monthly contributions from December to now. That’s an inefficient way to go about it, however, and reaching critical mass really will require an organic word-of-mouth chain reaction that hasn’t happened yet.

Mega booster Hugh Hathcock’s Gator Guard is rallying some of the truly high dollar fans, though it sounds like it’s not operational yet. The Athletic article talks about it, but it uses the future tense to say that “Hathcock hopes to set up the Gator Guard as a 501(c)(3) non-profit”. The Gator Collective, if you’re curious, is a for-profit LLC. The two entities have said they will work together, so it’s not like there’s a competition between the two.

It’s worth noting that Rojas is a financial advisor in his day job, and he spoke in the podcast about the importance of the subscription revenue. He can count on subscriptions more while planning deals than he can single donations since the latter are by their nature unpredictable. One-time gifts are welcome, of course, but it’s the recurring revenue that forms the basis of future projections. This is Sound Business 101, and a financial pro like Rojas knows it.

Trouble in Paradise

On the podcast after Rojas’s interview was done, cohost Jacob Rudner addressed Jackson. He said that “according to multiple people, [Jackson’s] making over $400,000 for an NIL deal” at Miami. That’s all he said, so I don’t know if that’s for one year or over multiple. I’d guess it’s the latter since Jackson was a 2021 recruit and therefore still has two more years before he can declare for the draft.

Jackson is a promising prospect, but he’s far from a sure thing. The nascent NIL market is still figuring out the going rates for players of various kinds, but mid-six figures for a redshirt freshman who’s barely played and wasn’t a top-rated recruit is a big chunk of change.

Miami has a billionaire fan in John Ruiz, who has pledged $10 million in NIL deals through his company LifeWallet. Nothing’s been announced regarding that firm and Jackson to date, but that’s more Gator Guard money than Gator Collective money. Ruiz has already signed many Miami athletes to LifeWallet endorsements over the past several months, so that train left the station long before the Guard was even announced. His biggest deal to date was for a men’s basketball transfer from Kansas State who’s getting the possibly coincidental amount of $400,000 per year for two years.

It may sound like all is splendid down there, but trouble has already started brewing. Star guard Isaiah Wong, one of the leaders of the Hurricanes’ Elite Eight men’s basketball team from last season, announced publicly through his agent that he wants a better NIL deal or else he’ll enter the transfer portal this weekend. The agent said the request is specifically related to that K-State transfer’s deal, which is larger than Wong’s NIL income at present. Wong already has a LifeWallet deal, and Ruiz has said he’s not going to renegotiate it. We’ll know the result of the standoff soon enough.

It may be that this kind of situation is inevitable in the NIL era, and it may only be a matter of time before a Gator athlete makes a similar kind of request. Having a loud and proud mega booster make himself to be the face of NIL in Coral Gables may be just the thing that brought it to Miami first.

Update, 4/29, 9:01 pm: Wong now says the statement from his agent was not authorized and that he doesn’t want to “jeopardize [his] relationship with LifeWallet or the University of Miami”.

Hybrid Theory

You probably could tell from the above, but I don’t think it’s realistic that the Gator Collective by itself will get to Napier’s goal of $20 million per year, much less surpass it enough to adequately service the rest of the UF’s athletes.

At least not as things are presently composed, though they won’t stay exactly as they are now forever. Rojas mentioned that he’s looking to create structures within the Collective so that people who are passionate about a single sport can donate in a way such that they know their money will go to that specific sport.

Rojas mentioned trying to get, for example, former men’s basketball or baseball players to donate to a men’s basketball or baseball vertical. He’s envisioning both guys who went to the big leagues or others who found success after going pro in something other than sports.

If the Gator Collective can get those kinds of folks into the fold, then all bets are off and anything I’ve said before and after this about the Collective’s financial potential goes out the window. This effort could overlap with the Gator Guard and its focus on high net worth fans, but both are in theory pursuing the same end goal of making NIL opportunities for UF athletes second-to-none.

Regardless, any pursuit of large donors doesn’t obviate the need for a mass of smaller donors like what the Collective is currently amassing.

Here I’m thinking about public radio institutions or national political campaigns, the most successful of which always have a blend of high and low dollar contributors. To have a real impact, the big checks are necessary. However the smaller amounts really do add up, and they also help keep people engaged. And, as Rojas discussed, the recurring revenue is what forms the foundation for a responsible and sustainable business.

It’s going to be Gator Guard-level money that attracts the biggest names to a school. It’s going to be Gator Collective-level money that’s going to get a lot of players to stay at a school. Most athletes are not going to command eye-popping amounts of NIL income, but something is better than nothing.

If a younger, promising backup cornerback doesn’t get any NIL money at UF, he may think about transferring to a place where he could get some. Why be a backup who’s not getting NIL money when he could be a backup who is getting NIL money? And the idea of leaving to start at a lesser school is usually not something that comes up until late in a player’s eligibility window, but the promise of NIL money on top of getting to start may expedite the process.

It’s hard to see how Florida can realize its goal of being an NIL leader without both a Gator Guard that’s delivering big checks and a thriving Gator Collective that’s harnessing the power of UF’s large fan base. It’s not an either-or scenario but a yes-and situation.

The form has changed, but the bottom line has not: college football programs will go as far as their fans propel them. It takes a good media deal. It takes alignment between the administration and athletic department. It takes making good coaching hires. But even as those things come and go, it always takes fan support to make something sustainable at the highest levels.

David Wunderlich
David Wunderlich is a born-and-raised Gator and a proud Florida alum. He has been writing about Florida and SEC football since 2006. He currently lives in Naples Italy, at least until the Navy stations his wife elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @Year2

1 COMMENT

  1. This article has made me sick. What ever University has the most money to pay out gets the player(s). If this does not get controlled, college football as we have known it, is gone forever. I’m not one to advocate not giving the players something, but without some type of lid, it will continue to get even more out of control. I don’t see anything good coming out of this. NIL has to be regulated in some way that is good for the player, but also good for the fans and University. I believe the coaches have already stated that this thing has to have some guard rails or college football and other sports are doomed. Portals have already been influenced as players are going to the highest bidder.