Episode 123: How is NIL Affecting Recruiting at All Levels?

This episode of the College Recruiting Weekly Podcast is brought to you by Tutor Collegiate Strategies for nearly two decades. Athletic departments and coaches have relied on Dan Tutor and his team to create winning recruiting plans, tell effective stories to their prospects, and help get the commitments from the recruits they really want. Bring us in to lead a live recruiting workshop on your campus this year, or talk to us about working one-on-one with you as a client. It's at dantutor.com after the show for all the ways we've been helping to build winning programs and successful college coaching careers. And now it's time for the show. That's right, it's time for today's episode of the College Recruiting Weekly Podcast with your host, Failed R&B singer and America's Recruiting Guru Dan Tutor. He goes great to be with you today, excited to talk to you, and happy anniversary. That's right. And it's about the one year anniversary of NIL, name, image, likeness, and its impact on college athletics. And I think what many of you are finding, no matter if you're a big time division one coach that listens or you're a newer division three coach or somewhere in between that, what you're seeing is that it's having a wide ranging impact in recruiting college athletics, no matter what division level, no matter what sport, and that's the interesting thing that we are going to be talking about today with Matt Brown. He is the writer and founder of Extra Points. It's a fantastic news site that gets into the depths of college athletics and he does a great job at it and we will give all his contact information in the show notes. Easily to follow him is on Twitter @MattBrownEP for Extra Points. You can look him up on Twitter. It's great if you want to keep in the know about some of the little things that go on that impact you in a big way as a college coach. And he had a very interesting article not long ago on NIL and its impact and just what exactly was it meaning when the Ness and Bolts, when the rubber meets the road for college coaches and their programs. And the article was fantastic. Again, it will be something else that we linked to in the show notes here on the podcast. So we wanted to talk to him about it and we did. It was a great conversation. I think you are going to come away learning things that you didn't know about NIL and hopefully you get an idea of maybe how to make this all work for you moving forward into the future as it takes more of a stable form and we sort of see some trends developing. That's what Matt and I talked about. That's what the conversation is about. Let's get right to it. Well, I can understand why a lot of coaches and athletic directors would look at these last several months, particularly about NIL with some trepidation or concern. And certainly there's been a lot of changes. But if I look at the last six months just in terms of the biggest changes, I still really think there are net positive. I look at now the ability particularly for Olympics for athletes to use name image like this to build professional connections and their network in a way that I think would be more challenging to do beforehand is a big positive. If I'm looking at a volleyball athlete or a track athlete or a soccer player who might not be able to do an internship, who might not be able to study abroad or have some of this business education just based on the demands of their sport. Now they have an opportunity to go out and learn about entrepreneurship, to learn about marketing, to learn about financial planning and also build some of these connections independent of their sports information department. I think that that's the real big benefit at the end of the day is going to be educational. I honestly got to believe that for the bulk of college athletes, even though it's easy for us to focus on the million dollar quarterback in the SEC. Those are going to exist, but I don't think that's the median use case across all of college sports. And when NIL was being proposed, talked about and finally implemented, there were a lot of the theories bantied about as to the horrors that it was going to cause and the conflict of interest and the shadiness potentially behind deals. To what extent has that transpired? Just as you've studied it and tracked it in your journalistic efforts around college athletics, have any of those nightmare scenarios come true? I think on some level, some of that stuff has happened, but I charge me to look at NIL as necessarily a deculprate. I think that's just the vehicle for some of the same kind of conversations that have been happening for really a hundred years. I try to look at recruiting and this whole industry as realistically as I possibly can. And people have been receiving financial inducements to go play sports somewhere since 1905, since 1903. And certainly in big markets in the SEC and the big 10 where there's a lot more commercial interest, unquestionably, those things are happening. And I think unquestionably, some athletes are going to find out that maybe some of the advice they got from their uncles or their AAU coaches or people in their sphere was not on the up and up. And I think at least a couple of these deals from companies that I don't know we're going to be there in 18 months. So those things, yes, have happened. And I think any time we have any kind of infrastructure change in the sport, you're going to have good actors Russian and you're going to have bad actors Russian. I still believe that the positive aspects have outweighed some of the negative ones. And it's hard for me to imagine that the negative ones wouldn't be there if we didn't have NIL. I think Jim Bofischer said this pretty succinctly and accurately recently when he said, "We've always been doing NIL deals. We just called him something else and maybe we didn't talk about in press conferences, right?" So those influences and that part of talent acquisition, that's always been there. Now we just have an LLC for it. I ask you about maybe some of the biggest changes as we started the conversation