When Deverin Muff played Division I college basketball at Eastern Kentucky University, student athletes weren’t allowed to earn money off their name, image, and likeness (NIL)—their personal brand.
Now he’s a professor on the university, and a few of the players in his classes have agents. An NCAA policy change in 2021—heralded by Muff and other Christian athletes as a matter of fairness—allows college athletes to earn money beyond financial aid or scholarships.
“This is a matter of justice, frankly. … It righted a historic mistaken,” said Pepperdine University sports administration professor Alicia Jessop. College sports, especially football and basketball, attract billions in revenue.
Christians in college athletics have welcomed the change to permit NIL deals, in keeping with interviews with CT. But also they are navigating an unknown landscape and finding challenges along the way in which. The NCAA itself is still reeling from the resulting shifts within the economics of school sports, passing additional NIL rules just last week.
Jessop was recently teaching a category on NIL deals at Pepperdine, where she can be the school representative to the NCAA. One student decided to place the category into practice immediately and reached out to a sunglasses brand to pitch a deal. In a short while, the scholar had a free pair of sunglasses delivered.
“It’s a teaching tool,” said Jessop. “They think they’re learning about NIL in order that they’re focused, but they’re getting a complete business curriculum put in front of them.”
Under the latest NCAA rules passed last week, schools will be more directly involved in NIL deals they usually can offer a support system that helps educate students through the method.
“It’s a possibility for Christian athletes in college to develop maturity and wisdom to navigate the world, which is what college sports must be about,” said sports historian Paul Putz, assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. “It’s the Wild West a bit of bit, but there’s opportunities as well.”
Christian athletes may be well prepared for the NIL market, said Putz, because they’ve already been taught to think highly of their platform as a way of “promoting” Jesus.
He noted that national sports ministries just like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) and Athletes in Action have marketing and sales roots; Don McClanen founded FCA in 1954 with the concept that athletes could use their name, image, and likeness to endorse Jesus as an alternative of shaving cream or cigarettes.
Christian colleges have consulted with NIL lawyers, in keeping with interviews with CT, and have developed NIL-specific policies to place boundaries on what brands students can partner with.
For example, Houghton University’s NIL policy prohibits “activities that endorse businesses or brands which might be engaged in activities inconsistent with the University’s mission.” Most Christian schools have policies just like secular schools, which also don’t want students doing promotional deals with gambling corporations, for instance.
One query mark on this latest NIL landscape are collectives. Some nonprofit and for-profit NIL collectives have formed around school programs which might be often backed by alumni to search out NIL opportunities for players.
The NCAA has tried without success to limit these collectives from being an element of the recruitment process, in an effort to avoid “pay-to-play” incentives that may simply send one of the best college athletes to the wealthiest schools. The IRS also issued a memo last 12 months saying that these nonprofit collectives may not be tax-exempt, which could dampen alumni donor backing of those groups.
Is NIL making college sports transactional?
Some Christians have anxious about college sports becoming an increasing number of transactional. Historically, Christians have associated amateurism in college sports with moral formation, in keeping with Putz. Playing non-professionally in an academic setting is taken into account character forming.
But money has at all times been an element of the equation—it just wasn’t going to athletes. Coaches were already drawing high salaries by the Nineteen Twenties, Putz said. He doesn’t see any concern about transactional deals with coaches. (One recent example: Public records showed The Ohio State University signed a latest offensive coordinator for $2 million.)
“If [NIL] is transactional, we’re learning that from the grown-ups in those spaces, from the people who find themselves setting the pace and expectations,” Putz said.
Harold “Red” Grange, considered one in all the faculty football greats, announced he would turn skilled shortly after his college team won the state championship in 1925. Critics, which Putz said included Christians, were offended that he would stoop to commercialism.
But Putz said that when James Naismith, the Christian who invented basketball, was asked about Grange, he said any college athletes going to play professionally were simply doing what coaches had already done.
“He saw early on the way in which college sports were already commercialized,” Putz said.
