Daevin Hobbs ranked among the nation’s top 40 football recruits in the 2023 class. After signing with Tennessee, he signed a name, image and likeness deal with Spyre Sports Group, a collective affiliated with the Volunteers.
His father, Dennis Hobbs, though, remained skeptical. What should a freshman defensive lineman be able to earn? What was real and what wasn’t?
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“It was still kind of new, and when you’re saying this and I’m gonna do this, is that really going to happen? I was like, ‘We’ll believe it when you get your first check,’” Dennis Hobbs said.
Once it hit the bank account — Dennis declined to reveal the amount of the deal — the Hobbs were believers. But they still don’t know how Daevin’s NIL deal compares to other players at Tennessee and beyond. And in the fledgling NIL world, that’s overwhelmingly common — and largely by design.
In college football, information has always been a form of currency, an edge in competition. That’s even more true in the world of collectives, many of which put attractive packages in front of transfers or recruits to show them what can be possible on their campuses. Not all collectives are active in recruiting, but many are. Schools aren’t allowed to pay athletes, but a vacuum of NIL legislation and enforcement has led to de facto pay-for-play. In return, athletes agree to make some kind of appearances, sign autographs, post on social media or the like.
“NIL is 80 percent of recruiting, 75 percent of recruiting. To think that it’s not is naive, but the way you do it is different,” Arizona State coach Kenny Dillingham told reporters this summer.
In recruiting — and once a player gets on campus — what is a fair deal? What is a player truly worth, and how does he learn that? How do collectives know?
Finding that information isn’t easy, in part because many contracts with collectives come with nondisclosure agreements. Any seemingly solid number — in July, Maryland quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa revealed that he turned down $1.5 million from an unnamed SEC team to transfer — is devoured with interest. Eight of 15 high school recruits polled anonymously at the Under Armour All-America Game said they were offered substantial NIL deals, including a $1 million offer on signing day, $3.2 million over four years and $3 million over four years.
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Companies have sprouted that make attempts at cultivating data or projecting NIL value.
But people who work in the NIL space say they are swamped with misinformation. There are stories about collectives under-delivering or not delivering on promises once players reach campus. The most high-profile example was 2023 quarterback Jaden Rashada, who signed a deal with Florida’s collective worth $13.85 million. He didn’t receive a cent and later transferred to Arizona State.
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“Everybody’s trying to figure it out as we go along. The hard thing for everybody is what’s real and what’s not real,” TCU coach Sonny Dykes said. “My discomfort is for those young people choosing schools based on outright lies in some cases, or at the very least, a misunderstanding. We’ve gotten to this point because we’ve taken advantage of student-athletes for years and years and years and not provided for them financially. And now it’s gotten even worse.”
New NCAA president Charlie Baker has proposed that every NIL deal is entered into a public database. But the push for transparency is not unanimous. Some say it could cause other problems, including in the locker room.
Why it’s hush-hush
The biggest barrier to information is simple: It’s written in the contract. Often, deals with collectives include a nondisclosure agreement.
Kerry Small, one of the founders of a Penn State-focused collective named Success With Honor that recently merged into a group called Happy Valley United, said his group has NDAs for 100 percent of its deals to protect locker room dynamics and to maintain a competitive edge over competing collectives.
“We don’t really want the athletes talking about it. One coach, his athlete had a high-profile deal, and that coach was worried it would impact the locker room,” Small said. “If people go out and talk about their deals, whether they’re real or inflated, it affects the market.”
When Small spoke with The Athletic before the merger of Penn State’s collectives, he said 390 athletes had signed agreements.
Zero had given pushback on the practice of NDAs.
“There was a concern about how athletes would take it, but they’ve embraced that,” Small said. “Overwhelmingly, they get it. One guy said, ‘I don’t really want anyone to know what I’m making.’ There’s no advantage to that. It protects them. When friends ask, they can point to the NDA. It protects the athlete and the ecosystems.”
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It’s unclear if a collective would actively enforce NDAs. Inside athletic departments, athletes are required to register their NIL deals, but disclosure forms can often be bare bones, and many schools don’t require athletes to disclose the financial terms. Some forms simply ask athletes to disclose the business they’ve signed with and the deliverable they complete so schools can have written proof the deal is compliant with NCAA rules.
“It’s difficult from a collective standpoint because you just don’t know. There’s no registry, no database. You can’t compare anything to anybody else,” said Terry Prentice, an associate athletic director who ran Arkansas’ NIL activities until taking a similar job at Mississippi State earlier this month.
It’s a different scenario when outside companies are involved, perhaps paying athletes to star in an ad or endorse their products — how some believed NIL would function when it became part of college sports in 2021.
“We know those people, and I see every single agreement coming through,” Prentice said. “So I know restaurants do a couple thousand bucks, they’ll add some gift cards. A car dealership may do a car or a monthly payment of $1,000 or $2,000 a month. I have a decent handle on things from a brand side, but less so with collectives.”
At camps or recruiting events, when players are asked about the impact of money on their recruitment, the most common reaction is clamming up or shrugging it off. The same is often true of players and their transfer decisions. A recent poll of seven Tennessee players during the Vols’ local media day produced seven non-answers.
