Nebraska AD Trev Alberts on NIL: ‘We’re never gonna be first, but we’re never gonna be last’

If Nebraska hopes to compete with the other powerhouse teams in the Big Ten, the Huskers are going to have to stay on top of their NIL game.

Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts is well aware of that.

“We’ll keep working on it,” Alberts said on the Huskers Radio Network on Monday night, via Inside Nebraska. “I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: We’re never gonna be first, but we’re never gonna be last.”

The Huskers have hired Jonathan Bateman to become the program’s first-ever in-house director of NIL.

“I’ll tell you: I probably should’ve done this six months ago,” Alberts said of hiring Bateman as the NIL director. “You think about, well, six months isn’t very long, but the amount of change in six months is crazy. I just got a two-page document from Jonathan with an update on all the legal ramifications, all the advancements of where all these proceedings are going, what all the likely outcomes are going to be. … We have a dedicated person now that’s looking at everything from what other schools are doing, what our state law looks like, should we amend the state law.

“So making recommendations about how we best position not only ourselves but our collectives, our student-athletes to be successful. Because this is a highly evolving space, and we need to be a leader in it.”

While Alberts acknowledges that the current lack of regulations in place makes things difficult, he believes that things will ultimately work out in the NIL space.

“I think we have a good strategy in the NIL space,” Alberts said. “Really grateful for all of those who support us – the donors, our NIL collectives that support us. It’s important, to me, obviously you have to be focused on all of those types of things that the university holds near and dear, but at the same time doing everything that we can for our student-athletes and coaches to make sure we have a reasonable chance to be competitively successful.”