Small potatoes at smaller schools
Most Christian college students aren’t going to see big NIL deals. According to Jessop, Pepperdine students are inclined to get in-kind deals on things like sunglasses.
One estimate in 2021 put Division III athletes’ average NIL compensation at $47 a 12 months. That has likely increased as students change into more entrepreneurial, but the majority of NIL money goes to football programs on the Power Five schools, which have drawn over $595 million in NIL funding previously three years in keeping with Opendorse.
Most Christian college sports programs are Division II, Division III, or a part of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, a conference for smaller colleges. The combined NIL football program earnings for all schools across those programs was estimated at around a half-million dollars.
Baylor, the one self-described Christian school within the Power Five conferences, reports that greater than half of its student athletes have NIL deals. Smaller schools may not have the resources to rent agencies to assist students with deals, as some larger Christian colleges have done.
Tim Schoonveld, the athletic director at Hope College, a NCAA Division III school, has 550 student athletes, and he estimates 15 of them have some sort of NIL deal. But they aren’t Nike ads.
“Maybe the local restaurant offers you a meal per week in case you tweet about them,” he said. “That’s the limited stuff we get.”
That’s by design. Division III athletes, like those at Hope, don’t receive athletic scholarships; the profit is that they’ve more time to deal with school and don’t lose their financial aid package in the event that they step off the team.
But Schoonveld is pleased for student athletes to earn income off their name and image. He thinks schools may help students navigate the ethics of deals; he wants them to balance making deals with being generous as people—engaging with younger fans without expecting compensation, for instance.
After the NCAA began allowing NIL deals, Peyton Mansell, then a quarterback at Abilene Christian University, reached out to a neighborhood farm and told them he liked their milk, in keeping with the college’s student newspaper The Optimist. Mansell and the farm worked out a partnership, and that have led him to start out his own beef jerky business in 2022, which has taken off.
“Now, having the ability to return that favor by being on the opposite side, and having the ability to say, ‘Hey, I need to sponsor you,’ is absolutely nice,” he told The Optimist. “Especially at a faculty like ACU, which doesn’t have the national reach like other universities.”
UConn basketball star Paige Bueckers, an outspoken Christian, has a self-imposed requirement that any NIL deal features a charity or community engagement opportunity. Bueckers was the primary college athlete to sign a take care of Gatorade, and Jessop said that girls athletes are the “early winners” with NIL because they will establish their very own marketing deals when “historically their athletic departments haven’t marketed them.”
Is NIL spurring transfers?
Another NCAA rule change in recent times that plays into NIL allows student athletes to transfer schools without the penalty of sitting out a season or more. That means larger schools with more incentives can often recruit top players at any point. Muff, the previous college basketball player turned professor, has conversations every week with students who may be wrestling with transferring, often to greater schools with the potential of higher compensation.
He brings up why it may be good to remain even without the greater NIL incentives, and asks them to take into consideration life outside of sports.
“Because I’m a former student athlete, teaching at the college I played at, the conversations can get deeper,” he said. “That’s my hope for anybody who does come refer to me—that they consider the community they’re leaving.”
Muff didn’t transfer partly because he became a Christian through the ministry Campus Outreach his sophomore 12 months.
“Having that community that was already inbuilt here, not only with other Christians in school however the church community, that helped lots,” he said. “People are well inside their right to transfer each time they wish to, but as an alternative of being a hired gun, you could have the chance to be in a family.”
He added: “If they honestly consider some place else goes to be higher for them, go for it. But consider all of your options before leaving.”
Jessop said for top athletes, “money talks”—and she or he thinks the pay-to-play collectives are more chargeable for driving transfers than NIL as an idea. But she still thinks students will hunt down Christian universities for his or her values.
And that’s where Christians have a singular contribution, Putz said.
“If we’re an athletic program that wishes to be a Christian athletic program, how will we connect what’s happening in NIL inside a broader structure of a Christian flourishing for student athletes?” said Putz. “NIL presents a laboratory space for determining those questions.”