There’s still a stigma around choosing a school based on what could be financially possible, and with the ever-evolving rules, no one is quite sure how open they can or should be.
The secrecy changes to an extent once inside the locker room, coaches say.
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“Managing the locker room is one of the things that keeps you up at night,” Auburn coach Hugh Freeze said at SEC media days when asked about players earning NIL opportunities.
Players with the most on-field production don’t always earn the most money. That’s the case in professional sports, too, but it’s a brand-new dynamic to college locker rooms.
“These players talk,” Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said at SEC media days. “They know what players get paid, and you’ve got dynamics around the country of, ‘Oh, I’ve been here, I’d made these plays and that guy just got here and he’s going to make more money than me?’”
But sometimes, talk is cheap. Deals can be exaggerated and players can pursue deals that are unrealistic. A player might feel undervalued, but until a transfer portal window opens, his leverage is minimal at best. And he might or might not be underpaid.
Piecing it together
But for all the lack of information, some have a better grasp on the market than others.
“I would say I have the single best idea of market value in the world as it relates to NIL,” said Jason Belzer, who founded Student Athlete NIL, a company that helps operate more than 30 collectives nationwide and represents around 1,000 athletes.
He has access to as much data as anyone because his company negotiates and executes NIL contracts. But that still might not answer — definitively — what a player’s true value may be.
“Market value is all over the place,” he said. “If you operate in a vacuum, it’s basically like a silent auction.”
How much are student-athletes really making?
At today’s @NILSummit, we released the first ever look into how much football and basketball student-athletes are making based on data from over 30 @AthleteNIL collectives and more than 1000 student-athletes we’ve contracted with. pic.twitter.com/HwpNlaF9xc
— Jason Belzer (@JasonBelzer) June 4, 2023
Belzer said 20 to 25 college athletes are earning seven figures annually in pay from collectives.
In general, he said the market is overpaying players and will continue to do so because of the lack of transparency in “bids” to earn players’ services.
“Once we bring in a school, we can say here’s your average payroll based on position, years, and we’re usually pretty accurate to what a kid is making,” Belzer said. “That doesn’t mean a school won’t come in and pay double because they really want that player.”
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Belzer pointed to NIL valuation projections available on the internet. For many players, that’s the only online resource tied to a tangible number.
“A kid comes in and thinks he’s worth X, and it’s a rude awakening when he realizes it’s not the reality,” Belzer said. “They’re just not real.”
Based on Belzer’s data, the top 50 percent of Power 5 collectives spend around $3 million annually on football. The bottom half of Power 5 collectives average around $1.5 million on their roster.
For some collectives, like the Texas Tech-affiliated Matador Club, the non-profit entity has made public that each football player on the roster will receive at least $25,000 a year, using an annual budget of $8 million, about half of which goes to football.
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Belzer said collective models relying on donors to cut big checks is unsustainable. If the money is coming in, the collectives Belzer works with will take it, but he is driving collectives to press harder on monthly memberships with benefits for members, as well as business sponsorships. If he can find 10,000 fans willing to chip in $25 a month, a collective can have $3 million annually on hand to disperse to players and be competitive in the marketplace.
Schools and collectives have found another source of information: transfer athletes, though by the time they land at a new school, their information can already be dated.
“They’ll tell us. They share. It helps,” Prentice said. “You hear about an offer or hear from a kid transferring in that’s similarly situated at a school in our league or another conference, and they’ll tell you what they were getting (from a collective).”
What’s next?
There’s a shortcut to making this information readily available — Baker’s proposal that every NIL deal is entered into a public database featuring the player, business and financial terms.
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The NCAA president says that would also help give leaders an understanding of what percentage of money is going to male athletes versus female athletes.
At Texas A&M, male athletes earned more than $8.4 million in NIL money from Aug. 1, 2022, to June 11, 2023, with the majority going to football players, according to records obtained by The Bryan-College Station Eagle. Female athletes earned $134,661 over the same span. Male NIL earnings at Texas A&M more than doubled year over year, while female earnings rose 39.2 percent.
“Some of the behavior that’s currently going on out there would change, and that would be a really good thing, too,” Baker said.
“What we have now is no visibility into the market at all, which puts everybody at risk.”
Belzer is in favor of a database and offered to provide Baker and the NCAA with the data he’s uncovered working closely with collectives and athletes. Baker hasn’t taken him up on his offer, Belzer said.
But some collectives with deep pockets and access to information don’t want to sacrifice the competitive advantage that comes with both.
“As much as it would make my life easier, and donors want to know more, but the truth of the matter is that if athletes are central to this, it’s not in their best interest to have that out there,” Small said.
Dennis Hobbs also didn’t like the idea of a database.
“They’re kids,” he said. “You don’t want controversy in the locker room or people around the country knowing. There shouldn’t be a public record.”
Over time, the market may settle and the value of NIL deals with collectives may become more transparent.
But until then, information will be scarce.
(Photo of West Virginia at Penn State: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
