Memphis AD Laird Veatch asks boosters for more NIL money, warns teams could lose players

Memphis athletic director Laird Veatch sent a email Thursday to the university's highest profile boosters, known as Ambassadors, requesting more money for name, image and likeness funds in hopes of keeping athletes at the university.

The Ambassadors are a part of the Tiger Leadership Circle that functions as the athletic department's premier student-athlete support program and have donated at least $500,000 or more to the Memphis Athletics Fund over a five-year period. An ambassador who received the email confirmed its contents to The Commercial Appeal.

"The competitive landscape of college athletics is changing. We need your help," Veatch wrote in the email. "The NIL era is here (and) whether the college athletics model will continue to evolve, we believe this will likely be our new normal for at least for the next few years. And while we may not all like what NIL has brought to college athletics, it does presented an opportunity for our programs and our student-athletes."

"To put it directly, we need to embrace NIL in order to remain competitive. To put it even more directly, if we don't start embracing NIL by December, we may very well start losing players to other programs."

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December 21-23 is the start of the early signing period for football. Schools typically announce recruits who have signed their letters of intent on the first day of the period.

Veatch also asked boosters to consider what other schools have done with NIL. Fellow American Athletic Conference school SMU, for example, has an NIL collective that, according to On3Sports, will pay each member of the football and men's basketball teams $36,000 per year, which comes out to $3.5 million annually.

"I'm sure you heard and read about donors at some other schools providing several million dollars to student-athletes," Veatch's email continued. "To be clear, we're not asking to be at the top of the arms race but we would really need our students collectively earning $2-3 million per year in NIL opportunities to remain competitive."

"If each of you as our Ambassadors were to contribute $1,000-2,000 per month for the next two to three years or 12,000-24,000 per year to NIL opportunities, we can come together to achieve our goals and support our student athletes at a highly competitive level."

Veatch then offered donors ways they can support Memphis athletes by either supporting them directly or giving to the 901 Fund, Memphis' NIL collective. They can also reach out to Bridget Perine, the university's student-athlete branding & image coordinator.

Memphis has seen a few athletes secure NIL deals outside of The 901 Fund but almost primarily with men's basketball. Last season, Jalen Duren signed with VaynerSports to manage his NIL ventures last season with the Tigers and Emoni Bates signed an NIL deal with Roc Nation.

Former wide receiver Calvin Austin III remains the most prominent football player to announce an NIL deal, when he did so with local restaurant, The Wing Guru. Earlier this summer, coach Ryan Silverfield noted that NIL is not just important with current players but also attracting future ones.

"(NIL) does show up, especially in transfer portal recruiting. You can say what you want, this guy costs this amount of money in the portal or this recruit costs this amount of money," Silverfield said in an interview on "The Gary Parrish Show" in August. "Those discussions come up on a day-to-day basis, that's part of it. Obviously that's not what the NCAA intended it for. But the best thing is, we're in a great city with a lot of people that care so there's unique opportunity for our current student-athletes to have access to NIL and continue to be able to really make progress off this and proceeds off the NIL program."