I have been a college sports fan most of my life. Initially, it was easy for me to root for Pitt basketball when Tay Malarkey and Sammy David were playing, and for Penn State football as a natural adjunct to my father’s support of his Alma Mater. Once I got to Penn State, I realized I was in sports fan’s Heaven. Rip Engle was reviving the football program with players like Rosey Grier and Lenny Moore. The winter sports program was incredible. I recall spending one whole Saturday at Rec Hall watching, in order, nationally ranked teams in gymnastics, boxing, basketball, and, best of all, wrestling. Having three Bridgeville boys – Bob Harris, Bill Norcik, and Emil Borra – on an outstanding Lions soccer team merely embellished my situation.
The ensuing years have been filled with ups and downs for Penn State and Pitt sports, but I have maintained a lukewarm interest in both programs. This year I have closely followed both basketball teams and was pleased at their performances in conference tournaments and their participation in “March Madness”. Sure enough, both teams had impressive wins in their first-round games, and the possibility arose that they might meet in the quarter-finals, depending upon winning their next games. Alas, that didn’t occur, as they both were eliminated in the second round.
I was impressed with the coaches for both teams, and disappointed to learn that Micah Shrewsberry, the Penn State coach, had decided to resign and become head basketball coach at Notre Dame, despite a serious effort on the part of the Athletic Department to retain him. The official “party line” was that Shrewsberry was a native Hoosier and that he couldn’t wait to be “Home Again in Indiana”.
Penn State’s fan base is so big and so passionate that it supports several dozen “experts” who make a living reporting on Lion sports, via newspapers, podcasts, and the social media network. Unanimously they agreed that his departure was a major loss and that the villain really was “NIL” and Penn State’s inability to manage this concept. Shrewsberry was quoted as having reported that State was dead last in the Big Ten in the NIL support its basketball players received. The clear implication was that this concept permitted wealthy supporters to funnel money legally into the pockets of amateur athletes in support of their teams, and that the Penn State Athletic Department had failed to exploit this as well as their competitors in the Big Ten.
NIL stands for “Names, Images, Likenesses”. Fifteen years ago twenty former UCLA basketball players sued the NCAA arguing that “the organization violated United States antitrust laws by not allowing athletes to make a share of the revenues generated by the use of their names, images, and likenesses in broadcasts and video games.” When they won their case, the state of California enacted legislation permitting amateurs to be reimbursed. After considerable litigation, the Supreme Court upheld this decision in June 2020. A year later the NCAA adopted a rule permitting the reimbursement of athletes for the use of their names, images, and likenesses.
The consequences of this decision are still unknown two years later. The current most popular source on NIL is a sports website, “On3”. According to it, the single individual with the greatest NIL potential is LeBron James’ son, Bronny. Currently a high school athlete in Cleveland, he is expected to make over seven million dollars from NIL this year. A significant part of it comes from the fact that he has over twelve million followers on FaceBook and Twitter.
Next comes Arch Manning, grandson of Archie Manning, and nephew of Peyton and Eli Manning. Currently a Freshman at the University of Texas, his high school credentials suggest he is the next great Manning quarterback. He is projected to earn three and a half million dollars through NIL in the coming year. So is Livvy Dunne, a gymnast at LSU with a social media following of over eleven million subscribers and endorsements of athletic clothing. Nineteen other celebrity athletes are in the million dollars per year class.
Whence cometh this wealth? Primarily from two sources – endorsements and appearances in commercials, and social media. A T & T featured Purdue center Zach Edey, easily the best-known current college basketball star, in a popular commercial during the March Madness television coverage. He certainly deserves to be reimbursed for the use of his likeness there. As for the social media category, a rule of thumb is “twenty-five cents a year for each follower”. Knowing how to exploit TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. certainly can be lucrative.
So, how valid is the complaint that Penn State suffers because of NIL? It turns out that four of the top 100 NIL players in the country are Penn State football stars, led by Nick Singleton with a projected annual income of $864,000. Okay, but the complaint was about Penn State basketball. Well, second string All-American Jalen Pickett is projected at $71,000, and the next five players average $20,000. How does that compare to other Big Ten basketball teams? Purdue’s championship team averaged $25,000, once Edey’s $408,000 is eliminated. Incidentally, Notre Dame’s five starters averaged about $12,000.
A curious outlier is Ishaan Jagiasi, a senior walk-on on the Penn State basketball team. He was sixteenth out of sixteen in season statistics, playing a total of three minutes in thirty-seven games and compiling one assist. His projected NIL earnings this year are $56,000, primarily because of his personal skill manipulating social media. He has a total of 333,000 followers on five different platforms, focusing mostly on what’s it’s like to be a walk-on on a Division One basketball team.
My conclusion is that this is a complicated subject. I suspect Micah Shrewsberry did indeed leave to go home to his beloved Indiana, and that Dear Old State is exploiting NIL nearly as well as most of their competitors.