Leverage NIL to Lift Up Student Athletes Who Don’t Get Full Scholarships

Last Wednesday, Ben Jones published a column on this website in which he posed five questions for Penn State head football coach James Franklin. The last of which had to do with the “ever changing Name Image and Likeness (NIL) landscape.” The premise was that it appears Penn State is still behind in this NIL race. Ben’s question was, “What does Franklin think Penn State – and more importantly the money in Penn State’s orbit – need to do to get the program and athletic department up to speed?”

As the parent of a current D1 FBS football player and as a Penn State donor and a Nittany Lion Club member, I have a suggestion. Although, because state laws and NCAA regulations do have some limitations in what can be done regarding NIL, this is a suggestion primarily directed to, as Ben put it, the money in Penn State’s orbit.

There are three types of student-athletes as far as scholarships are concerned: those who get full athletic scholarships that pay tuition, room and board, books, fees and cash; those who get partial athletic scholarships that pay portions of their educational expenses; and those who don’t get any scholarship at all and pay for their full education while also participating in a varsity sport.

As Mike Poorman has pointed out on these pages, the value of a full athletic scholarship for a Penn State football player who stays four years is $251,178 if the player is a Pennsylvania resident, or $355,741 if the player is from out-of-state. Those student-athletes have no expenses related to their education, and they’re getting cash – close to $5,000 a year – to help cover the “Cost of Attendance”. 

Not coincidentally, it is from this subset of full scholarship student-athletes that the most likely candidates for extra NIL money comes. The marquee players who stand the best chance of making money from NIL are the ones whose names are in the headlines, who get the playing time and, in most cases, are on full scholarship. In essence, the rich get richer. They are also the ones that I’m not at all interested in helping because my Nittany Lion Club donations and ticket purchases already do that.

As a fan concerned about my own bills, if I’m going to get involved in the NIL support game with the discretionary money I have, the student-athletes I would be interested in supporting are those who are paying their own way to be on these varsity teams. The walk-ons who do everything the scholarship players do as far as the team is concerned, but don’t get any financial benefits, or much in the way of any NIL opportunities. 

In this sense of fairness, if I were starting an NIL group to help Penn State student athletes, it would be for one purpose: to ensure every student-athlete had the cost of their tuition and room-and-board covered. If a coach feels a student-athlete is good enough to play for their team at Penn State, and that coach is going to require the same commitment from every member of that team regardless of their scholarship status, then there should be a mechanism so that the student-athlete’s tuition, food and housing will be covered. An added benefit from a team-unity standpoint is this creates a better possibility for a “one-team” atmosphere rather than the “haves=versus-the-have-nots” atmosphere when some players have scholarships, some might have partials and some have none. 

So, what are we talking about here? Penn State has 858 student-athletes getting 371.4 total scholarships – meaning to achieve this goal of fairness we’ll need money to cover the equivalent of 486.6 “scholarships” every year. Let’s assume half those additional student athletes getting NIL money “scholarships” are PA residents and half are from out-of-state, and we’ll use current tuition, fees, room and board rates of $32,270 and $51,635 respectively. Which gives us a total need of just a bit over $20.4 million a year. 

An NIL group that followed this fairness goal could collect money from donors, show how much money was needed to fully pay for every student-athlete’s attendance, chart progress, distribute the funds to the non-scholarship athletes on each team and let the donors know who received the money. As I said, if I was going to donate some of my hard-earned middle-class money in support of Penn State student-athletes, this is the type of group that I would give it to. 

Granted, the group would need to navigate all the myriad Name, Image and Likeness rules set up by not only the state and NCAA, but by Penn State itself, so that these student-athletes were being given money for the use of their NIL that followed all these rules. And of course, some of my donation would need to go to cover the cost of making sure these rules were followed. As an example, of the two “NIL collectives” currently listed on Penn State Athletics website – Success With Honor and We Are – Success With Honor estimates that 10-15% of donors’ money will be used to cover operating expenses. Which seems very reasonable.

Except, setting up and running these collectives, including the one I’m proposing, takes a lot of time, energy and money that seemingly duplicates a donation system that already exists – the Nittany Lion Club, which has a primary mission “to provide annual scholarship support to Penn State University student-athletes.” Except, under current laws and NCAA rules, the Nittany Lion Club can’t be involved in student-athletes’ NIL money. To wit:  “The institution may not arrange for third party compensation for a college student-athlete relating to NIL.”

Now, I am all in favor of NIL, by extension these collectives and especially any collective like the one I described that is dedicated to ensure every student-athlete has the cost of their tuition and room-and-board covered. But, if I had my way, the NCAA would – and should – make the need for my fairness NIL group obsolete. How? By eliminating all limits on the number of scholarships colleges can grant in any sport, and instead just put a limit on the roster size for every sport.

How would that make my fairness NIL group obsolete? Because if scholarship limits are eliminated the colleges themselves will have the ability to decide if every student-athlete has their full cost of education covered. It doesn’t mean they have to, and in many cases schools might not provide scholarships for every member of every varsity sport, but they could. And for those that do, my fairness NIL group no longer needs to exist.

There are other additional benefits of this scenario, one being that, as I noted, it uses a donation system already in place – the school’s booster club. The second is that I’ll be making my donations to Penn State and no matter how professional an NIL group is I’ll still feel better about where my money is going. Third is that, in most cases, Penn State is a much better investor than most others and any principal would have a better chance of growing in their endowment than in an NIL group’s.

But as much as I’d really like to see the NCAA eliminate scholarship limits, I don’t think that will be happening anytime soon. So if I was making a suggestion to the “money in Penn State’s orbit” on how they should get up to speed in the NIL race, it would be an NIL collective dedicated to helping cover the cost of attendance for those Penn State student-athletes in every sport who don’t have full scholarships. I, and possibly a whole lot of others like me, could see donating a few dollars to that effort.