that you've seen over the last year. One have you seen as some of the bright spots or the unexpected benefits of it maybe for an athlete or even for a department and for a school like where has this flourished and gone well? Some examples that you should have. Sure. In fact, I can give an example for one that I've done myself because I actually signed a couple of these NIL deals in the beginning to help promote extra points. And part of that is because as a business, I have a lot of readers who are ADs and some of our coaches, but a lot of people in the industry, but I don't have as many college students or athletes I figured, well, who's better to talk to a bunch of college students than a college student rather than boring 30s dad, right? So I signed nine of these and did that also so I could better understand the nuts and bolts of this process. And I remember the most commercially successful one of these that I've done was with a young woman named Hannah Barber who was a guard for the Alabama Women's Basketball team. And Hannah was just so impressive. Somebody who came in one and she negotiated her deal. She had a counter proposal to what I had suggested and taught me some things about Instagram and influencing that I didn't know. And she told me, hey, I might be able to play professional basketball in Europe or somewhere else for a few years after graduation, but probably not going to have a 12 year WNBA career. But when I'm finished, I think I'd like to be an athletic director. I'd like to work in athletic administration, I'd like to work in college sports. I'm the kind of person that reads your product anyway. And she was a really authentic advocate for the publication and I told her, hey, listen, I'm only paying for a couple of Instagram posts here. And your season's done. You want to be an athletic director? I know lots of athletic directors. Let me go book an introduction for you. Let me know if I've talked to other athletes who say, maybe I'd like to work for Under Armour. Well, great. Yeah, people who in my community who work at Under Armour, let's book an introduction. So I look at some of these and I've seen this with people in financial services. I've seen this, who people want to work in advertising. One of the great things is that the benefit isn't just $150 or $500. Just this chance for the athlete to professionally network and understand how different industries work, how to sell themselves, how to evaluate whether a campaign has been successful. And that's really practical business entrepreneurship education. And we talk about college sports. And maybe I'm an idealist, but I still really believe this. That part of the point for a crowd, you know, not just, again, not just SEC football, but just a little enterprise. We're trying to holistically build and develop young people. And I think if you come into this with that kind of attitude, how can I benefit and grow from this? Not just from the small check, but we like to say in recruiting that we want athletes to make a 40-year decision and not just a four-year decision. I look at what's happening here as something that can really positively impact an athlete for 40 years. And if that happens, that benefits the department and the brand too. It's a good thing for Alabama to be able to say, hey, through this, I hope you're right. I can't broker that deal for you, but I can say, here are the business community connections. And here's what our athletes have learned. And we can tell you how to talk to brands to be able to have that similar experience. And honestly, that's exciting to me. Yeah. And so you bring up some things you talked about how this can be an enterprise-wide, you know, throughout college athletics thing. Because I think when it first started, I know, look, we have coaches at major college schools that listen to this podcast. We have coaches at smaller schools and eighties all over the place that they did the same. And I think the conversation, when this first started, let's say a year ago or so, it was, well, this is going to be for the power five schools, the football, men's basketball. And I'm just the division two. I'm just an NAI division three school. I don't know that this is going to be a play. Well, in a sense, if you're looking at the journalistic world, you're not the New York Times, you're extra points in Matt Brown. So you are the Division III in the journalistic world right now at this point, and yet you creatively looked at how you could make this connection to take advantage of this. So I'm like leading up to that. That was the lead up question. My question to you is, have you seen good examples of schools that are not power fives, not Division I football, Division I minnes basketball, take advantage of NIL, where before maybe they didn't know how to do it, didn't think they could do it. But are those, do you see or hear stories about those emerging, that those are being done at some of the mid and lower level schools as well as the B ones? It is a great question. And I know honestly, I'm glad that you kind of used me as an example because I think the success of my business is honestly proof that this kind of marketing and these kind of deals can work for a million low majors. And that's actually the majority of who I talk to for my business. So one of the examples that I give to people about I think a school that has done NIL really well is BYU. And it's not just because BYU was able to set up a situation with Bill Barr or all of their football walk-ons have a deal. And now they have something really across. I think all of their non-scholarship women athletes. One of the first things that BYU did I think is so smart is they said we're going to create a partnership with the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce. And I think it was the, they called the Salt Lake on slopes, which is like the tech advocacy group around Utah County and Salt Lake and Salt Lake County. To build professional networks between their athletes and people within their business community. They're not brokering the deal. But it's saying like, hey listen, we got to dobe