Colleges partner with student-athletes to foster success with regards to Name, Image and Likeness
By Tony Moton (’98)
Gridiron collisions have been a staple of the university’s football heritage for decades. On any given Saturday at Memorial Stadium, the sound of a linebacker’s shoulder pads crackling against the thigh pads of an opposing running back is almost symphonic to the ear. Football simply wouldn’t be football without its tackling and blocking, which create a hyperkinetic transfer of force and power for all to hear.
With that in mind, Joe Petsick (’95) began game-planning for what might be considered the Mother of All Collisions soon after he was hired three years ago as an executive in residence and assistant professor of practice in management in the College of Business. His goal was to prepare the school and its student-athletes for name, image and likeness (commonly referred to as NIL), the ground-breaking policy enabling collegians to earn money for their status as athletes.
“NIL is, in my opinion, the single largest element to make the most dramatic impact on college athletics in the last several decades,” Petsick said. “It has the capacity to dramatically change the competitive fortunes of a school and it created an immense amount of pressure on schools to keep up and deliver.”
Petsick’s theory was that the school could shape its NIL fortunes by student-athletes engaging with fellow students, educators, administrators and outside supporters and businesses with an approach akin to gang tackling. The more collisions that can be generated by different forces, the better the university could make noise in this new era of college sports.
“When I was researching what other universities were starting to build and work on (in relation to NIL), they were focusing on one thing — how to help athletes make money.” Petsick said. “My idea instead was let’s teach the student-athlete how to build a business around themselves so that they can, in turn, earn money. That way we are giving them tools for the next 40 years, not just the next four.”
So, when NIL became a reality on July 1, 2021, the sounds you heard in and around Lincoln were student-athletes careening into business majors seeking advice on how to manifest their brand awareness. Journalism and business professors were joining forces on their way to developing courses that could enable volleyball and baseball players to increase their marketing potential by teaching them the power of mass and social media.
Incoming freshmen basketball and softball players were bumping into seasoned pros who might already be operating their own businesses. Sophomores, for goodness sake! And for any of the school’s 600-plus student-athletes dreaming of having their silhouettes turned into logos (see Michael Jordan), some of them certainly made a stir ramming into future lawyers at the College of Law for tips on weighty matters such as forming limited liability companies, signing contracts and registering trademarks.
Brett Stohs, a clinical associate professor of law, said the university’s collision-style approach to name, image and likeness is a win-win for both the student-athletes and the Law College because he knows this first-hand. He’s the director of the Weibling Entrepreneurship Clinic, which enables law students to mix it up with the university’s sports standouts.
“It’s an exciting educational opportunity,” Stohs said. “I have law students who are about to graduate and they are seeing these changes unfold and looking forward to helping student-athletes. In addition to working with student-athletes one-on-one, they have engagement with the community and do presentations with the athletic department.”
From the Law College’s perspective, Stohs said, NIL can be something of a legalistic cautionary tale. “There are a lot of risks and not a lot of regulation with NIL, and we are dealing with college students who might not be ready for the risks ahead,” he said. “We pride ourselves on helping the student-athletes understand these opportunities and protect themselves from the risks of this unregulated marketplace.”
Partnerships like the ones between the athletes and lawyers-in-the-making were no accident. One set of tools used to help student-athletes develop their entrepreneurial skill set is the College of Business offerings known as pop-up classes, one-credit courses taught by a range of faculty and industry professionals with thematic titles such as Pitching Yourself and Ideas Online, Mobile Production in Your Pocket and The ‘Reel’ Deal: Instagram for Storytelling Online.
“The way that we wanted these classes to unfold was under the hope that the classes would be filled by half student-athletes and half non student-athletes, which is actually what happened,” Petsick recalled. “And another reason for that is by design, to create more collisions, to create more ways for people to find each other who might not likely do it otherwise, to help them realize they could build something together.”
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One year into the Age of NIL, the university seems to have built a winning formula with collisions as the main element. According to Opendorse, a marketing company that assists athletes in maximizing endorsement values, the Big Ten Conference was the national leader in both earnings and the number of NIL deals from July 2021 through June 2022. A source familiar with name, image and likeness earnings said the Cornhuskers were among the conference leaders in total earnings. The Big 12 Conference was second in both total compensation and total deals made during that time period, the Opendorse report indicates.
