How Overtime Elite became a college basketball ally instead of a threat

Rob Dillingham of the Cold Hearts goes to the basket during an Overtime Elite league game on Friday, December 9th, 2022 at OTE Arena in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Adam Hagy/Overtime Elite)
By Kyle Tucker and Brendan Marks
Feb 13, 2023

In May 2021, John Calipari was ranting to reporters, as he is wont to do, about the future of college basketball and what was best for the sport (especially his Kentucky program). At the time, an upstart professional league, Overtime Elite, was gobbling up five-star high school talent by offering six-figure contracts, and this obviously had the Hall of Fame coach’s attention.

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“We are not just competing against other colleges. We are competing against that too,” Calipari said then. “Because the kids they are going after are the kids that we would recruit.”

Like the five-star Thompson twins, Amen and Ausar, who would become the face of OTE over the last two years and who will likely both be NBA Draft lottery picks in June. They recently told The Athletic that Kentucky was once their dream school, but being able to turn pro before their senior year in high school changed the dream. So there was Calipari two summers ago, workshopping his competing pitch in real time, citing TV ratings and the value of branding when you play for a highly visible blueblood versus a nascent pro league with (at the time) no TV deal. He’d just held a staff retreat where strategizing how to combat this new recruiting threat was a major topic.

Dan Porter, OTE’s co-founder and CEO, responded to Calipari’s comments on Twitter that day:

Less than two years later, Calipari visited OTE’s state-of-the-art, 103,000 square foot facility in midtown Atlanta to see five-star Kentucky signee Robert Dillingham, who is playing his senior high school season there. Calipari looked right into one of Overtime’s many, many cameras and gave a full-throated endorsement of the league and its developmental value. He basically filmed a free commercial for his one-time nemesis. In the blink of an eye, OTE went from foe to friend of college basketball.

“The structure and all that is needed to prepare a young man for college is there,” Calipari told The Athletic recently.

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Five-star Rob Dillingham needed Overtime Elite. Kentucky is happy he did

In Year 1, all of Overtime’s players (most of them still in high school) signed professional contracts and were paid handsomely, thus forfeiting their NCAA eligibility. Thanks in part to the passage of NIL legislation, which allows college athletes to profit from their own personal brand, Year 2 has brought a second option for OTE players. Now, they can either take the guaranteed money and be pros or sign as scholarship students of the league’s in-house academy, where educational expenses are covered and they’re free to pursue NIL deals to earn income, thus maintaining NCAA eligibility.

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A dozen players, including eight top-75 recruits from the 2023, 2024 and 2025 classes, chose the latter, turning Overtime Elite’s tricked-out building into a must-see attraction for college coaches. Three OTE players have already signed with schools for next season: Dillingham at Kentucky, Kanaan Carlyle at Stanford and Trey Parker at NC State. Naas Cunningham (2024) and Bryson Tiller (2025) are both top-five players being recruited by almost every major program. Coaches from Duke, Kansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Indiana, Michigan, Memphis, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, Louisville, LSU, Mississippi State and Ole Miss, just to name some, have stopped in to see what the fuss is about.

Now that they’re in a mutually beneficial relationship, college coaches can see the appeal of Overtime Elite. Backed by the big bucks of Jeff Bezos, the rapper Drake and a number of NBA players, including Kevin Durant and Devin Booker, OTE has everything in its building. There’s an accredited, NCAA-approved school. There’s a massive practice gym equipped with the same Noah System that most NBA teams use to track shots. There’s a modern weight room and nutrition center, a full-time therapist, a shot doctor and an accomplished coaching staff.

Introducing the scholarship option was “a game changer,” NC State coach Kevin Keatts says. He’s watched Wolfpack signee Parker blossom into a tantalizing prospect since joining that league. He started this season alongside UK’s Dillingham, then got traded to a team featuring the Thompson twins. Playing with and against a heap of blue-chip recruits, Parker has stood out with jaw-dropping athleticism and explosiveness — there might not be a more exciting finisher in OTE.

