After reading so many pages in various NIL threads, I am still completely confused as to how the process work (or supposed to work).
I think I understand NCAA's original intent. A student athlete selects a school to attend or transfer to, then upon arriving on campus, he can earn money based on his NIL like appearing at tailgates, signing autographs, do commercials for local merchants, sell jerseys with his/her name on it etc etc etc...it is not supposed to be an inducement to enroll in that particular school.
But the reality is, it has become the primary consideration in deciding where to enroll or transfer, NIL is in fact play for pay, while having to appear not to be the case, and tampering is everywhere.
The NCAA has various rules in place on how NIL is "supposed" to operate, such as the coach is not even supposed to tell the NIL operators which recruits or transfers are being prioritized, it is supposed to be completely hands off.
Then you can have multiple NIL entities operating in parallel, in concert with each other or completely independent of each other? How does that work?
How does a collective work? Let's say someone donates $5000 to a collective, is that $5000 free for that collective to use on whoever they want on whatever sports they want? That you may want that money to be spent on MBB but they may end up offering it to a synchronized swimming? Or each sport has it's own collective?
If the athlete is supposed to earn $ from his/her name, image and likeness, then the donor should also benefit from his/her NIL right? How does a donor benefit from a particular player's NIL? Once you donate to it it just get blended into a pool of money, like a crowd fund, so how does the collective manage it? Does a collective track the provenance of each donation, and pair up the athlete with the donor to fulfill the NIL obligations?
Let's pretend I was Jesse, and the WV collective offers me 800K, so what do I need to do to earn that 800K? There is an agreement to be signed no? Someone has to tell me that, hey Jesse, this is the list of things you need to do:
(1) on this date, between 2-8pm, you are to appear at this car dealership to shoot a video commercial, because XYZ Kia paid 150K towards your NIL.
(2) On that date, you need to greet customers at the entrance of the Oakwood Home Depot from 6am-noon and attend a kids workshop for building a park bench because they contributed $85K towards your NIL.
etc etc etc...
Is that how that works? Because otherwise, how does a collective who collected $ from all these different sources, assign what Jesse needs to do to fulfill his NIL obligations? Because these obligations have to be NIL related.
It cannot be performance based. Someone mentioned targets and objectives for on the court, that can't be, this is completely not related to what the athlete does on the court, supposed to be anyway. In other words, a kid can sign a 2 million dollar NIL deal and shows up day 1 saying my knees are sore and I need a season ending surgery and there is nothing a school can do about it. Or a kid can just slack off and skip practices all the time and it should not impact his NIL earnings at all.
I think if you are a big time donor and runs a business who wants to gain from a player's NIL, you would want to control who to endorse and when to endorse instead of relying on a NIL collective to do whatever they want that may not be in concert with the coaches. You may want to wait till there is a potential contender with one missing piece before you throw your weight behind it, or truly look for that particular player to endorse in exchange for his/her NIL, and those may not be possible or easy by adding to a collective.
Like I said, I don't know how this all work, because play for pay but not really appearing to be play for pay, seems to be so one sided and tricky to navigate.