down the street. We have Google, we have Goldman. Let's get you guys talking with each other. And that's something that you don't have to be Alabama or Ohio State to do. Like you can, there's no reason why a school in the big South can't potentially have some of the, with the rest of the tourism board or the Chamber of Commerce. What I will say, and this has been almost to a man or woman. And I've talked to 80s over the last couple of months. Because, you know, we're just understaffed. And if my compliance team is two people and some GAs and I have one and a half SIDs and there's nobody on my, none of my athletes have an Instagram following above 20,000. I don't feel like I had the capacity to give them really direct built up education. All right, now everybody's basically doing two jobs and doing laundry at the same time. Right. So what I've talked to people at some of these, these mid and low majors or D2s is basically been, all right, we have an account with influencer. So we are some other companies. So we have our compliance paperwork. Don't do a deal with the gambling company. Don't do a deal with the pornography company. Please don't embarrass us. Everything else you want to do, go with God. And some, a couple of very interprising athletes have done some, you know, gone out and done some things and others are just getting some merch. So when I hear that, the first thing I tell people, and this goes to anyone listening to this podcast to, I will talk to your athletes completely for free. And I am, this is an ideological thing for me. I will not recommend any services. I won't broker a deal, but I'll say, this is what you need to think about how to price yourself. This is how you sign up for a marketplace. Here is, if you want to go get a deal, you can't because whether you're at Ohio State or Ohio University or my hometown, Dennis in University in Granville, Ohio, where I grew up, Division 3 School, anybody that wants a $200 deal can get one. If you want more than that, you have to treat it like a job. And then you have to decide to yourself, is that worth the time away from academics or my social life or my sport or any things? And that's going to be different from athlete to athlete. But getting a deal, these are all things that you can do. And if you don't have the institutional capacity as a department to help people with that, I would encourage you to look out and see what third parties, not, I'm not just corporate brands, but business leaders or alumni or other people that could come and fill those gaps. I expect that to happen immediately, but it's something that I think is attainable at virtually every level in college sports. So you mentioned the lack of capacity for some departments and look, some bigger departments too. Just don't know where to go and what to do and how to set up some of these things that you mentioned that in one example, be why you did. So there are outside companies that of course will partner a contract with an athletic department to set up those relationships, to kind of manage those, to try to maximize the athlete's ability to monetize themselves. And we won't get into the names or recommendations. There's some big ones. And you get who has followed the space or is familiar with NIL knows those names. So my question is, have those been a good thing? Are those companies organizations that will do that? Has that been a good thing for NIL? From an athlete standpoint and from a department standpoint? And I guess my secondary question is, what is the alternative if an athletic department just doesn't want to do that, doesn't want to, you know, just for whatever reason, doesn't want to partner with that. Can, have you seen them start up on their own and do some of those creative things like be why you? Yeah, I know. I've seen a couple of schools decide, hey, listen, no, but it's very difficult, I think, for anybody to pitch themselves as an NIL expert because this is new. I would not use that label for myself and I think I'm starting to study this quite a bit. You know, what we can say is we can share best practices from what we've learned over the past couple of months. And we can share best practices about marketing and entrepreneurship and social media generally. And you know, influencer marketing has been around for a little while, but this industry has changed a lot. There's still a ton of regulatory uncertainty. So I get a little concerned when a company starts up and says like, we are experts in this space and we can definitely solve all of your problems for you. Like, I don't think any of these, the companies are bad or like are burned by bad people or anything, but we're all kind of flying a little bit blind. So if I wasn't AD and I had a certain amount of money to allocate for this, like I would or a coach for that matter, I would think like, you know, does it make sense for me to spend some money on a compliant solution? And the answer if that may be yes to have somebody automatically report contracts and you send that information depending on what your state want might be. But you're also a university and if you're a school that has a business school or that has a communication school that's strong, you probably have more subject matter expertise on campus than I think you do elsewhere. So I think a reoccurring theme of my publication is that I am begging everybody, AD's, coaches, athletes, schools to do better job talking to each other. Because one, you're just very broadly speaking, I think the academic side often doesn't totally understand what happens with athletics or has misconceptions about how that works and value that they bring or don't bring. And also I think sometimes athletics does that too, you know, hey, chances are nobody knows more about visual production or about pricing or about CPM or some of these things than people that are already on your campus. So I see Tennessee, I see Arkansas, I see a couple other schools, TCU I believe have said, all right, we're partnering with our business school. We're going to have those professors come in and share information. We might even build courses