How Not To Navigate NIL

I do not envy college coaches trying to navigate the new and scary world of NIL and the open transfer portal.

There remain a great number of unknowns regarding the long-term effects of both, as well as the best way to build and maintain a program in the face of each development. I suspect the answer will be different for different schools. It should be axiomatic that what works at the University of Georgia probably won’t work at the University of Maine.

But this much I do know. The policy recently outlined by Boise State football coach Spencer Danielson absolutely is not going to end well. Danielson has announced that his school will not pursue NIL opportunities for first year players.

To be clear, Danielson is not saying that players cannot accept NIL deals or pursue NIL money on their own behalf. Doing so would almost certainly run afoul of equal protection dictates, and land the school in a losing court battle. What he is saying is that the school will outsource finding and negotiating those deals to players and their own camps. For more you can see this wide-ranging interview Danielson did clarifying his initial remarks:

What Danielson describes is not the prevailing method being pursued around major college football. And Boise State is, on paper and certainly in the minds of the school’s fans, a major college football program. And in the modern world of college football, players are being recruited not just on the chance to win football games and eat great food and chase girls. They are being recruited on schools’ ability to brand them and provide access to markets. The currency of the college football realm is currency.

That particular Genie is out of the bottle. What Spencer Danielson plans to do is stand there yelling at the Genie for the benefit of alumni. This sort of red meat messaging works great on the summer rubber chicken dinner circuit. The same folks who are with him on this proposal now will not be as forgiving if the Broncos win five games in 2025.

I understand where Danielson is coming from. No group of humans is more concerned with “paying dues” and “earning your keep” than college football coaches. I suspect this results from the fact that you become a college football head coach you must put in decades of 18 hour days, crawling over and around the exhausted bodies of fellow graduate assistants and position coaches. It’s a career path where survival of the fittest doesn’t guarantee success. It’s more the price of admission.

And every successive generation believes that kids these days have it easier than they did, and want things handed to them on a silver platter. My father believes I have it easier than him. His father probably said the same thing. Everyone believes that they had to work for what they got, and the kids these days don’t understand sacrifice and commitment. It’s a tradition that predates even the Rose Bowl and Tennessee football’s descent into tepid mediocrity.

And there’s a certain outsider streak to Boise State fandom that makes this kind of appeal to a blue collar work ethic resonate with a fanbase that for a long time watched its teams try to earn a spot at the BCS and CFB Playoff table. I expect that if Kirby Smart or Steve Sarkisian basically told a room full of boosters that their freshmen were just going to have to sort of figure out the whole NIL deal on their own the reaction would be swift and negative. In the SEC we don’t give up the chance to micromanage and hyperoptimize any aspect of the football program that we legally can, and even some that are more of a gray area.

Spencer Danielson thinks he’s telling players to only come to Boise State if they are willing to pay their dues. What he’s really telling them is that other coaches at other schools are more willing than he is to take the time to build their individual brands. Not every kid who thinks about that is a spoiled brat who would become a locker room issue.

Many recruits are just sophisticated young men who understand that they provide a valuable service and that, when you have value to offer, you should not give it away for free. Danielson might as well be telling incoming players and their parents that Boise State has an academic support center, but he’s not going to show them where it is, and he’s not going to make any special effort to assure that they have access to it. The brand building and business side of College football is now as important as the academic. Refusing to recognize that fact doesn’t change it.

I expect Danielson thinks that the stance will bring players who only really want to come to Boise. Who truly buy into what he and his staff are selling. I suspect what it is actually going to get our players who view the school as a stepping stone to a real payday. The hard truth of today’s college football is the players transfer. They do so for a variety of reasons. Narrowing the pool of players you can recruit in year one is unlikely to prevent that. It just means the pool your drawing from a year to is going to be that much more shallow.

Again, I get where he is coming from. I am also over the age of 40. I also wonder sometimes why police and doctors all seem so young now, and why bananas cost so much these days. But pretending that you are not living in a new reality does not prevent that new reality from living on around you. Until later…

Go ‘Dawgs!!!