But heading into the summer of 2021, most institutions, according to reports, were sent scrambling for answers on ways to best handle NIL because the NCAA offered few clear-cut rules on how schools should manage this brave new world of student-athletes finally making an honest dollar.
Clamored a headline posted on USA Today’s website just hours before the bell tolled making NIL official: “NCAA’s band-aid approach to name, image and likeness leaves athletes and schools with confusing options.”
Or this posted earlier in the day by The New York Times: “The NCAA and Supreme Court took a small step to fix college sports. It’s not nearly enough.”
Finally, this gem from Sports Illustrated on the day NIL went into effect: “It’s Going to Be a Cluster---: The New Era of College Sports Is Here. Is Anyone Ready?”
Anyone? Anyone? For an answer to the NIL readiness question, one need only to look at Nebraska’s approach. Consider these collision-makers helping transform the energy to the school’s NIL fortunes:
- All current student-athletes can be found in the Nebraska Huskers Marketplace, which gives Nebraska fans, brands and sponsors the ability to browse, book, pitch and pay any Husker student-athlete for NIL activities.
- The athletic department brokered a partnership with Altius Sports Partners, an NIL advisory and education firm which was set to help provide strategic guidance on the school’s overall NIL policy and development of a corporate partnership strategy.
- Athlete Branding & Marketing, founded by former state Attorney General Jon Bruning (’90, ’94) and Carson Wealth Management managing partner Paul West (’98), works with companies and donors around the state to raise money and partner with athletes as donor collectives become more prominent players in NIL. Former Nebraska football chief of staff Gerrod Lambrecht runs the collective, which reportedly had raised $3.5 million and paid Husker athletes nearly $1 million through the spring of 2022.
- Tom Lemke (’13), a former baseball player, serves as the assistant director of life skills and post-eligibility opportunities director for the athletic department. He has been tasked with leading the NIL education program called Husker Advantage, which helps incoming freshmen get acclimated to college life during the summer before their first year at school.
- The Clifton Strengths program in the College of Business utilizes Husker Advantage to help student-athletes become more aware of their natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving as they prep for life after sports. The student-athletes also have access to a program that helps assess their entrepreneurial attributes.
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One early example of collisions working magic in the NIL space was Adrian Martinez (’21), the former Husker quarterback and current Kansas State player. Thinking ahead and thinking on his feet, Martinez reached out to the College of Journalism and Mass Communications and collided with Geoff Exstrom, a senior majoring in sports media communication and broadcasting. Together, they released the podcast Athletes Unfiltered.
Martinez later created his own line of merchandise and, when NIL started, he already was set to partner with brands on local, regional and national levels. Along the way, Martinez was shepherded in the process by two former Husker football players who long ago envisioned the day when student-athletes could reap the benefits of branding themselves the right way.
In 2012, Adi Kunalic (’11) and Blake Lawrence (’09, ’11) created Opendorse as a company serving the needs of clients in the athlete endorsement industry. At some point in the distant future, they figured, the doors to endorsing collegiate athletes would swing open.
“When we were in school, NIL felt a million years away,” Lawrence said. “Even then, we could feel the support of the Nebraska community. It was clear that if college athletes were ever allowed to benefit from NIL rights, Nebraska athletes would be in a great position to succeed.”
Lawrence, who earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing and an MBA in strategic marketing, found the ideal running mate in Kunalic to help make Opendorse one of the country’s largest and most influential purveyors of NIL opportunities. Kunalic, who has an advertising degree, said the company — with its office in the shadow of the campus at 13th and Q streets — makes it easier for athletes to maximize their branding potential while juggling school, athletics and life away from campus.
“We saw the opportunity that athletes had, but also understood the massive time and energy commitments that college and professional athletes face,” Kunalic said. “We wanted to make it incredibly easy for any athlete to receive opportunities, complete deliverables and accept payments all in one place. That’s where Opendorse started and we’ve stayed true to the vision for over a decade.”
