There is no bigger conversation aside from the return of sports that the NCAA is tackling than the name, image and likeness proposition.
Since Ed O’Bannon sued the NCAA over his name, image and likeness being used for profit in NCAA basketball video games, the definition of student athletes and employees of the university has been black and white and one the NCAA has balanced carefully.
Oklahoma’s Spencer Rattler came to Norman, Oklahoma, with a huge brand. After one season, Rattler has the biggest following of Sooners players with 314,000 followers on Instagram and near 47,000 followers on Twitter. The NCAA is heating up the name, image and likeness conversation, which has one athlete marketing company proposing that someone like Trevor Lawrence could be worth near $500,000 based on his brand.
“Blake Lawrence (CEO, Opendorse) crunched some numbers for Yahoo Sports in a phone interview on Wednesday and concluded Trevor Lawrence could make more than a half-million off of social media endorsements alone this season,” reported Yahoo! Sports. “Trevor Lawrence has nearly 500,000 Instagram followers and 81,000 Twitter followers. He came up with the monetary answer by calculating the engagement rate on each feed. For an Instagram post, Trevor Lawrence could make $16,000. For a Twitter post, it would be about $1,100 per post. He estimated 12 interested local businesses and 50 total posts.”
The word media value was not used and is one that is complex and the reason behind the value mentioned. Max media value is the most money a person can make if the entire image on an advertisement is sold. That includes the 100 percent visibility of brands in an image, 100 percent engagement of an image and many other factors. The max media value of a potential advertisement is hardly ever met.
Lawrence has over 500,000 Instagram followers and 81,000 Twitter followers after starting as a true freshman and leading Clemson to a national championship. He played in a second year, too. Rattler is not far behind, and the former five-star quarterback from the 2019 class hasn’t started a game for Oklahoma yet.
The conversation of student-athlete compensation with their name, image and likeness is still strong and it is something that could be implemented by the 2021-22 NCAA sport season. If it passes, Rattler is going to be worth way over six figures for his second season as the starting quarterback for the Sooners.
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