The Temple Alumni Office hosted a NIL educational session and reception Wednesday night aimed at offering Temple alumni and donors the opportunity to learn more about how Temple is using NIL and the landscape as a whole.
At the session, Temple Athletic Director Arthur Johnson admitted that he did not do enough in the NIL space when it first became legal in July 2021.
“We gotta do better,” Johnson said. “I’ll admit and I said to people, I didn’t do enough on the front end to really push because of all of the uncertainty, the uncertainty with where the rules were, how it was going to work, the lawsuits have just continued to come. While it hasn’t gone like we wanted to go, Andy has done a great job finding our niche and we still need that support.”
The event featured remarks from Johnson and a panel of four Temple figures involved with the NIL operations — Ken Jacobsen, Andy Carl, Justin Miller and Jackie Dansak. The panelists discussed their roles with NIL and how they are helping Temple advance itself in the industry.
Here is what each of the panelists covered at the event.
KEN JACOBSEN
Jacobsen, a practice professor of law and director of the sports law program at Temple, talked about a current settlement that is being brought against the NCAA. He cleared up some “common confusion” around NIL and how many things labeled as such are not actually NIL, like pay-for-play deals. The NCAA settlement would clarify some of the gray areas.
If the settlement is approved, the NCAA will no longer have the National Letter of Intent, the document that athletes sign committing to a school and scholarship. A student-athlete will instead be able to negotiate their own scholarship, what they can earn from their NIL and from revenue sharing, Jacobsen said.
“The payment, the compensation that athlete receives, has to be equivalent in value to what that athlete offers and delivers to whoever’s paying him or her,” Jacobsen said. “That’s not an easy thing to quantify, because what is the market? So these are very complicated issues that exist now in the NIL space and will continue to exist in the NIL space until we get more clarity from the settlement. If it’s finally approved, it’s going to change the landscape of college sports forever.”
JUSTIN MILLER
Miller, Temple’s executive senior associate athletics director and chief of staff, explained that NIL does not go through the university, but they are private transactions through third-parties — through collectives like The TUFF Fund. The only way the athletic department is able to obtain information on private transactions is if a student-athlete discloses it to them, Miller said.
Miller works with student-athletes to ensure they can navigate the NIL space. He works to protect athletes from deals proposed that might violate NCAA regulations and informs the young students on taxes and financial literacy, he said.
A class has been established for all freshmen student-athletes at Temple that teaches about brand development and NIL. The department has also been working with the Temple NIL Store for all student-athletes to sell products with their names and numbers on them.
“Our vision for Temple Athletics is to cultivate the greatness within our student-athletes as they pursue academic, athletic, personal and professional life,” Miller said. “We need to work with and we’re working hard to work with the NIL space in still staying true to that. But it’s really important, as this world is evolving and constantly evolving, that we stay nimble and we’re able to respond to the changes in the marketplace.”
THE COLLECTIVES
Temple’s main source of NIL funding during the last three years has come from The TUFF Fund, an independent collective spearheaded by Temple alumnus Andy Carl that was started in August 2022. Carl started the Fund looking for a way to help Temple athletes in the NIL world.
Carl has played a major role in helping Temple land recruits and transfers by helping the players land NIL deals. The TUFF Fund has or will have NIL agreements with all 16 basketball players and has helped significantly raise the football budget, Carl said.
“We came up with a concept of The TUFF Fund where it was a NIL collective that we started to see popping up all over the place, but we knew that we didn’t want to get into the pay-to-play space,” Carl said. “So we tried to utilize our student-athletes and their name, image and likeness to further initiatives that we were really passionate about and some of our alumni and our fans were alumni were passionate about that maybe we couldn’t go about performing.”
Carl has worked closely with players, helping them land NIL deals with different brands and companies. With the help of Carl and The TUFF Fund, basketball players Jameel Brown and Zion Stanford have both set up camps in the city.
Carl helped guard Quante Berry land an NIL deal as an ambassador for the Lupus Foundation of America. Berry’s mother and sister have both been diagnosed with Lupus, a disease where the body’s immune system attacks healthy tissue.
In May, The TUFF Fund was joined by the Owl Elite Fund, a for-profit collective that offers another way for athletes to gain NIL profit. The Owl Elite Fund is run by former Temple track and field athlete Lou Parisi and alumnus Jackie Dansak
The Owl Elite Fund focuses on executing marketing and advertising activities with student-athletes and businesses of all sizes and industries. Dansak announced the Owl Elite Fund’s first partnership at the event, with 2Moods a vodka seltzer brand that will make Temple-themed cans and boxes. The money brought in from the partnership will go into the collective and can then be used to engage athletes in NIL opportunities.
“It’s exciting for me because I get to see the parents of a lot of the student-athletes that I’ve grown and built relationships with,” Carl said. “I think that makes truly a difference in the program and excited about the growth opportunities.”
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