But Opendorse probably hasn’t gone through a more vision-filled time in its existence than the first 365 days of NIL. On July 1, the firm released a 41-page report analyzing the financial impact of NIL on student-athletes, universities and college athletics across the country. Their study projects a market spend of $1.14 billion for athlete compensation via NIL in the United States during year two.
“One of the most significant benefits that will stem from NIL is the long-term benefit for student-athletes,” Lawrence said. “They’ve always been able to build their brand or network while on campus, but now the results are immediately tangible. These student-athletes will now make connections with local business owners and community leaders that would have been less likely to occur pre-NIL. More important than the deal they get tomorrow will be the career opportunities that are created years down the road.”
To create career opportunities for the future, nothing works better than a few collisions here and there for athletes aiming to cash in on NIL. This idea rings particularly true for former student-athletes who never had a chance to bank on their name, image and likeness during the NCAA’s long-standing amateur-athletes-can’t-get-paid approach.
“Every recruit today, transfer portal or high school, is asking about NIL,” Kunalic said, “and many will make decisions, at least in part, based on where they expect the highest level of NIL support. (But) the NCAA has made clear that boosters (collectives) cannot contact non-enrolled athletes.”
Frauke Hachtmann (’94, ’97, ’00, ’10), a journalism professor and former scholarship tennis player from 1991-95, feels empowered by helping student-athletes earn paychecks.
“I think our students deserve to be paid because they make a lot of universities a lot of money,” Hachtmann said. “They have bills to pay and, from that perspective, it’s really interesting now and things are really changing. You have to stay on top of all the developments.”
Hachtmann has taught a pop-up course titled Branding Yourself in Today’s Market, which entails five weeks of classes and exercises designed to figure out what kind of mission and values a student possesses. Next, the course hones in on the type of brand and social media presence that would work for students in the eyes of sponsors.
“We try to find what makes someone interesting as a person and an athlete,” Hachtmann said. In some ways, Hachtmann experiences a sense of poetic justice teaching students lessons that never came about during her own college days in Lincoln.
“There is a lot of communication and interconnectedness here at Nebraska,” Hachtmann said. “We are very collegial, so when NIL started, some disciplines lent themselves to this, like business and us in media. But instead of having two competing colleges, we came together and figured it out. We are getting a lot of students taking these courses who might be majoring in something totally different. I think it really speaks to the overall sense of team.”
The team players in the Nebraska ecosystem simply aren’t afraid of bumping heads or bumping into each other if the endgame is getting the most out of NIL for student-athletes. One such player is Jake Bowman who, as a junior, started the school’s first peer-led advisor program and is credited with helping Husker football center Cam Jurgens land a trademark for his Beef Jurgy brand. He also had a big hand in enabling basketball guard C.J. Wilcher to book a long-term endorsement deal with U-Stop Convenience Shop, the longstanding, Lincoln-based chain.
“I want to help athletes grow their brands and their businesses and help them understand how their talents can be applied off the field or court,” Bowman said. “Me and Joe (Petsick) talk about this a lot, but in order to get to play D1 sports, you have to have personal drive and self-motivation, all the things an entrepreneur needs to start a business.”
Bowman started his first company, an online athletic shoe and clothing retail arbitrage business called Pickswap, alongside his brother in high school. At Nebraska, Bowman sought opportunities to expand his own brand by helping student-athletes do the same. He is among a team of students who have a proclivity toward entrepreneurship and, in many cases, already operate burgeoning companies on their own.
Formed within the College of Business, the student advisors work one-on-one with student-athletes to help them maximize their earning potential and organize their commitments, agreements and compliance.
“We work with a lot of athletes, but we get to work with a lot of different people in this community,” Bowman said. “Being able to be in these meetings with the athletes I work with, meeting CEOs of these companies from around the area, working with people in the athletic department and the College of Business is fun for me.”
But the most fun for Bowman? Those initial collisions with potential advisory clients or paying sponsors. “I like talking to people,” Bowman admitted. “I get to meet tons of new people, and it’s great to approach NIL this way.”
No self-respecting Cornhusker would approach name, image and likeness in any other fashion.