The world of college sports has changed and continues to change ever since the NCAA adopted its policy to allow student athletes to profit from the use of their name, image and likeness, also known as NIL, in the summer of 2021.
Although it has been more than a couple of years now since the change in the rules was made, there is still much confusion that exists out there among everyone involved at times.
Fans, players, coaches and even university officials are slowly beginning to understand more and more with each day that passes, and one of the businesses that is involved in the NIL effort is The Brandr Group, which is based in Ponte Vedra Beach.
According to Len Stachitas, chief administrative officer with The Brandr Group, educating everyone involved has been a major key since the NCAA’s ruling went into effective.
“We have a team that does educational classes on NIL, and we get phone calls all the time from athletes and parents wanting to know more,” Stachitas said. “We are a group rights business, which means we don’t represent individual athletes, but instead groups of athletes. Deals get done through the group.”
The number of people required to be considered as a represented group varies depending on the sport and league.
“In the NFL it’s six or more and in the MLB it’s four or more,” Stachitas said. “For the NCAA, a group can consist of three or more players from a university or six or more from multiple teams.”
The Brandr Group currently represents athletes from 86 colleges across the country by creating opportunities for them and insight to help them manage the NIL landscape.
The business was created about seven years ago and has worked in various professional sports leagues since then, but Stachitas always believed that college sports would follow suit eventually.
“We anticipated some day it would come to this in college,” Stachitas said. “The markets not that big yet, but college fan bases are pretty passionate, so it won’t stay that way for long. We believe it’s going to grow exponentially, just as it has in the pros.”
Although the concept of NIL is new for the NCAA, it is something that has been prevalent at the professional level for roughly more than 40 years, with 70% of all apparel sold coming through the NIL process.
There are even more avenues within NIL that make it the complexity that it is, including two sides for licensing and active use.
According to Stachitas, the licensing includes products, such as t-shirts, jerseys and bobblehead dolls or any merchandise that can be sold, while active use means that an athlete is actively involved, such as an autograph session or personal appearance.
For some fans, NIL has gotten out of control, and they may not like the new path that college sports is on.
However, The Brandr Group promotes itself as “NIL done right,” and their employees as “experts taming the wild west of NIL marketing.”
“We’re transparent throughout the process,” Stachitas said. “The schools know all the deals that we do.”
Wesley Haynes founded The Brandr Group years ago and much of the staff at the beginning had ties to the PGA Tour, which is what led them to make the company’s headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach.
One of the best parts of the process is when they receive thanks from an athlete or their parents for helping them line up their NIL opportunities.
Those moments are when Stachitas realizes the advantages of NIL and how it can impact a person’s life.
“I think back to when I was a college athlete, if someone gave me $100, I would have been ecstatic,” Stachitas said. “We just got a thank you from an athlete at Wake Forest the other day. It becomes real when a mom and dad walk into a bookstore (on campus) and see a jersey with their kid’s name on the back.”
