Escape Velocity
How NIL news and information is spreading faster than ever before
People of a certain age might remember Encyclopedia Britannica. Thousands of pages of information catalogued in beautifully bound books, covering as much of the alphabet—and a multitude of subject matters—as possible, for your personal reference at home if you were lucky enough to possess them. Then came the advent of the internet, and the subsequent popularization of internet access, which made catalogued web pages filled with that same information accessible to all, for free. Moreover, the information became editable by those whose social scoring remained validated enough to permit ongoing improvements on open-sourced websites.
What does this have to do with NIL? Plenty.
The Ivy League doesn’t do NIL. Except when it does. I’ve talked with agents, lawyers, athletic directors, coaches, advisors, and players who have sought out, and found, ways to get it done. Where there’s a will (and a public aversion but private tolerance of NIL by Ivy League decision-makers), there’s a way. One such national championship–winning head coach asked me if he could accept a loan in excess of $10 million and use the interest to compensate his players. Like…what? While I don’t expect that specific idea to come to fruition, I do expect that coaches who talk with both one another and with desperate-to-win donors and alums will find overt and covert ways to create the recruiting and retention outcomes they want, in order to achieve the ultimate performances they want.
The point of that anecdote is that for millennia, information was siloed and traveled slowly. But now, information moves fast—and it’s accelerating. Whatever contractual advantage was realized by schools in the first year of university-led revenue sharing will largely be given up in the subsequent year or two. Administrators switch conferences, change industries, become agents, join enforcement groups, and shrink the legal competitive advantage through no fault of anyone’s. It is simply market forces correcting imbalances much quicker than in years past.
Additionally, agents share contracts, players discuss payment frustrations despite confidentiality clauses (which are almost wholly unenforceable), and the velocity of information disbursement is continually gaining speed—to the detriment of bad actors in the space. Even though the arbiters and administrators are largely, and perhaps intentionally, leaving the space mostly unregulated, the current landscape is self-correcting and self-governing, a bit like any lawless, permissionless system. Anyone can institute order where previously there was none. Think manifest destiny, or Sooners, or the Oregon Trail if you’re simply looking for land-grab imagery. For practical application, think Matthew Sluka, Leonard Hamilton, Jaden Rashada, and Nico Iamaleava as cautionary tales—instances where bad faith actors placed guardrails at the outer limits of the system.
Please pardon me borrowing terms and nomenclature from physics, cryptocurrency, and American expansion, but they won out over phrasing related to prison yards, Squid Game, and the tired “Wild, Wild West” cliché—places where order needed to be instituted and eventually was.
Mark Twain had a saying that, in and of itself, could be ironic (if he actually didn’t say it), which goes something like: “It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” People operating in this space can’t hold so tightly to their beliefs, principles, and visions for the future that they fail to improve, fail to see more prosperous paths forward, or fail to recognize what’s apparent to others but not yet evident to themselves.
Staying active and connected is the best way to help ensure—though not guarantee—that a well-rounded NIL worldview is achieved. I like to think my perspective is broad, but it’s always hard to know where blind spots exist, because they wouldn’t be blind spots if they were apparent. I appreciate your readership. I welcome all feedback. And I hope some of this information, shared regularly in this publication, is useful in guiding athletes forward toward a better future.