NIL’s been out of the Notre Dame headspace for the last few weeks, with no top football recruits decommitting when pressed with (speculated) hundreds of thousands of dollars from other schools, but Mike Brey’s retirement brings it back up. The biggest hint Notre Dame wasn’t in a great place with NIL came long before Peyton Bowen jumped ship. It either came with Dante Moore or, if you watched the college basketball transfer portal, with Mike Brey’s failure to bring in a single big man to replace Paul Atkinson.
It’s possible what happened with the men’s basketball program was not NIL. It’s possible that’s too charitable to Brey. But being charitable to Brey by nature and being especially charitable to Brey right now, we’re looking at the NIL angle, and besides: The NIL angle makes a lot of intuitive sense. Notre Dame landed a small-time transfer recruit in Marcus Hammond. It couldn’t land a medium-time one in Grant Basile. Basile—a physical rebounder from Milwaukee—was exactly the kind of player Notre Dame needed. They failed to bring him in. Maybe it’s NIL, maybe it’s not, but presumably Basile wasn’t the only forward on the radar, and to completely swing and miss at a whole position? That was odd. At the very least, it’s worth checking where the NIL program stands.
From what I can tell, there are currently four public Notre Dame NIL efforts.
The first is the FUND Foundation, whose face is Brady Quinn. FUND is a registered nonprofit, the basic premise of which is to donate to charities specified athletes support while also giving the athletes stipends. FUND could (and maybe does, as they’ve retweeted both these efforts) support Dane Goodwin working with the American Cancer Society, or Logan Diggs working with HandsOn New Orleans. How much do Goodwin and Diggs make from this? I have no idea, but the reporting seems to be that it’s small. This is a benefit for athletes, but it doesn’t appear designed to sway a specific recruit.
The second is Irish United, which is newer and run by Student Athlete NIL (SANIL), an organization that runs NIL machines like these at multiple schools. It’s a different beast—only 85% to 90% of contributions go to athletes, there’s no mention of charity, and standard donations aren’t tax deductible. My guess/impression of what’s happening here is that SANIL handles the legal side, acts as a middleman for brokering deals between brands and athletes, and provides another funnel for fans to generally contribute to NIL at their preferred school, Notre Dame being one among many.
The third is the Irish Players Club, which started with an NFT offering but is now evidently a media platform where players receive payments in exchange for content? That’s my impression on what’s happening. It’s football-only right now.
The fourth is NBC Sports Athlete Direct, which has been piloting a program at Notre Dame, Temple, and Vanderbilt. There was some noise here in October when Chris Tyree set up a fan club via NBC, but it’s hard to tell what impact it’s having.
Overall, it’s unclear what is and isn’t happening. Much of this goes down behind closed doors, and just as there was the no-contact dance between coaching staffs and boosters back when this was bags of cash, there’s separation between NIL organizations and the athletic departments they support. In certain states—including Indiana—this is evidently legally required. Maybe there are more than these four out there. Maybe I’m missing something big and public and obvious. But contrasted to even Iowa State—which has both the We Will Collective and the We Will Club, the first a FUND-style charity and the second an NIL brokerage run by the exact same people—Notre Dame seems to be disorganized, heavy on the non-profit, and light on getting players money. There does not appear to be one cohesive group stepping up and making it their job to create financial NIL opportunities for Notre Dame athletes. If there is, it’s happening behind the scenes, but you’d imagine it would be helpful to have a tacit designated person recruits could contact with these sorts of questions and requests. Maybe I don’t understand how NIL is working, though.
The questions, then, are 1) whether these four efforts are, together, enough to keep Notre Dame recruiting competitive across sports and 2) what Notre Dame—as a community, not the school itself—should do if the answer to Question #1 is “No.” I don’t have the answers to those. In football, the recruiting remains solid (and Marcus Freeman’s made the observation that if a player demands a specific price one year, he’s likelier to demand a new price the next, with the transfer portal an annual option). In most sports, NIL is currently a mere luxury for athletes. In men’s basketball, it’s arguably the most necessary, with basketball such a fluid sport in terms of slotting players in and out of lineups and rosters and the transfer portal so loaded every year. For coaches interviewing to replace Mike Brey, NIL is the biggest concern, right? Does something exist or not?
