Have We Found The Perfect NIL CollectIve?

First appeared in BOXSCORE

By Aron Solomon

There are probably more artful ways of saying it, but these early days for what has become the straight-up pay-to-play of the highest level of college sports haven’t been great.

A quick history lesson:

In the pre-NIL days, you had guys who owned car dealerships and local banks, and a bunch of businesses. Give money illegally, under the table, for big-time athletes to play at big-time schools.

That’s pretty much exactly how it worked.

Play football for us and your mom gets to drive this turquoise Thunderbird. You love your mom, right? She loves a Thunderbird, right?

No matter how we choose to dress it up, the idea of a “collective” to broker NIL deals is the same thing, as events by the recent Florida recruiting nightmare involving the NIL collective for the Florida Gators football team.

As I wrote two weeks ago on this exact issue:

“Let’s step back for a second and be honest about what NIL rules are:

A way to legalize illegal activities that have existed in college sports for generations.”

Charlie Cartwright, a Florida attorney, had this observation on the recent $13.8 million implosion of the deal to bring recruit Jaden Rashada to the University of Florida:

“High school students being paid tens of millions of dollars to play college football is always going to have a legal dimension to it. These kinds of NIL deals will often attract people who aren’t looking out for the best interest of the student-athlete.”

He adds an important point about recruiting being nationally for the athletes while the schools are spread across the nation:

“That each state has its own laws that are often different from other states has led to even more chaos.”

But since the NIL ship has absolutely sailed, there’s no point in looking back at the shore, argue its loudest proponents.

If you think about the actual best a NIL collective can possibly be, it wouldn’t just be owners of businesses; it would be an authentic collective with many people who have different expertise and are actually looking out for the best (financial) interest of the athlete as they want to see a successful program.

Enter Tommy.

While time will tell if the Tommy Group, a brand-new Los Angeles-based NIL collective, actually does the impossible – looks out for the athletes – any group would aspire to have the pedigree of this collective.

Fronted by Keyshawn Johnson, former NFL superstar and one of the best sports talk radio people in history, is the driving force pulling this together. The rest of the collective comprises former USC Trojan athletes, people with expertise in media and hospitality, and then the traditional kinds of money backers that support NIL collectives and, before that, booster clubs.

Tommy is launching in the context of USC having their own in-house NIL collective, BLVD, that comes with a slick website and a “NIL for USC Student Athletes” billing. This was expressly created to prevent other NIL collectives from coming to USC.

Well that didn’t work, as Student Body Right quickly came to USC and then left just as quickly, in part because of the passing of its co-founder and in part because of how difficult it is to compete with an in-house collective.

And now the Tommy Group arrives to challenge the primacy of USC’s own in-house operation.

What does this really show about the NIL business? That the potential money here is so massive in, as BLVD says on their site, “NIL opportunities and resources in the new era of collegiate athletics.”

What we need to keep in mind is that this new era is really new. The kinds of experimentation needed to get NIL right is going to cause friction, which is part of what makes the USC situation so interesting.

We don’t yet have any answers to the question of whether the best way to do NIL is to have any university involvement. Maybe the best model is the university vetting the entire process and putting their seal of approval on the best collectives.

After all, there is a strong argument to be made that collectives such as Tommy Group are much better-positioned to do NIL than any university-affiliated group.

And as we saw in Florida, there is a fine argument to be made that when NIL goes wrong, as it frequently will, the more distance between the situation and the university the better for all involved. I discussed NIL and the launch of Tommy Group on ESPN this week, so I’d encourage you to listen for more.

About Aron Solomon

A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the Chief Legal Analyst for Esquire Digital and the Editor-in-Chief for Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Venture Beat, The Independent, Fortune China, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, YouTube, NewsBreak, and many other leading publications.