around it and give course credit. I think it's awesome. I love it. I think you should use the resources that you have. And the drive back those, of course, that takes time, right, that takes institutional energy. The same thing, even with multi-meeting rights. A school could theoretically make more money selling their own ads, selling their managing their own website, selling their own billboards. But you need more than just 24-year-olds at a phone book to make that happen. So it might be easier to go work with Van Wagner or Learfield or somebody else and give you guaranteed money. So I think if you are a school that was operating against the time crunch or resource crunch, it sure might have been easier to outsource some of those things. I would encourage them, now we have a chance to breathe a little bit, maybe think about what you have on campus already. What have you seen as the big changes in recruiting when it comes to NIL? How has that new reality and college athletics affected recruiting both at the high level as well as the low level if you have any examples of that? What would have been the biggest changes? How have you seen coaches and programs use their NIL offerings to, I'll say, lure more recruits or better recruits or are already at two early and we haven't really seen that play out yet and able to measure it? I think it's mostly two early and I say this with love, but especially on the college football side. I have found that coaches and even sometimes ADs are not always the most reliable narrators about what actually ships recruiting. I understand that because this world is so hyper competitive and if you feel like your school, the people you're recruiting against have something that's a tiny little bit different than you. You obviously want your school to have the same thing. I think that fuels a lot of the facilities construction boom. We have academic research to suggest that that doesn't actually matter, but if you're a coach and you see everybody else is building something fancy by God you want that too and you'll. Tell your AD and you'll get on Twitter and you'll leak it to your local 247 guy that you need a new facility and that you're being hurt by that. But at the end of the day, we have some research to suggest that where your school is located, the relationship that that coach has and the assistance have with that athlete. And what kind of playing time and what kind of path to championships or the purpose you can deliver. Those are the things that tend to matter the most. And bells on whistles money both above the board and under the board do not on the aggregate matter as much. And I think I've been thinking a lot about this famous in our world, the speech that Gary Patterson gave a couple weeks before he got fired to a group of boosters saying, listen, you guys run your businesses, you know, kind of between the lines. And now you need to, you know, we need to step up here and not worry about as much about compliance. And if we don't step up with NIL, we're going to get left behind. We're going to lose a third of our roster to other people. We're going to offer more money. Later in that interview, he acknowledges, hey, you know about third of my roster doesn't even care about name and gelatinous. And I looked it up. I looked, hey, how many, how many of these football players have opened or accounts? How many of them are on market price or no cap? Most of them weren't. And most of them that that did weren't especially marketable. Part of that was Gary Patterson's fall. And I think we have to recognize that different people are motivated by different things. I don't think you necessarily have to think if I can't offer legally or otherwise 100 grand in NIL deals, we're going to get left behind. You know, it's your T.C. If you're Texas A and football, I understand that's like a different world than college athletics generally. But if I was a coach, I would just think, what is it I can tell a recruit that our school can offer an education instructor. And we can just point to what other people are doing. I am skeptical when I hear people say this is, it's just, it's only about finances because that part of the equation's always been there. And just like with other jobs, money isn't always the number one reason why we pick a job or why we're enrolled in a school is an undergraduate degree. We can't be the case now. Yeah, no, that's a great point that, you know, in somebody, you talk about work satisfaction or what they went out of a job. Usually the top two things are, you know, recognition and, you know, and then some other intangibles that doesn't always come down to money. You also bring up something interesting, again, going back to that midsize smaller school scenario within NIL that I've had division three athletic directors talk with me about, you know, because we wrote some articles and recommendations about, you know, how this is going to potentially positively affect smaller schools. And the point that I was making to them is if they can do, maybe this is a version of what you're describing in the past is the BYU doing, you know, going to their local Chamber of Commerce, you know, in that small college town that did, you know, not big outside of the city limits. You know, in terms of the, the reach that an athlete might have, but within that city limits for the local card dealership to put up the billboard with. The women's basketball team on it and each one of those players, you know, gets, you know, a small little advertising fee for for, you know, they're them being on the billboard. If you could go to that small, smaller to medium size school athlete and say, look, I don't know what every else is talking about, but you know, when you come here, we have this thing with, you know, the, the auto dealer or the, you know, whatever business and you're going to be on there. It's going to be an extra 500 bucks in the point being that our, our community really cares about our school. You're going to be it's big time here within our community. You're going to be noticed and valued. And yeah, so that's not a lot of money, but