In 2021, the Supreme Court reached a landmark decision that allows all college athletes the ability to profit from their own name, image, and likeness (NIL). Since then, there has been a scramble all across the world of college sports to tap this new market.
One of the most common new businesses to have risen surrounding NIL is NIL collectives. NIL collectives are organizations that seek to assist athletes in the process of finding and completing profitable opportunities, as well as negotiating their compensation packages.
One of the most common NIL opportunities for collegiate athletes is an endorsement of a product in exchange for payment. However, with the strenuous schedule of an NCAA athlete the presence of a collective or organization is helpful to create more opportunities and better opportunities for those athletes.
Below are what On3 deemed were the 10 most “ambitious” NIL collectives in college sports. I didn’t know much about NIL collectives before writing this, but it seems to me that the success or failure of an NIL collective is largely dependent on the amount of money being poured into the program, however, there are non-monetary factors that play into the success of certain collectives, which is the most interesting part to me.