The new landscape of college sports still hasn’t fully settled in. As of July 1, college athletes are able to earn money off their name, image and likeness, but the full impacts of the change have yet to settle in and likely won’t for years to come.
With football players likely to be among the biggest earners, all eyes are on these programs as they prepare for the new season, and NC State is no exception. At the 2021 ACC Football Kickoff, head coach Dave Doeren, redshirt junior center Grant Gibson and redshirt sophomore quarterback Devin Leary all fielded questions regarding the NIL changes.
NC State, like many other schools in the ACC, launched a program to help educate and provide resources for the Wolfpack student-athletes and while that proactive approach could be used as a recruiting tool, Doeren isn’t ready to use it in his pitches yet.
“I need to see where it goes before I’m recruiting with it,” Doeren said. “Right now I’m just learning, trying to be a resource for our players, trying to make sure they don’t put themselves at risk. There’s a lot of fine print in some of these things for these guys. As you can imagine, people want to take advantage of them. We just want to be there for him through it and hope that they get the good side but not the bad side.”
While he acknowledged that NIL will become a part of recruiting in the future, Doeren thinks there are more important things to worry about right now.
“You can predict the fact that some teams are going to have guys that make a ton of money and they’re going to walk into a home and say, ‘if you come here, you could be like that,’ right?” Doeren said. “You can predict that that’s going to happen. How much is that going to happen in the ACC where one school has it all and the rest of us have nothing? I don’t know. I’m just trying to coach football right now, help my guys and deal with all this stuff. We’re still in COVID, by the way, like it’s not gone. We’re still having to manage all that and there’s a lot of things I’m more concerned about I think than that.”
For players, the NIL changes are a mixed bag. How a player carries themself has always been important in sports because of teams at the next level looking at them, but now, brands have joined the teams in watching just how the players carry themselves.
“I mean, ever since this whole NIL situation has been passed, it’s very important that you represent yourself in the right way,” Leary said. “I think it’s very easy for people to reach out to you through social media, but actually being able to talk to them on the phone or via Zoom or actually in person is very important how you represent yourself as an athlete.”
Some players however, would prefer to not focus on NIL and brand deals.
“It’s good for college athletes as a whole,” Gibson said. “I think this is a rule that should have been in place a long time ago, but now that we can use it and get involved with it, I think it is big. Me personally, I’m trying to make sure I take care of my game first and don’t get too caught up in the side deals and things like that, just because I don’t want it to take away my main attention, which is the game and trying to help my team win.”
There is a lot to still be figured out with the NIL rules changes, but there is one thing that is already certain 一 the fact that players can now profit off their name, image and likeness is a long overdue change in college sports.