it kind of goes to the point you were making that that compared with a smaller medium size school that isn't doing anything that isn't giving any kind of a story out to that athlete is to why in this, if we're talking about NIL, if that's one of the boxes that they're checking and comparing other schools. That's a very low bar to clear to be the competitor potentially if that's that could be the tiebreaker in a lot of a lot of scenarios, but I don't see a lot of schools doing that. And what I hear you saying just from your observation, your conversations is that they feel like I just don't have the manpower or expertise and I don't know where to start fair statement. I think that is a fair statement and I think everyone is talking specifically about division three, I think there's another component that's that's worth flagging in this world because what you're describing about, you know, getting getting an auto dealership to put something up. I can definitely think of some communities where I think you could do that. I think you could I think that you could do that in Mount Union. You could do that with with Mary heart and Baylor. You can you can do that probably with in a division to with Southern Indiana or a couple other places. But you know, I grew up in Ohio and that's a big division three state and a lot of those institutions. You do not have that kind of community athletic support. So I but but I think there's a way you can still spend this as an athletic department potentially as a positive. So let's think about a school like case Western reserve, which is, you know, that's in Cleveland. That's a division three schools. Decent Athletic League, but it's mostly known as an engineering school of summary now. It's very it's a very academically selective great business school. You're down the street in the Cleveland clinic. Even if case Western reserve makes the division three playoffs, I would and this is no disrespect to any Spartans who might be listening to this. Like I would say like your visibility throughout Greater Cleveland is like you're not even in the top 10. Sure. But one of the great things about name image likeness is that as an athlete, you are now free to enter commercial relationships, even for things that have nothing to do with with you being an athlete. So if I'm a case to indulge in maybe a stereotype here, you might not have an athlete with an Instagram following a 50,000. You might have one with a Twitch following of that much. People who are really in the streaming games. People who are musicians, people who have Etsy shops, people who have followings in businesses independent of their identity as an athlete. So you might be able to say that in case look, am I going to get you a billboard for 40 with you and you know, throw on a football? No, I'm sorry, but that's probably not that's not why you come here if you want that go to John Carroll or go to a max school. But we got a great business school here. And if you also love developing or coding or playing DDR or or something else, we have facilities here that can help develop you and help grow that in other ways. And you might actually make more money than the person I'm not. And that might be something for a more academically oriented school that that you that you help pitch. Right. You're talking about all this map and the you know that as you were describing that and going through that scenario, I thought, wow, there's there's probably 80% of coaches and these who just heard you say that they have no idea what Twitch is. They have no idea. Yeah, you know, even the term what an influencer actually is and what I say when it's one of the problems, sort of if you go to the NIL 2.0 roll out of, you know, how how to how to coaches and departments do this better. And really start taking advantage of it. Now that it is a sort of in the in the landscape part of the fabric is the athlete comes into that student athlete relationship with a college. What we find with freshmen sophomores, especially is that most of the vast vast majority aren't going to take the lead in knocking on the 80 or the coaches door or anybody in a compliance office say, hey, I really want to be taking advantage of NIL at your school. How do I do that? They're just not going to do that. They don't know how or do just, you know, they're shy freshmen. We all remember what we were like at 17 or 18 stepping on that. We're not going to do that. Huge change. That absolutely in that combined with a coach or an AD, not knowing some of these little, you know, sub sex of of, you know, the promotional or online world. Sure. That's the recipe for disaster. That's where there's this gulch in between them that somebody has to figure out how to how to cross it. Well, it has to be the coach, the AD, the college to set up that relationship. I guess my question, I think that's more of a statement or an observation, but the question I guess I'll ask for it is, what is the solution? If we look at like where do colleges go from here, now that NIL is a part of this, using some of these examples that you've kind of gone over, how do they, how does that coach that AD who doesn't really know about Twitch? And, you know, hopefully by now, if they're listening to the podcast, as they're listening to it, they will have Googled what Twitch is. So they were starting to, they're reading it right now as they're listening to us. But, so how do they do it? I think they're both, they're both part of your sin. I don't know. You're right. And that's why I look at this and say, this is an inefficient marketplace. And it's going to take some time. So I guess my first thing I would say is, if you're an AD, you really probably should know with Twitch is at this point. And, you know, talk to one of your junior staffers or give me a call. I'll give you my email here at the end and not just Twitch, but, but other following me following. I think what I would think here if I'm an AD or a coach, particularly if I'm at a smaller school, I'm thinking, I want my teams to be athletically successful. And I want my athletes to develop and grow as multifaceted