Matt Brown: How to read an NIL story in 2022

Matt Brown of Extra Points is probably the foremost NIL expert in the media. He specializes in the 'inside baseball' of college athletics, and just put out a fantastic piece that basically boils down to 'don't believe most things you hear about NIL.' It's a 5 minute read; I encourage everyone to read it.

LINK: https://www.extrapointsmb.com/nil-facts-rumors-data-college-sports-expla...

Highlights:

  • There are a lot of NIL numbers reported that just aren't credible, such as ON3 reporting that a 4-star Miami qb received a $9.5M NIL deal (for reference, more than Lamar Jackson makes), just to put out an article days later refuting everything they published previously.
  • Everyone has an angle
    a company makes money by facilitating deals between athletes and brands, well, they're probably going to talk up the growth (or valuation) of that side of the market. If a company is loath to work with collectives, and say, only works with universities, well, they're likely to give you a skeptical perspective on collectives. We shouldn't be surprised if a trademark attorney tells the world that athletes should really retain the services of trademark attorneys.

    The advice and perspective of these individuals isn't necessarily wrong. But it may also be self-interested, and readers and writers should ask themselves if the person quoted in a story benefits in some way by advancing that particular argument.

    This industry isn't that big, and most of the major companies, big collectives and quoteable lawyers are all either in business with each other, or rivals with each other.

  • There's no good (much less complete) data sets out there, so it's impossible to really understand the market right now.
  • "The fine print matters" and often poorly communicated. As brown puts it when discussing Nicholaus Lamaleava's $8m deal: "a deal that "could pay more than $8 million" is NOT an $8 million deal!" He points out that Nico basically gets $350k 'guarenteed', and the rest may/may not come depending on if this kid busts, if he leaves early for the NFL, if he transfers, etc.

Anyways, this is great reporting on (the people reporting on) NIL, and I wanted to share here.

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