What if NIL is just the first step towards creating your own IP universe?

Opendorse released its latest annual report on the NCAA athlete NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) market this week. The company estimates that total NIL compensation will reach $1.67 billion in the 2024-25 season.

The report breaks down NIL deals into two main groups: “commercial” deals, where, for example, a volleyball player posts an Instagram video promoting a skin care product and gets a few thousand dollars in compensation, and “collective” deals, where a quarterback commits to a new school and gets a $500,000 deal from his affiliated cheerleading team. The former is a new phenomenon in the influencer market. The latter is a backdoor to pay-to-play.

Opendorse says “collective” deals account for more than 80% of NIL compensation, with college football and men’s college basketball the dominant sports.

In May, the NCAA and its five major athletic conferences reached an agreement to settle class-action lawsuits filed by players who were barred from receiving NIL payments before the rule change. If approved, the agreement would pay $2.75 billion in compensation over a 10-year period to thousands of former athletes and create a framework for schools to pay players directly in the future. That would create a more traditional labor market for college sports.

As a salary equivalent, though, NIL is relatively paltry, with top athletes earning about 35% of what they earn in professional leagues, according to Opendorse estimates. On average, a men's basketball player at a top-25 school can expect to make about $350,000 per season in the NIL, while the median NBA salary is $1.5 million. A quarterback at a top college can expect to make about $800,000 in the NIL this season and more than $1 million next season, which is roughly in line with the NFL's median salary (across all positions) of $860,000.

On the other hand, a top-25 women's college player can make more in the NIL (about $89,000) than the WNBA's median salary of $78,000. It's not a completely fair comparison, since WNBA players can supplement their salaries with marketing deals, but it's an indication of how far behind the league is in terms of salaries.

But I think athletes need to design their IP-universes in advance, within which they can develop certain IP products. When you have a legend in your universe, NIL is just a tool on the way to becoming a Legend. Even if your athletic achievements don't put you on the same level as LeBron or Brady.