human beings. And I have a business reason for that too, because if they come and they develop lots of different relationships in my community and develop a personal identity independent of just being an athlete. Well, one, I like my chances of them graduating better even if they get hurt or if they have a bad experience with athletics, they're going to come back. They're going to be more involved with this university. And I can hit them up for fundraising. fundraising. Like if you want to look at this just for me pure. you know, self-interest thing, but also as a human being. And I think if you're a coach, you like to see people grow and develop and you want to be a positive influence in their lives. And I would look at this with NIL as an extension of that. This, if helping people who develop as full humans, will help your program. And so I think, I think in some of these initial meetings, like that's, I would want to make sure that I am not putting so much on my athletes that they feel like they can't have relationships with other clubs or take academically demanding or unique coursework or think about developing themselves in other ways. And as a coach, I don't think as a coach, you need to understand how the UGAME streaming works or how to sell things on Etsy or the nuts and bolts of those. I think that will be too much to ask on somebody. But I think the ideal world is I may not know how to help you reach all of those goals, but I can help you find the person who would, particularly with-- Just setting up that network like you talked about earlier. Exactly. So at a larger school, that might be literally somebody's job in the athletic department. And I would, I would, it's a smaller school, whether you're at like SIO, you know, Southern Illinois Edwardsville or Eastern Illinois or I don't know, some directional to Mexico. Then it's just like what am I doing as an department to make sure I'm connected with other people on campus? So I know, hey, I've got some of these into eSports. Well, here's our eSports team or here's somebody with that community. Here's our music school. Here's somebody that knows about starting a small business. And then as so many of these coaches and athletic departments will bring in outside people to talk with their athletes, I think you should have people to talk about financial planning. You should have people to talk about the law or about personal development or maybe exercise science or something. But then, you know, somebody who knows the internet really well, I think it's smart too. To bring in and literally lay some of these things out. And you know, if you decide you don't want to go up, sell a bunch of things online, that's fine. Like you don't have to. Chances are you're probably not going to make it ton of money. And there's other ways for you to make money with NIL. You can coach. You can, you can go back home to Lincoln County, Ohio and sell autographs at the Indian Mount Mall to people, right? You can, you can do some of these other things. Right. And I think a lot of it's just a lack of imagination. Because they have a lot of these sub communities are unfamiliar. I, you know, kind of going back, what you, something you mentioned like 20 minutes ago, right? Like, I've joked about this, but my publication has written way more about you, comfortable, but it has Alabama football. It's not a publication that's going to reach 250,000 people every time I publish a newsletter. The, before talking to you, the last thing I did was, was writing about Missouri Valley Conference in expansion and division two schools that may end up joining the Ohio Valley. And for me, the thinking is, I don't need to reach a bunch of people. I need to reach a very certain segment of people who are going to be really connected and really invest in what I have to say. And for me, that's athletic department personnel, that's coaches, that's athletes, that's academics, and it weren't that I say with deep love in my heart, gigantic nerds. Like, there's people who don't work in this industry who are going to read about something that Southern Illinois Edwardsville might end up doing. And the cool thing about athletes is that all of them have some of those kind of stuff communities. Whether that's people on their own hometowns, people very invested in their Olympic sport, people in their faith community, their ethnic identity, their fraternity, some other kind of thing in there, where they are an expert in that space. And if you go deep in there and you start dedicate your time and find a way to reach people in that space and build a community with them, not only can you make a little bit of money, but you can build yourself up professionally. That's the cool thing about all of this. And that's what I think we're trying to hope and help athletes and admins and brands and going to athletes understand. So two more topics that I want to get to before we round out the conversation, that I think are important to both coaches and athletic directors at all levels. Number one, or the first thing that I wanted to ask you about, you have this scenario where NIL is happening on one side of the spectrum in college athletics. Along with that, and so they're disassociated in a way, you have the transfer portal. You have, and that can be at a small school, at a large school, we're seeing this quiet crisis on college campus athletic departments arise where, man, we're seeing our attrition rates are going way up. We're losing kids, we're having transfers. Yeah, we're getting some, but we're losing an alarming number. So I'm wondering, have you seen any department do this or any evidence that it could be done where an NIL relationship where an athlete feels like they're plugged in, they're getting support for whether it's small dollars, big dollars, or just they see that the department is sort of on their side and being an advocate for this new right that they have. Has that affected transfer rates in any way, shape, or form that you've seen, Oregon, is it one of those things that's just too early to really even tell? It's a great question. I do think it's a little