“Because of the fact that he’s played against some really good players and been in a system and they run it like a college or pro program, I think you get a kid who is a lot more prepared than he probably would be at a normal high school,” Keatts said. “I’ve seen him grow in areas where I really thought he needed to get better. He’ll have the experience of already being away from home, he’ll have the experience of already traveling, he’ll have the experience of playing with good players, and then obviously being in the classroom and everything else. Those are things that really help freshmen when they come in the door, where the adjustment is not as big as a guy who hasn’t been through some of that stuff.”

Kevin Ollie, a 13-year NBA vet who won two national titles (one as an assistant, one as head coach) at Connecticut, is head of coaching and basketball development. Dave Leitao, who spent 13 years as a head coach at DePaul and Virginia, coaches one of OTE’s teams. Ryan Gomes, an All-American at Providence and longtime NBA player, coaches another. Damien Wilkins, son of Gerald and nephew of Dominique, a former McDonald’s All-American and 10-year NBA veteran, is the general manager. College coaches appreciate the professionalism of the approach.

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“They came, they saw, they watched practice and the light bulb went off,” Porter said of college coaches. “Everything is done with an incredible amount of seriousness and rigor. So when you see the physical development, the skill development, the basketball IQ development — now we’re friends. It starts with seeing it, and then it goes to relationships, and then it goes to them feeling really good about players they’ve recruited since 10th or 11th grade being with us.

“And by the way, the opposite happens too. I sit down and talk to these coaches and I say, ‘What do you want to see when so-and-so steps on your campus?’ Then we fold that back into our curriculum. Our goal has always been for when our players make the NBA, people would say, ‘Oh, that’s an OTE player. They operate at a different level.’ That’s our goal with college coaches too. We want them to say, ‘Wow, that player got to my campus and he was ready.’”

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How Overtime Elite program aims to find its 'voice' in Year 2

Calipari and Porter have had multiple conversations, first to clear up misconceptions Porter says Calipari had about the league’s intentions. He worried that OTE would try to convince his signees to go pro and skip college, which Porter assured him won’t happen. Then Calipari shared the kinds of skills he would like to see developed and the emphasis on being a team player he hopes to see instilled in Dillingham and future Kentucky recruits with Overtime. Calipari liked that the league was already heavily focused on developing fully formed people, including mental health and financial literacy initiatives — and he was sold by their commitment to upholding players’ NCAA eligibility. OTE hired former NCAA investigator Tim Nevius as its vice president of regulatory affairs and athlete advocacy to be certain everything about its new scholarship program passes muster with college basketball’s governing body.

Nevius spent five years at the NCAA, where he was the lead investigator on the 2012 Ohio State “tattoo gate” case, which ultimately cost Jim Tressel his job and dragged several players through the mud for (in retrospect) laughably innocuous violations. That was a turning point for Nevius, who then switched sides, joining antitrust lawyer Jeff Kessler in the fight for athletes’ rights. He helped assemble the landmark class-action lawsuit Alston vs. NCAA, which led to a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in favor of college athletes in June 2021. That same year, Nevius gave a TEDx talk called “The exploitation of US college athletes.” After two years as outside counsel for Overtime, he moved in-house last year to help spearhead OTE’s move to the scholarship model. His job was dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.

“If the scholarship players joined a program that included professional players, what guardrails did we have to put in place to ensure they’re going to maintain their amateur status and be able to continue on to college?” Nevius said. “It’s fairly straightforward, because players are allowed to get their expenses paid for — what the NCAA calls ‘actual and necessary expenses,’ which are in connection with their basketball competition. Financial aid covers room, board, books, tuition, and then their actual necessary expenses related to basketball. The academic component was also a priority. Fortunately, OTE already prioritized academics, so it was really just making sure the program met initial NCAA requirements.”

Overtime’s academic program is registered and cleared with the NCAA’s eligibility center. In addition to poring over the rulebook, Nevius also had proactive conversations with his former employer at its Indianapolis headquarters and checked in with college compliance offices to be certain he wasn’t missing anything and everyone was comfortable with OTE’s new model.

