For those who have followed college athletics this year, NIL has become shorthand for a number of issues. The jargon around the NCAA has made it difficult to discern what NIL actually is. Fortunately, former UNC linebacker Shakeel Rashad, who serves as executive director for the organization Heels 4 Life, was able to explain.
“College athletes can now make money off their own name, their own image and their own likeness, just like everyone else in the world,” said Rashad, who graduated from Carolina in 2015. “So it’s really just returning to them the right that everybody else has had, that the NCAA previously had rules against.”
Since North Carolina’s NIL legislation went into effect on July 2, 2021, multiple UNC student-athletes have taken advantage. Heels 4 Life works with football players to secure NIL deals, and Rashad noted the example of UNC offensive lineman Brian Anderson, who wanted to capitalize on his love of fishing and the outdoors.
“But because he was playing college football, he was not allowed to make money off of fishing and videos, and things that he really enjoyed to do,” Rashad said. “NIL happens, and now he can get out and get endorsements, he can make money, he can sell merchandise with his ‘Tar Heel Sportsman’ brand, something that has no effect on what he’s doing on the field.”
Had Rashad’s arrival in Chapel Hill come in 2022 instead of 2012, those same opportunities would’ve been available to him. Unfortunately, the NCAA’s rulebook at the time hamstrung any of Rashad’s attempts to capitalize on himself.
“To think that I, when I was in college, could not have a Shakeel Rashad Linebacker Camp, because the NCAA owned my name, that’s the part that never made sense to me,” he said.
But if he could go back in time and secure and NIL deal for himself, would a football camp be the first item off the list? Not so fast.
“If I could go into Lucha Tigre in Chapel Hill and eat for free, I’d have been pumped,” he said.
Now, such new and unique opportunities for student-athletes springing up every day. Restaurants, coffee shops and even car garages have gotten in on the NIL fun since last summer. Such a powerful tool has already made an effect on high school recruiting.
“Just like when I was taking recruiting visits, I was like, ‘Hey, can I see the weight room? Can I see your locker room? What’s the education like? Let me go look that up.'” Rashad said. “I think NIL is gonna be something a lot of these recruits are looking at.”
But with that in mind, Rashad acknowledged a disadvantage faced by UNC, compared with other universities around the country. And that’s where Heels 4 Life comes in.
“You look at some of the schools in other places, the Georgia Techs, the Miamis, the USCs, they’re in these huge metropolitan cities where a lot of brands and companies and businesses are gonna come in and sponsor them,” he said. “But in Chapel Hill, I think one of the charms of Chapel Hill, and why people continue to come to UNC, is that little college-town feel.
“But there’s just one [aspect where] that’s not a beautiful thing all the time, and it’s in NIL. You don’t want a small college town when you’re trying to get local businesses to work with athletes. And so, we kind of try to stand in that place and help create more of those opportunities.”
Beyond helping young people with their finances, another indirect benefit of NIL has revealed itself recently: allowing student-athletes to stay in school longer than they would have otherwise.
“I know plenty of stories of guys that are like, ‘I probably don’t need to come out of college yet, but I need to go make a little money,'” Rashad, who is originally from Jacksonville, FL, said. “Either [their] family needs it, or [they] just had a kid, or something like that, and they need to make a little money. Now with NIL, if that guy’s able to work it around and find the right business to work with, he could stay in college, or she could stay in college for another year.”
This effect has been seen recently in college basketball, with stars like Armando Bacot and Caleb Love returning to UNC for next season. College basketball’s reigning National Player of the Year, Oscar Tshiebwe of Kentucky, will become the first such honoree to return to school since 2008.
Critics of NIL have decried its seemingly ever-changing rulebook, or the lack of rules altogether. Combined with the booming transfer portal, player movement in college athletics is at a level never before seen. But Rashad said some exploitative moves can’t take away from the overall benefits of the legislation.
“If rules are being broken, I don’t think it’s fair to blame… the way it was set up to be,” he said.
With NIL seeming to be here to stay, college athletics is in a brave new world. It would be hard to go back now.
Featured image via 247 Sports
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