early for me to make a really definitive statement. You know, what I can say is that although I'm sure that we'll probably have coaches to give feedback saying, of course, this has happened. I'm sure it is. There's very little NCAA regulation about this, but one of the few rules that they do have is an NIL deal cannot be explicitly paid for play, and it cannot be used formally as an to induce an athlete to go somewhere. So when you see Charlie Batch get on Twitter saying, I'll pay a million bucks if Kale Williams transfers to Eastern Michigan, well, that makes into the world's dumbest criminal because like that is not only does that violate NCAA law, but actually probably violates if not Michigan state law other states, other state laws, such that you're trying to do that. So, well, I was really saying it as an incentive to switch, but more like the athlete, just as I feel like school A is doing anything, there's no opportunity, they look over at school B and say, I see some athletes doing some stuff over there. I've heard some stories. I want to go there. That could very much be a thing. Again, I'm sure there are coaches who are saying that even if the data doesn't necessarily back that up or if it's too early. And I think with the portal, what this speaks to and I understand the frustration here is that it does require a cultural shift at all levels to continuously recruit your athletes. And we have to remember, and that didn't get so important for me in the media here too, sometimes we forget this, that 20-year-olds don't always act super rational. And we sometimes would project, I think, our middle-aged thinking onto the thinking of a 19-20-21-year-old. So I might be just looking to transfer because their girlfriend dumped them. Or because they struggle in one class or because being 20 is really hard. And it isn't always just because somebody is offering me a briefcase full of money to go somewhere else. So I'm sure that that does have. So those are regular conversations that all coaches have to have about being supported and welcomed in this alignment with your goals athletically, spiritually, academically, financially, maybe part of that for somebody that's in there. For sure. The last thing I wanted to bring up is something actually that you mentioned you're starting to look into or starting to track moving forward, which is again why I think people and coaches ADs, especially should read your column and the newsletter and the articles that you put out, which is the, with NIL and just IRS oversight, the growing IRS question about how does stuff get reported? What is the impact to a student athlete? Our college is aware of how this could positively or negatively affect an athlete if they don't manage the financial relationship correctly. What are you starting to see on the IRS front when it comes to NIL? How does that impact the athlete as well as the athletic department? Yeah, I honestly think I wrote about this. I did a newsletter a couple weeks ago about what my predictions for 2022 were. And the one that I got the most feedback on was saying like, I think the IRS could be a much bigger force at NIL for this year. And I think that's for a couple of reasons because it's easy to think, it doesn't only matter what the NCAA says that can't only force anything, those investigations take five years like who cares. But they're not the only regulatory body that might care about some of these. So from an athlete's perspective, I think this is important because particularly in the very early days of NIL when a lot of schools weren't totally certain what the rules are going to be until like 12 hours before something from an inapolis came out that maybe not everybody who signed deals in July and early August got W9s or knew exactly what they needed to report. And then they are going to have to sit down and do their taxes. And I imagine we're going to see some tweets about people getting letters because they didn't report even relatively small things. And you know, cynically, it's easier for the IRS to go after somebody who owes 900 bucks and it is for somebody who goes, "Oh, it was 900,000." So you really have to be careful. I got deemed on this when I was 21. When I was working as a contractor somewhere, I didn't know any better and ended up having to pay a really big bill later in my 20s. So I think that's an issue. And I would recommend to every athlete. If you were planning on making more than 500 bucks doing this, get a CPA report, report everything. And especially because you might be doing deals with somebody outside your state, there's a lot of things that I wouldn't trust Google on this, like, leave a tour for. And trust me, as a reporter who's been a good entrepreneur for a while, you don't want to mess with this stuff. The other issue, I think, would be with potentially some of these collectives that Indiana has one of these and Florida and Texas and a few other ones, where a third-party entity might pitch itself as a non-profit that seeks to distribute NIL money through charitable causes. This is what the horns with hard thing is with Texas. I mentioned there might be some other ones. And I've talked to, I'm writing about this soon. I've talked to a couple of professors who studied nonprofit accounting. Most said, I'm not certain that the IRS is gonna be okay with some of these things. Or that will view, name him, would you like to orient an enterprise as charitable rather than just paying for goods and services? If it turns out for that is the case, that would be a concern, I think, for a power five athletic department, because one of the reasons you were able to ask people for big checks for your big projects, is 'cause that's tax deductible. And if you are a booster, suddenly you have a way that you can give money directly to an athlete and enjoy the same tax protection that you wanted to give to a volleyball facility, that could be, a school could lose money from donations. Whereas right now, if you have to give money to the athlete and it has to be through your business, and you write that off on a different tax level, and there's a