“We felt very confident,” he said, “but of course we wanted to have a dialogue with the NCAA just to make sure they were aware of it and there were no misunderstandings or hidden pitfalls that we weren’t aware of.  Rules have been on the books for years about this, but something we wanted to be sure we were interpreting correctly was that it wasn’t going to be an issue to have high school kids on the same team with, in the same league as, players who were being paid as professionals.

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“The reception from almost everyone (in college programs) has been especially positive, because I think there’s a comfort they get from knowing that we are tracking everything, every step along the way.”

From OTE’s perspective, this evolution was an easy, obvious choice. It widens the talent pool the program can pick from, now that players don’t have to choose between them and going to college. As an added benefit, five-star players who sign with OTE can still be of great interest to massive and passionate college fan bases. The league has a new deal with Amazon Prime Video to stream its games, and now Kentucky fans have a reason to watch Dillingham go head-to-head with the NBA-ready Thompson twins.

“I don’t think that I had personally appreciated that or tuned into that as much, and then when I realized that signing certain players who are being followed by all these blogs — Kentucky Wire or whatever they’re called — it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s a whole other realm,” Porter said. “Because the reality is we have a couple players the audience knows and cares about, but the question we ask over and over again is why somebody should watch us. There has to be some story or some reason to watch, like that the Thompson twins are going to be the first lottery pick twins. So bringing all of those college fans into the tent has been a real plus. I can’t tell you I was intentional about it. It snuck up on me and hit me on the head, and then I woke up and realized, oh, yeah, that’s valuable.”

If getting Calipari’s blessing gave OTE credibility as a place to nurture elite players, landing a Stanford signee was a major win for the program’s academic reputation. Cardinal coach Jerod Haase echoed Calipari’s and Keatts’ sentiments about the growth he’s seen in top-50 recruit Carlyle’s game while at Overtime, but none of that matters if he can’t get into Stanford.

“Our admissions people obviously take that extremely seriously, and they did their own vetting process,” Haase said. “And then when I was there firsthand, I was extremely impressed with how they were handling it. They’ve clearly invested in the basketball part, but I think they’ve invested in the academic part, too, and made sure they’re offering a quality education and they’re doing it the right way.”

He probably never expected to be saying such a thing about a professional league that popped up seemingly overnight two years ago, born of a media company that earned millions of social media followers by posting mixtape-style viral video content. On the other hand, Haase sort of expects the unexpected when it comes to college basketball at this point.

“Everything’s changing, really minute by minute,” he said. “The last four or five years, the only thing that’s constant in our sport is that everything is changing.”

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Leitao used to be on the other side, coaching at a prestigious university whose leaders at that time would have no doubt turned their nose up at something ike OTE.

“You’re used to traveling down a certain path and now this new entity comes up and you don’t really know about it and you haven’t seen it, so the first thing you do is say, ehhhh, I don’t know about this,” Leitao said. “It’s a slow process to convince people that something new can be better, but there’s not a college coach that’s come through here that hasn’t raised their eyebrows in awe of what we’re doing. We had one coach who was just marveling, like, why wouldn’t a young man come here? There’s nothing like it in America.”

Overtime Elite’s co-founder Porter — the son of two college professors and nephew of a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a graduate of NYU and Princeton and the former head of digital at William Morris Endeavor talent agency — stops short of told-you-so self-congratulations. He’s just glad to see that his fledgling league is now viewed less like the enemy and more like just another part of the hoops ecosystem.

“It’s not just the coaches, by the way. It was all the college basketball writers on Twitter who just loved to smash us,” Porter said. “Ultimately, I never had any issue with college basketball, and I wasn’t trying to compete with them. I’m just trying to run my business. I’m a college basketball fan. I love the NCAA Tournament. I didn’t look at all these coaches and go, ‘I want to go head-to-head with them.’

“I’m really happy that we can be standing on the sidelines together with all the college coaches and I hope to work with as many as possible, and I hope that they feel like we deliver a great player to their ranks, and that’ll only strengthen our relationship.”

(Top photo of Kentucky signee Rob Dillingham: Courtesy Adam Hagy / Overtime Elite)

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