Left tackle Dan Moore of the Tennessee Titans can list all the sponsorship deals he has done as a pro on one hand: A few meet and greet opportunities when he was with the Steelers, a grill company that gave him some barbecue tools in exchange for his endorsement. No such thing, especially for someone playing his position. If he were in college — a talented offensive lineman with a chance to make his team a national contender — that might be different.
It is a business rebuilt to allow players to cash in on their name, image and likeness fame, one that pays exorbitant prices to athletes under the guise that the money isn’t a salary, but rather a payment for services the athletes provide through sponsorship deals. That’s the way many of the headline-grabbing six- and seven-figure payments that go to college players for so-called “third party NIL” can truly comport with the NCAA rulebook. And that rulebook — for all its rapid changes in recent years — refuses to do away with the fading notion that college athletes aren't pros who can be paid merely to show up and play.
One of these things is not like the other ... or is it? Mike McGlinchey, a ninth-year NFL right tackle with the Denver Broncos, has a contract worth $52 million in guaranteed money but he doesn’t have a sponsorship deal. That puts him in the majority of NFL offensive linemen, who either don’t need to work extra for more income or aren’t well-known enough to grab much more than a local deal or two.
Of the 20 biggest NFL endorsement deals listed by Sportico – a list that starts with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce at $32 million – not a single one belongs to a lineman. But in college, there’s Jordan Seaton, the five-star left tackle who was one of Deion Sanders’ biggest signings at Colorado, then left the Buffs to play at LSU. There, in the heart of SEC country, Seaton reportedly makes $4 million for pitching a national chain pharmacy, a fast-food restaurant, a personal finance firm and others.
It’s a far cry from what McGlinchey envisioned when NIL arrived five years ago; he graduated from Notre Dame long before the era of paying college players began. All of those amounts are less than what the top 10 college players make in sponsorships, according to On3, which tracks college NIL deals, none of which are disclosed by schools. It's a list that includes Seaton but does not include college football’s most widely recognizable name: Arch Manning, who reportedly took a pay cut this year to $2.5 million to help Texas beef up its roster.
Niklas Myhr, an associate professor at Chapman University and an expert in digital marketing, acknowledges the nod-nod, wink-wink element to all these NIL deals, but also thinks some of the numbers are the product of what he calls an “immature market.” “Basically, there is no mature market for 20-year-old amateur athletes the way there is for sneakers,” he said. Among the 14-month-old College Sports Commission’s top missions is making sure companies partnered with schools — “associated entities” — are paying players an amount within a “fair range of compensation” compared to what others might receive for the same services. The CSC also verifies that those companies are using the athlete’s NIL for a “valid business purpose” — i.e., to promote goods and services provided to the general public for profit, as opposed to hanging onto, or “warehousing,” the NIL rights for future use or having the player simply show up to an event to shake hands.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
