Miller: Syracuse’s 3-pronged NIL effort is disorganized, and needs to unite
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Three NIL collectives currently exist to help Syracuse student-athletes navigate name, image and likeness deals. The university-sponsored collective, Orange United, is not in contact with Athletes Who Care or Elite NIL, said Jason Belzer, CEO of Student Athlete NIL. This is an extremely irregular setup, according to NIL consultant Bill Carter, and those involved are not happy about it.
Since NIL took effect on July 1, 2021, it’s become a staple of college football recruiting. Yet, SU has lagged behind the rest of the Atlantic Coast Conference and the country, officially launching its collective two months ago, Belzer said. The other two collectives have been active for over a year.
“I can’t answer why they hadn’t tried to create a collective earlier,” Belzer said. “Syracuse did not really have a unified NIL effort in any context. It’s hard to recruit in this day and age if you don’t have NIL to back something up because every other university does.”
Thus, Syracuse has been below the median NIL revenue for ACC programs, which is around $3 million per year, Belzer said. The two other ACC schools Belzer works with – Georgia Tech and Wake Forest – created their collectives as soon as they became legal in 2021. Student Athlete NIL has deals with every football player on those teams, but has deals with less than half of SU’s football players, Belzer said.
In spite of this, at a Nov. 20 press conference, Director of Athletics John Wildhack said the narrative that Syracuse is behind in NIL is “not accurate.” However, according to those involved in SU’s NIL effort, it’s clear that Syracuse’s NIL usage is behind and disjointed. Ironically, it needs to “unite” to succeed.
Multiple outside groups have excelled in different markets but cannot collaborate as a single NIL effort. With the excitement in Syracuse behind new head football coach Fran Brown, this is the time to capitalize.
“We are at a moment where there’s a lot of consolidation happening among collectives at other schools,” Carter said. “It’s been determined that there’s a bit more power in having one entity.”
Context on the collectives
All three of SU’s NIL collectives operate differently to provide distinct opportunities to student-athletes. So, before getting into the communication failures, it’s important to understand how these groups operate.
Orange United – This university-partnered collective was officially founded about two months ago and has deals with 20 football players, Belzer said. To create the collective, Student Athlete NIL — the largest operator of NIL collectives in the country — partnered with Learfield, SU’s multimedia rights partner. Belzer said the majority of SU’s NIL deals will come at the start of 2024; they expect to have deals with every football player by the end of the school year.
Athletes Who Care – This 501(c)(3) nonprofit group is a charitable foundation that’s committed to serving other charities in Syracuse. They have deals with over 25 football players and over 50 Syracuse student-athletes, according to founder and director Cliff Ensley. The goal is to have 150 student-athletes engaging with charities by the start of the next school year. Their approach differs from Orange United because they do not work with potential recruits, nor do they have any interest in doing so, Ensley said.
Elite NIL – Mike Bristol, who’s completed endorsement deals for Jim Boeheim for nearly 20 years, created Elite NIL in 2021. With the help of his background, Bristol already had relationships necessary to succeed in the NIL marketplace, so he is able to focus on personalized endorsement deals. Elite NIL is in the process of being acquired by Grand Central Sports marketing group, Bristol said, giving them “national reach” in terms of business partnerships. Currently, they only work with a handful of the most “marketable” student-athletes; Garrett Shrader is their only football client right now.
Bad communication stems from differing values
The three primary ways to create NIL partnerships — through charity, local endorsements and university-sponsored sales — are all available to Syracuse fans and donors. Yet, their opposing values and strategies have led to an estrangement where neither outside group has contact with SU or Orange United.
Carter said there’s “no way” these groups don’t have a massive overlap in donors, all of which could be more efficient if they operated as one entity. But, there’s an animosity between Orange United and the other NIL groups, one that’s antithetical to their common goal.
“If the left hand doesn’t talk to the right hand, there’s going to be a deficiency in the process,” Belzer said. “Once a collective goes and does a deal with a student athlete and I don’t know what they’re doing, how can I go and do a deal with the student-athlete? How do I create the most attractive scenario, especially when there’s limited funding to go around?”
