Happy Independence Day, Gators! I hope you had a good holiday weekend and didn’t set anything on fire you didn’t intend to.
The NIL era of college football has started, and honestly? It doesn’t feel all that different to me.
Some players found people who were familiar enough with the Adobe suite of applications to hack together logos and/or T-shirt designs. They’re going to find out what college students of my generation found out with Cafe Press and Zazzle or whatnot 15 years ago: you’re not going to make life-changing money selling clothes. Sturgeon’s law is undefeated: 90% of everything is crap, and the law might be undershooting on college athlete clothing hustles.
The upshot is that it’s merely going to be a new kind of insufferable to follow players on social media. I don’t envy the beat writers who have to do that for their jobs. Most social media postings by most people are inane, parochial, and/or irrelevant to those outside their immediate social circle. College athletes are no different, and the issue is compounded by the fact they’re at the stage in life where putting out certain kinds of vague or ambiguous messages feels like an important thing to do.
For my age cohort, it was AOL Instant Messenger away messages first and then LiveJournal, MySpace, and embryonic college-only Facebook, so I’m not casting aspersions here. I did it too, but no one cared who I was so it didn’t matter. Every now and then a Twitter or Instagram post from a player at some school or another will go viral for unknown reasons, and fans of several stripes will freak out about whether “I can’t wait to see what’s next !!” means they’re about to transfer. It nearly always doesn’t; it probably just meant the guy was daydreaming about life after college or something and felt it so strongly he had to say something and that app on his phone was only a tap away.
So yeah, don’t follow college athletes on social media unless they are genuinely funny or something, because on top of the usual fare there will now be a bunch of sales pitches. I will continue not following them, and I’ll rely on the people who have to do it professionally to surface the stuff worth worrying about.
For now the novelty is still there, and I do find it vaguely interesting to see who is following rules about not using official UF logos and imagery in their online clothing stores (Gervon Dexter) and which ones will need to swap out some photos if university lawyers ever browse their way (Trey Dean). I can’t help but have a laugh at how so many of these shops have Geocities-level web design despite how much better website creation tools are now versus 2005. I guess bad taste doesn’t skip generations of young adults no matter how much better the built-in templates are for hosting services.
NIL isn’t going to amount to much more than pizza money for most players who take a crack at selling a logo someone made for them. And you know what? Good for them. Pizza money is great to have.
Others will finally be able to put their names, images, and likenesses on charitable causes or things like GoFundMe campaigns without having to go through compliance to get NCAA waivers. I’ve already seen some of that, and that kind of thing should’ve been streamlined a long time ago.
A lot of the ones who will really cash in are people you’ve never heard of. Young people can amass a lot of followers on social media regardless of whether they do something notable like play college sports. They just have to be good at posting things to the social media platform.
Once you have tens of thousands of followers/subscribers, you can start to make a lot more than pizza money for sponsored posts. You’re going to hear about olympic sport athletes from small schools making tons of money from #SponCon (sponsored content) because they got Instagram famous for posting fashion/glamour pictures unrelated to their athletic activities. Or they got big on Twitch while streaming video games. Or they have a YouTube account about whatever non-sports thing they love that gets a sizable audience.
It may all sound like easy money, but it’s really not. The upfront cost to attempting to make money this way is so low that there are countless people trying to do it. Sure, lots more people have heard of Malik Davis than most college students. He even has one of the better personal logos. But how many people are actually going to buy his shirts? Probably not that many.
In short, you’re not going to see much about NIL ventures unless you go looking for them. If you follow players on social media, you’ll see it. If you regularly go scrolling through Cameo, you’ll see it. If you live in a college town, you might see advertisements for some player or another to host an apartment pool party or a shindig at a restaurant or night club. They might also sign autographs at the mall. Those kinds of things are hard to avoid.
What you won’t see is college athletes pitching insurance or cars or whatever on major mass media campaigns. The competition there is with not just much more well-known pro athletes but literally anyone else who is famous: actors, musicians, media personalities, and, increasingly, Internet influencers (which are basically what the college athletes who will really cash in on NIL are first, before they are athletes).
Tim Tebow and Johnny Manziel became legit, mass-market celebrities with non-sports tabloids covering them before they left school. They’re the exceptions, not the rules. No non-football people know who Trevor Lawrence or Justin Fields are. Non-basketball people don’t know who Cade Cunningham or Jared Butler are. The combination of The Long Tail effect expanding from goods to fame and the segmenting of attention in walled gardens — you won’t know Instagram-famous people if you’re not on Instagram — means that athletes taking advantage of NIL rights can be something you ignore if you want to.
The real question is whether NIL opportunities will actually affect recruiting. I tend to think it won’t much. Going pro in a revenue sport will still net vastly more money than anything you can make on hosting pool parties or autograph sessions, so being one of many in Tuscaloosa will remain more attractive than being the biggest fish in Nashville. And on the flip side, players can already become Internet-famous despite playing in the relative obscurity of a non-revenue sport at a place like Fresno State. Their fame doesn’t depend on their athletic profile, which in turn means they need only attend a college with reliable network connectivity and not necessarily one with a rabid fan base or top ten aspirations.
I could be wrong about this, but if NIL does anything to recruiting, it’ll tend to spread the talent around rather than continue to condense it among a select few schools. If that does happen, then it’ll will be great for college sports.
But in the meantime, worrying about NIL stuff is entirely optional. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to see it. If you do, then carry on. Everyone can get what they want.