The national letter of intent, typically used as a binding agreement between high school recruit and college football program, is gone. In its place is a financial aid agreement created by a team’s respective conference. Wednesday’s early signing day was a novel event for many reasons. Now, more than ever, money is the fuel that drives the college football landscape.
Money is the reason schools across the country switched conferences for lucrative media rights deals. In the era of name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, it’s also a major dictator in what programs high school recruits and transfers alike ultimately decide to play for. That’s no secret. And at Penn State, like many schools, it’s at the center of discussion when creating a blueprint for success in a novel age.
“The reality is NIL is a factor now, and if you’re not able to offer similar opportunities that other schools are, it’s going to make it challenging,” James Franklin said on a signing day live stream Wednesday morning. “So we’ve been aggressive there and trying to close the gap. We still have some work to do. I think that’s the reality of it.”
The Nittany Lions have hired staff members to oversee their NIL department and have invested time and resources into growing a singular collective, Happy Valley United. But with an impending House settlement set to allow teams to pay their athletes over $20 million annually, beginning next fall, they’re also playing catch up in a game that has yet to establish its ground rules.
The foundation of Penn State’s recruiting strategy is the same ideology Franklin and Andy Frank, the program’s general manager of personnel and recruitment, have used over their 11 years in State College. They want athletes who care, first and foremost, about education and the opportunity to play team-first football for one of the nation’s most renowned programs.
But neither Franklin, Frank nor any other member of the team’s personnel staff can deny the 800-pound elephant in the room. Money is important, and if the program and university can’t or won’t embrace that, then it will be incredibly difficult to compete in the modern era. And while the Nittany Lions are making strides in NIL, they refuse to make it priority No. 1.
“If it’s the only thing that a family or a kid is looking at, we’re probably not going to be the place for them,” Frank said. “But we also want to make sure that if we are the right place for them, for all the reasons that Penn State has always been, … we want to make sure that we’re competitive and we’re not asking kids to take less money to come play football here versus potentially going somewhere else.”
The amateurism model in college football is dead. It’s a big business. That means negotiations between team and player no longer revolve solely around the opportunity to play in the White Out game or compete for a Big Ten Championship. There are new voices in the room and a new way of doing business. Because it is, of course, a business.
“You’re going to talk to agents and people that represent these athletes. That’s different. You almost have to,” said Alan Zemaitis, the Nittany Lions’ recruiting coordinator for personnel and recruitment. “You feel like in some recruiting situations, you talk to them more than you talk to the actual parents.”
In developing a recruiting base, connections with high school coaches, players and families used to reign supreme. And while these types of relationships remain essential, they almost rank second in importance to the links between a program’s recruiting personnel and a prospect’s agent.
Penn State has long succeeded in signing recruits from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and New York. But if it hopes to maintain this success in the age of NIL and revenue sharing, developing long-standing connections with agents is almost certainly the bridge for recruiters and coaches.
“These agents are connected to a lot of players, so getting to know them, getting to know how they work and and what to expect from them, is critical,” Zemaitis said. “Because a lot of times you’re going to be talking to the same guy, because he’s usually tied to a region and you want to have good rapport and good relationships with those guys because those are the guys that are going to have an idea of who we want and who we like.”
This professional model, like the NFL, is almost exclusively overseen by the Nittany Lions’ NIL staff, led by Dann Kabala, the team’s director of player relations. But, naturally, Zemaitis and other recruiting personnel members are likely thrown into the fire of discussions over compensation because of how essential money has become to recruitment.
It’s unlikely that the current system, still run in a traditional sense with the added layers of agents and financial discussions, is sustainable. If college football is shifting toward an NFL model, Penn State has to oblige. And it’s already taking a major step toward embracing the novel landscape.
The Nittany Lions are, more or less, searching for a general manager.
In November, the university posted an opening for an assistant athletic director for strategy and analytics. It’s a position that, according to the listing, will have someone “oversee the scholarship budget allocations for an athletic department managing a total budget of over $20 million” — the amount programs will be granted from the House settlement.
“I think that we will move forward in that regard here over the course of the next several months. I don’t know when that will exactly take place,” Frank said. “I think we are interested in someone who can have relationships with agents that can know how to deal with contracts, to know how to deal with the negotiations.”
The agreement high school recruits signed on Wednesday was only another step in the direction of evolving college football into a professional sport. Soon enough, Penn State will introduce its new general manager, like other programs across the country have already done. Franklin, Frank and his Nittany Lions are quietly sprinting into the modern era.
“If you look at NFL organizations, typically, they’ve got one to three or four people in the salary cap world. Those folks will help with those negotiations. Typically, you try to center with one person or a small group that handle those conversations,” Franklin said. “Obviously, coach, myself, the whole staff will be involved in the value that we place in terms of, how do we allocate the resources?”