Orange United has virtually no contact with Athletes Who Care or Elite NIL, Belzer said, and the few conversations they did have with Ensley went nowhere.
“We have always been very open with anyone and we are willing to cooperate and are all on the same team,” Belzer said. “Some folks obviously have their own agenda.”
Ensley said the workers at Athletes Who Care don’t talk in terms of NIL money raised, but in charitable hours worked. They think of Athletes Who Care as a charity enabled by the student-athletes’ name, image and likeness, not a collective.
This mindset and not dealing with recruits has put them at odds with Orange United. Ensley doesn’t feel SU would respect his values if the groups worked together, adding that Syracuse hasn’t provided them with any donors, even before Orange United was officially founded.
“They haven’t really reached out to us to do anything,” Ensley said of Orange United. “I think at some point, the different groups helping the athletes need to talk a little bit so we know who is benefitting from our services.”
When asked if he’s had any contact with Orange United, Bristol said he received one phone call from Orange United, but is “very behind” Athletes Who Care and is helping them market their company.
There is “no fundamental competition” between collectives, Belzer said, yet all parties seem to resent each other. One thing is clear, though: everyone wants to collaborate, but they just can’t figure out how.
Why unification needs to happen now
Collectives are “dealing in hype,” Carter said. They want to give the impression they’re flushed with cash and “raising money hand over fist.” However, that’s not the case for Syracuse, whose reputation is being behind the ball in NIL.
Nothing guarantees hype like a coaching change, so now is the time to maximize SU’s NIL effort.
“It does generate a lot of excitement and a lot of hope, and those are two things that collectives can use in their fundraising effort,” Carter said of the coaching change. “If you’re a collective right now, you are picking up the phone and you are calling your entire list.”
After garnering interest from four-star recruits and impressing the SU community with an authentic introductory press conference, Brown has potentially opened the NIL floodgates. To make the most of that, “alignment is what matters more than anything else,” Belzer said.
Both Belzer and Carter said a unified NIL effort is most popular because it centralizes fundraising efforts. Ideally, all three groups would come together under Orange United, as Student Athlete NIL operates 37 collectives, the largest of any collective operator in the country, and has the resources to help all groups succeed.
“We are able to execute a pretty extensive playbook to be able to drive revenue and create sustainable avenues for that,” Belzer said.
In light of Brown’s hire, Carter expects Syracuse to ask donors for more money, increasing the revenue stream that will help build up the football program. He said the outside groups likely won’t think to do the same, thus wasting valuable hype and momentum.
Syracuse is already hindered because of Orange United’s late start, and Carter said the new coach effect will wear off by the start of next school year, extending through the football season if the team improves.
At this point, all groups must compromise to combine into one collective with a nonprofit arm or three separate businesses that form a partnership. Either is better than what’s currently in place, and Orange United has the resources to succeed.
Both of these options are already in use at other universities, Carter said. Arkansas is a great example of collaborative success. The central NIL collective, OneArkansas NIL, works in accordance with Razorback Foundation Inc., which helps student-athletes serve charitable causes to raise NIL money. Though, the revenue-sharing system is very new and has legal complications based on state legislation.
Nonprofits will often approach a larger collective and offer to join forces, or vice versa, but only if a certain percentage of their NIL deals have a charitable component. In this context, Orange United could handle the transactions, while Athletes Who Care and Elite NIL can continue finding partnerships they care about with the long-lasting relationship they already have.
Syracuse can still catch and exceed the ACC median revenue with a strong NIL push, but it must happen immediately. Unification at this crucial time could potentially catapult Syracuse athletics into a new, successful era.
“Just because it’s taken a collective in the ACC or SEC a year and half to get big and powerful and have a lot of success, doesn’t mean that a relatively new collective has to follow the same formula and take just as much time,” Carter said.
The way forward is clear, and the time to succeed is now. Syracuse’s NIL groups must collaborate to capitalize on the excitement Brown has provided to compete with other ACC NIL programs going forward.
“If you and I are talking in three years, and there’s three entities at Syracuse doing this collective work, I’d be shocked,” Carter said. “They’re going to come together one way or the other. They do it because they think unification is a better strategy, or they do it because one or two of them have failed.”
