NIL ushers in a new era at UNL

LINCOLN — On July 1, the NCAA became the Wild West.

Cowboys and gunslingers of the 1800s became athletic departments and student athletes across the country, navigating the new frontier that is name, image and likeness (NIL). The NCAA voted to adopt an interim NIL policy on June 30, allowing all student athletes to profit through use of their NIL and allowing each school to adopt their own NIL policies. The uncharacteristically laissez-faire approach by the NCAA creates a landscape with a different set of rules across different regions, as some states have passed NIL legislation while others have not.

But like the Wild West, with disorder there’s opportunity. An opportunity that the University of Nebraska-Lincoln plans to be at the forefront of.

Executive in Residence in the College of Business Joe Petsick calls it the “pioneer spirit,” a term that represents Nebraska’s innovation that Petsick said made the Huskers a national brand. They became the first football program to endorse a weight training program in 1969. They launched one of the first nutrition programs in collegiate athletics. When HuskerVision was launched in 1994, the football team became the first in the country to have instant replay boards.

It’s with that spirit that Nebraska became the first athletic department to partner with Opendorse in March 2020. Opendorse is a Lincoln-based athlete marketing platform with the objective of maximizing endorsement value for athletes. They’ve emerged as a premier NIL company, working with more than 100 athletic departments, including Ohio State, Clemson and Oklahoma.

Opendorse Senior Communications Director Sam Weber said the collaborative partnership with Nebraska was helpful in building a beneficial program for student athletes.

“With Nebraska just down the street from where our headquarters is, we were able to work with their team to understand what they needed, what they valued, what they understood would actually help their athletes bring a tangible benefit,” Weber said.

Opendorse was founded in 2013 by former Husker football players Blake Lawrence and Adi Kunalic. It began as a platform for professional athletes to gain endorsement opportunities more easily and quickly. It has developed into a platform that provides education and brand building among other services, including their endorsement marketplace.

Weber said there’s been a steady acceleration of schools that understand the importance of having top-level NIL education.

“It’s like having the best football facility or the best weight room,” Weber said. “It’s a recruiting tool and I think it’s something that actually tangibly matters to the lives of the student athletes who really commit to helping themselves learn how to best attack this.”

With student athletes becoming marketable for the first time, the potential endorsement opportunities are vast.

“There are few times in our lives, if ever, that we’re told in advance about an industry that is about to be created,” Petsick said. “And then we’re told the date it’s going to be created. And then the day that it is created, it’s immediately a multi-billion-dollar industry. What’s going to happen very quickly is we’re going to see all kinds of people and businesses descend upon the space to try to find a way to get a piece of the action.”

With NIL providing an entirely new realm of possibilities for student athletes, it also adds to their already heavy workload. Petsick said the student athletes could become overwhelmed with public relations management and constant calls from businesses, in addition to the responsibilities of film sessions, practice and class.

Adam Wagler, the Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications (CoJMC), said financial opportunities could have negative side effects as well.

“You can look at name, image and likeness and see a lot of positives around the money, and that’s great,” Wagler said. “But there can be a lot of downsides with companies ripping students off, and students having to do a bunch of legal stuff that they don’t have time for and being sucked into some really bad deals. I don’t wish that on anyone, but it’s just the reality: when money is exchanged things happen.”

Attempting to create a robust support system is part of the reason the Huskers NIL plan goes beyond Opendorse.

The school announced its comprehensive NIL plan, #NILBraska, in full on June 3. The Opendorse Ready Now program is the first of three main components of #NILBraska. The second is Husker Advantage, led through the Life Skills Program. The third is Accelerate, a wide-ranging program that spans across campus.

Nebraska’s Accelerate plan can be traced back to Petsick’s office in the Center for Entrepreneurship in Howard L. Hawks Hall. Petsick was a student in the college during the 90s, a decade that saw the Huskers claim six national titles across three different sports. Staring outside of his office window, which has a clear view of Memorial Stadium, Petsick began to think of the student athletes he knew back in his days as a student. He began to jot down the names of some of those athletes --athletes from a variety of sport. About 30 names in he noticed a commonality among the athletes he wrote down.

“Almost everybody on the list I had written was an entrepreneur,” Petsick said.

That realization had Petsick knocking on doors, trying to find out how much the connection between student athletes and entrepreneurship had been explored by the College of Business. That led him to the doorstep of the athletic department, where they were eager to build an initiative to help athletes strengthen their skills and knowledge in entrepreneurship. While Petsick began building the foundation for entrepreneurial programming that would benefit student athletes, Nebraska was gearing up to announce its partnership with Opendorse. That’s when Petsick got the idea for the broader program that would become Accelerate.

“I started talking about an idea I had that we could build that would add a new degree of depth,” Petsick said. “And I think to change the way that NIL was being managed in most places around the country.”

The concept behind Accelerate is simple: help student athletes turn their brand into a business.

“Most schools that I’ve been reading and watching and seeing the things they’re sharing, (are) focused mostly on the transactional component, the ‘how do we help students make money?’” Petsick said. “That’s obviously an important component, but what we’re doing is we’re instead focusing on how we can help a student athlete learn to build a business around themselves so they can be best positioned to make the most money.”

“This is investing in the next 40 years, not just the next four,” Petsick added.

Brett Stohs, the Cline Williams Director of the Weibling Entrepreneurship Clinic at the College of Law, said that while NIL is new and unique, a business around it would be normal.

“A lot of this typical stuff any startup might deal with, these startup athlete ventures will also deal with,” Stohs said.

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