Just like most college administrations, Oliver Luck wonders how much longer the NCAA will permit donor collectives to facilitate NIL deals unchecked for athletes. Truth is, there is a lot of secrecy about how much college athletes are being paid, but Luck and longtime sports and media executive Bill Squadron are hoping to change this with the help of the nonprofit NIL Education and Information Center the duo co-founded in 2020.
A New NIL Nonprofit Partnership
Two years after the NIL nonprofit establishment, the duo signed a new open-ended partnership with Arizona State University’s journalism school. The idea is to jointly create an independent database to track NIL deals.
Luck and Squadron plan to collect information from as many schools, NIL collectives, athletes, and platforms as possible. The best thing about this plan is that many are already on board to share information and like the idea of creating the most comprehensive accounting of what college athletes are making in this new era of marketing rights.
The NIL nonprofit will make it possible for those findings to be reported widely, giving people across media, academia, and college sports a better idea of the market.
The NIL Success Depends on the Stakeholders
It is really important to convince the NIL stakeholders to share the data behind their deals which may be difficult, especially because this industry values privacy. What’s valuable though is that those who decide to share information will also be granted access to the whole database. This is a piece of extremely valuable insight information on fair market value and general trends across peers and competitors. However, for now, readily accessible NIL data will remain limited, fragmented, and poorly defined.
Right now, Salesforce and its Tableau platform have agreed to provide back-end storage and visualization software pro bono. Alongside Arizona State’s journalism students, the students at Elon University will be responsible for sorting the data, analyzing it, and writing reports.
Luck hopes that his NIL nonprofit will make the first self-sustainable initiative which looks like the only suitable way of doing things down the road in this industry.