Mizzou sees its NIL model as 'one of the advantages' it has amid revenue-sharing questions (2024)

COLUMBIA, Mo. — As the college sports world prepares for the onset of revenue sharing with athletes and the wide-ranging, still nebulous shakeup it will bring, Missouri athletics director Laird Veatch has his fair share of questions.

He has some optimism, too: Veatch sees a clear advantage for Mizzou when it comes to the future of name, image and likeness compensation, or NIL, for athletes. But after a month and change on the job in Columbia — and just a couple of weeks after the House v. NCAA settlement that will redefine the financial side of college sports — he told the Post-Dispatch there’s a lot to be determined.

“The unknowns and the big questions that I have would, in many, many ways, be what you and others would have: just on the surface about the settlement and where it’s headed,” Veatch said. “It is a process that has to play out over the coming year. It’s going to be another one of those scenarios, in some ways sort of like COVID, where you feel like you’re trying to figure it out throughout the year as you go through the process.”

One part of the settlement involves billions in back pay to affected athletes, but that’s not the aspect with so much landscape-shifting power. That power-conference schools will soon be able to distribute somewhere around $20 million in shared revenue each year to their athletes is the forward-leaning topic fueling discussions across athletics departments, including MU’s.

The money is where Veatch’s questions become more concrete.

“First of all, of course, the institutional NIL or that revenue-sharing piece: How will that be distributed?” he said. “What’s going to be the parameters around that — at the national, conference and institutional level? Then, of course, the above-and-beyond NIL: How is that going to be structured from an enforcement, accountability, transparency side? How do we position ourselves for that? That’s where it starts to get into, OK, once you understand the bigger picture and what the potential parameters may be, how do you start applying that to your organization? There’s going to be a lot of modeling, a lot of concept discussion.”

And, perhaps, some room for creativity when it comes to getting money in the hands of athletes.

Revenue sharing will only be a part of how athletes are compensated, and it comes with its own questions and spots of tension that could wind up in courtrooms down the road, like how Title IX comes into play and the potential status of athletes as employees. Some form of the more normalized NIL compensation, which pays athletes for the use of their likeness, usually in a marketing capacity, is likely to stick around.

NIL collectives have become a core part of the latter operation as modernized, cash-hungry booster groups. The settlement, in some ways, could be at odds with their existence.

“I wish the NCAA would get off this ridiculous and outdated notion and drive to kill collectives that are actively working to achieve what they want and what schools want,” Walker Jones, who leads an Ole Miss collective, told Yahoo Sports. “They’ve got to put this vendetta down. We’re trying to do the very thing they want — provide a system and process using our expertise and relationships to truly recognize our athletes’ market value.”

But Missouri, in this regard, is set up differently from other schools in its structure and relationship with Every True Tiger, its collective. A state law passed last year allowed the collective to receive funds directly from MU for distribution, creating the “Mizzou model,” as it’s known beyond Columbia.

Every True Tiger has since branded itself as a marketing agency that can arrange deals with athletes — a system that is more closely aligned with a post-revenue-sharing landscape.

“You’re going to see a lot of continued innovation and restructuring of how NIL is managed at schools across the country,” Veatch said. “I think the Mizzou model is a model that many will end up trying to duplicate or reflect in some way, shape or form — because it is kind of the beginning of that institutional NIL in how it’s structured, how it operates.”

That process has already begun. Two Circles, an international marketing agency with a base in Kansas City that was working with MU and Every True Tiger, hired Every True Tiger CEO Nick Garner to take the Mizzou model nationwide.

The Two Circles move is an indication that the way MU has been handling its NIL setup over the past year is, nationally speaking, a path forward into the revenue-sharing era.

“That’s one of the advantages we’ll continue to have,” Veatch said. “We’ve got an infrastructure already in place that in many ways suits the direction of where we’re headed.”

With marketing as the new point of emphasis for NIL moving forward, schools could pivot from courting donors to fund athlete compensation to corporate partners for endorsem*nt deals.

“That’s where we’re really going to have to push to get to another level with our partnership with Learfield, working with Every True Tiger as well and their staff, and reaching out to corporations and organizations across the state to really get back to what NIL was intended to be on the front end,” Veatch said.

The future of NIL is only one aspect of the college sports shakeup that has left administrators like Veatch with questions where they’d probably prefer to have answers. There’s a swath of other yet-to-be-resolved matters swirling around his office, waiting for models to follow and months to pass.

To understand the current uncertainty from his perspective, just ask him what questions he has about the future.

“There’s going to have to be a new model in how we operate, from a financial standpoint, from a resource standpoint, the types of services we provide,” Veatch said. “How does all that look? And of course, in the back of your mind, you’re always thinking about: How’s it going to impact your student-athletes and their experience and what they get? You can arguably say it’s going to be more and more and more positive, which is the huge upside of all this, right? But then, also, how’s it going to impact your stuff and the institution? And how do we take advantage of the opportunity for the university as a major branding, marketing arm of the institution in many ways?”