Chad’s On Campus - The Cost of NIL
By Chad Chatlos, Managing Director at TurnkeyZRG
I am not sure that anything in the last decade has changed the college athletics landscape more than Name, Image and Likeness, and we are still at the very beginning of what is to come. For years, the NCAA has worked in conjunction with the membership to protect amateur athletics from becoming a “pay for play” model, and now, the guardrails have been removed and it has become chaos. Many are focused on the dollars that are being raised and committed to student-athletes for the use of their image, but we are already seeing other “costs” to this dramatic change, to include athletes de-committing or transferring from schools when they realize that what they thought they were going to receive in compensation isn’t meeting expectations.
From the outset, coaches and administrators were rightfully concerned with questions like...
How is this going to work?
How does this affect culture in the locker room?
How will donors and philanthropic giving be impacted?
Will student-athletes eventually become employees of the university?
How is this going to be monitored, reported, regulated?
What role does the Federal Government have with these issues?
Is this sustainable?
We have already seen that the schools with the most money in the collectives are not the ones having the most success on the field. Does that continue? Are athletes making their choices on where they can make the most money as opposed to what is the best school, coach, program for them to develop their skills? How much of the growing numbers in the transfer portal from major programs is attributed to NIL? How much tampering is going on between coaches to current players at other schools? How is the NCAA going to get in quickly and remedy the issue?
A lot of questions to be answered and many more than the ones I have listed above. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in 2023.
To hear more from Chad, click here.
ABOUT TURNKEYZRG
Founded in 1996, TurnkeyZRG is a highly specialized talent recruitment/executive search firm filling C-level, senior-level and mid-management level positions throughout sports, entertainment and media. Over the past 25 years, TurnkeyZRG has filled more than 1,400 positions throughout sports, entertainment and media. TurnkeyZRG helps teams, leagues, stadiums, arenas, theaters, college athletic departments, events, sponsors, agencies, media companies, private equity companies and other clients identify, recruit and hire the very best management talent. Turnkey now benefits from ZRG’s global footprint, full array of industry practice groups, data-driven, analytical search tools, and technology investment in changing the way executive search/talent recruiting is done. TurnkeyZRG becomes a tech-enabled disrupter of the prior executive search model. For more information about TurnkeyZRG, visit www.turnkeyzrg.com.