A recent partnership Tennessee football entered into puts the Volunteers ahead of the curve in the NCAA’s plan to allow athletes to receive endorsements.
On Tuesday, the NCAA Board of Governors supported a proposal to allow student-athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness with certain restrictions. If this goes into effect, a move that Tennessee football made a little over a month ago puts the Vols at a huge advantage.
According to Barrett Sallee and Adam Silverstein of CBS Sports, this proposal would allow athletes to receive compensation for third-party endorsements, social media influence, personal appearances and their own businesses. They can’t use intellectual property of schools or conferences, and schools or conferences can’t be involved in any way with them getting paid.
All of this would go into effect in the 2021-2022 school year. By the time that happens, Tennessee football will be well into a multi-year partnership with INFLCR. This partnership was announced on the company website back in early March.
With the connection, UT players, coaches and staff can share multimedia assets created by the Vols’ athletic program and delivered through the INFLCR software and mobile app across their social media accounts. Such assets include photos, videos and graphics.
This is a way for the program to bolster its online presence, but players specifically can use it to build their brands as influencers. Let’s be honest. If you’re a college football player, you stand to gain lots of money as an influencer on social media.
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In fact, this NCAA ruling will probably bolster the influencing business like never before. Usually, people who rely on being an influencer for money focus solely on their duties as an influencer. People who already have the necessary reach of an influencer have it because of something else they do, which is likely their primary source of income.
Many NCAA athletes, however, have the reach of A-list celebrities but don’t have the source of income those celebrities have. At the very least, the athletes in a place like UT or Alabama will have a strong hyperlocal following so will still be able to reach the same number of people in sheer numbers, even if it’s more dense, as A-list celebrities reach.
Taking that into account, they stand to potentially make a lot of money as social media influencers. In fact, doing that at a big school like the Vols could be worth more than being a late-round NFL Draft pick in football or even going to the G-League or overseas for a year in basketball.
As a result, Tennessee football’s partnership puts them in place to go ahead and execute this benefit, especially if it can reach across other sports. Jeremy Pruitt already has a top five class in the works for 2021, although he’ll have to work to keep it that way. If this rule goes into effect, he could build on that dramatically.