different paperwork thing, I don't think you're really competing for the same amount of money. So that's also something to monitor here. For the Williams and the Western Florida's of the world, I think they're gonna be fine for the Oregon State. So the world's like, that could potentially be an issue, because there, you're gonna miss three, if your donation pool is $2 million short, like that becomes a big deal. - Right, right. Just whatever young journalist wants to focus on, you know what you dreamed about talking to professors about nonprofit accounting. - I did this, Matt. - I did this. - I've made that joke a couple of times, right? But that's the whole purpose of this publication is, you gotta dig it really into the weeds. I didn't think I was gonna need to write about epidemiology. I got a C-biology. I became a journalist in part because I was bad at math, and it wasn't great at physical sciences. And what has been the major stories? It's been accounting, taxes, and contagious diseases. - Yeah, that's what we gotta do. - You're talking to a communications major, so I can't even print. So last thing, really quickly, we talked about, we're looking back a year, you mentioned some predictions you did for 2020. Can you jump ahead five years and make at least one or two predictions about what, where are we seeing in IEL, both at the small and large college level, what's gone right, what's gone wrong, so that we can replay this in January of 2027, or someone's listening to a replay of this, you're on the spot. What do you give me some ideas about where, where does all this end up going? - I actually, I think I'm most bullish about the growth of name image likeness, completely independent of influencer marketing. The majority of the deals that we're talking about now are through an athlete promoting something on social media. And part of that is, 'cause that's what the marketplaces are focused on, that's the lowest barrier to entry, but those aren't the only things, right? And whether you're at a small school or a big school, when every single athlete has, no matter how good you are, you're an expert at playing your sport. And there hasn't been a tech solution or a logistical solution, I think, to scaling, monetizing that experience. There's a lot of high schools, all at AAU clubs and private clubs all over the country that would really benefit from having college athletes come in and help run clinics. I'm here in Chicago, and where we don't have as many swimming pools and we don't have as many tennis pros, and we don't add a lot of Olympic sport information is lacking, like my local high school here would absolutely pay for that. Or a third party would pay for you for someone to come in and teach kids on the West Side of Chicago, how to play volleyball. And that's something that across the board, I think athletes can benefit from. And I think there's more continued growth about their ability to monetize things that are independent of their identity as athletes. We've seen this a little bit with athletes experimenting as musicians, but, or I think there's a few people that are selling art, I think that will continue to grow, whether that's in speaking arrangements, whether that's in teaching classes and other subject matters, the tech and the infrastructure hasn't met up with that yet. And I think whoever figures that out is going to make a lot of money and help a bunch of other athletes make a lot of money too. - And that's how we wrapped up the conversation with Matt Brown from Extra Points at Matt Brown EP on Twitter, fantastic follow if you're a college coach. And look, the big takeaway I want you to leave with is that no matter what level you're at, how or if you're using any aspects of NIL in your department yet on your team, this is something that's going to impact college athletics for a long time. It's going to be continuing to change the way that athletes make their choices and whether or not they stay in programs, everything that got talked about in the episode today, it's going to impact you. The reason I wanted to bring this up and ensure it with you is because I want you, if you're listening to this podcast, to be one of the smart coaches in the know that is acting ahead of time, that is setting the tone that is out in front of everybody else that's a competitor of yours and not just simply reacting to something when it happens. And NIL is definitely one of these C changes in college athletics that's going to keep changing, keep evolving, and I just want to make sure that you were on the forefront of that. So thanks for listening. We invite you to go to extra points with Matt Brown. We'll link to that. Like I said, if you follow him on Twitter, you'll get all of his articles that he puts out. The other thing that I want to encourage you to do is look into the resources that we offer coaches at dantutor.com free and otherwise. There's a lot of free resources, a lot of low cost options for learning, becoming a smarter recruiter, looking by topic. Maybe there's an area of weakness for you. Go to the blog and look up over 1,000 different articles by name and topic. And it's just a great resource that we love providing for college coaches. And we know many of you have already been there, but we've been new listeners all the time. So we want to make sure that we direct them over there as well. So if that's you, check it out. And also look into the NCRC summer conference that's coming up as well as the way that we can work with you as a client, all sorts of good stuff that will positively impact your program. But for right now, that's going to wrap it up. We'll be back with more here on the college recruiting weekly podcast soon with a new episode. So look for that. And in the meantime, go out, be a great recruiter, recruit intelligently, and keep listening. Thanks, coach. Have a great day. The college recruiting weekly podcast is a production of Tudor Collegiate Strategies. For more information on everything, we provide college coaches, athletic directors, and the rest of your campus. Visit dantudor.com. Thanks for listening, coach. [MUSIC PLAYING]