NIL, NCAA & the Wild West of College Sports – Decoding the Future with Andrew Donovan
PODCAST (June 28, 2025) – College sports are changing fast, and few topics are more polarizing than NIL. In this episode of Church Pew Sports, Altius Sports Partners President of the College Division, Andrew Donovan, joins host Bill Hobson for a candid, in-depth look at how Name, Image, and Likeness is transforming college athletics.
With experience advising over 40 schools, Andrew shares insider perspective on the evolving dynamics between athletes, universities, and the NCAA. From recruiting and regulation to collectives and compliance, this conversation explores the complex challenges and emerging opportunities shaping the next era of college sports.
TRANSCRIPT – (00:00 – 37:14)
Bill (00:00):
That’s right, we’re handing out high fives as we kick off another edition of Church Pew Sports. It is great to have you all with us. Bill Hobson on this end, and Paul Miller hopefully will join us a little bit later on. His pastoral duties have called him away from the microphone right at the outset of the program, so you know—the timing in ministry is not always our timing. We’re glad Paul’s taking care of business, but I know he wants to be a part of this conversation.
It was just a couple of weeks ago, I was a substitute radio host on WJR in Detroit—the 50,000-watt blowtorch—and I was filling in on a show that was talking about a little bit of everything, including the world of college athletics and name, image, and likeness, and the impact. One of my guests—for like six minutes, it was so irritatingly short because that’s how real radio goes; there’s always a traffic update, there’s always a commercial break coming—one of my guests was Andrew Donovan, the president of Altius Sports Partners College Division. They handle NIL for a lot of schools you’ve heard of, and logos you probably wear. I know there are logos that I wear.
In fact, as we were playing the opening to the podcast, I was watching Andrew in the Zoom window, and he was recognizing some of those Coach Harbaugh moments, I do believe. So, Andrew, it’s good to see you. Thanks for coming on this podcast, where we don’t have the interruptions of traffic, weather, and commercial breaks every eight minutes. It’s good to see you.
Andrew (01:26):
It’s good to see you, Bill, and I certainly appreciate you having me on. And of course, I did recognize Coach Harbaugh there. And I got to say, at the outset here—I mow my own lawn, just like Coach Harbaugh. That’s something that sticks with me. That grit of Dan Campbell, who has also heard that voice—we share that.
Bill (01:44):
You know, it is impossible not to like Dan Campbell. Just impossible. Now, you don’t know this, but Paul Miller is a Buckeye. So, we have, as co-hosts, the Wolverines and Buckeyes.
Last week, Andrew, I was playing in a pro-am on the LPGA, and my playing partners included me as a Wolverine, a Buckeye, a Dookie, and a Notre Dame grad. It was like the United Nations coming together in a golf scramble, and I think we got along okay—but there was not a lot of sports-related talk, just to keep things safe.
So, in your world, where do your allegiances lie?
Andrew (02:24):
Well, I mean, I shouldn’t say this, but I will. Three of those four are clients, and it just so happens that three of the four I’d look at differently from an academic perspective. I’ll let you guys do the math there.
But in any event, my allegiances—you know, we work with more than 40 schools, so I would say my allegiances are far and wide across the country right now. That said, my undergrad alma mater is Miami, so the Hurricanes are my tried and true.
I spent a dozen years on college campuses in administrative roles—three years at Marshall University in West Virginia, six years at the University of Tennessee, and three years at LSU. So, I like to continue to keep in touch with colleagues and friends in the industry, and certainly, being in the role I’m in now, I get the opportunity to cheer for a lot of different teams and hope for good, competitive competition.
Bill (03:09):
You’re somewhat like me. When people ask me what my favorite golf course is, you’re not going to answer that question. It’s not good for business to go out with a solid answer. I totally can relate to where you are.
Well, let’s dig into it then. When did you, Andrew Donovan, first enter the NIL world? How did this become part of where you are?
Andrew (03:30):
Yeah, so the role I’m in now—I was actually on the client side of the relationship with Altius in my time at the University of Tennessee. I was on the executive team there, and I oversaw our regulatory affairs, our compliance and governance unit.
Back in 2020, our athletics director at the time was Phillip Fulmer—the famed former football coach—and then our future athletics director there tasked me with leading a group to determine what we were going to do to manage what was to come.
At that point in time, there were rumblings that we were heading down a road where the NCAA was going to allow athletes to profit off of their name, image, and likeness, which had long been prohibited. There was also some movement at the state level—in the state of California and Florida in particular—and then there was a waterfall effect from there to basically beat the NCAA to the punch to allow athletes to do what I just mentioned.
So, when I was tasked with that, I really started to look into the space to try to better understand it from a professional lens, because that would really be the only equivalent for those of us on college campuses to understand.
It ultimately led me to Altius, and so we hired Altius as a consultant at Tennessee. I got to know the founder and our former CEO really well. We really hit it off, and it opened up an opportunity for me to actually come on this side and to serve multiple institutions, as I mentioned, in navigating their infrastructure to support their athletes in NIL—how they’re putting policy and procedure in place, how they’re creating opportunities for their athletes, and making sure their athletes are navigating those opportunities in not only a responsible way but in a way that optimizes their brand, grows their brand, and creates new opportunities down the road.
Which has all evolved over the last four years. We’re here six days away, as we’re recording this, from the four-year anniversary of NIL going live. We now at Altius find ourselves in a position where we not only continue to help schools with NIL, but we’re helping with many more departmental initiatives—revenue generation strategy, departmental efficiencies—different elements that some are directly related to NIL and others are more tangentially related, but are so important because institutions now have to make their dollars go further, because the athletes, as I’m sure we’ll talk about, are being cut into that pie.
Bill (05:51):
So I’m thinking back to my old history classes—back when I was in school, I had hair—and they were teaching us things about the early settling of America. Those pioneers would head out west, and they would just arrive at this open expanse in the plains, and they would decide: this is the town, and I’m going to make a town here.
There was nothing there except for rocks and tumbleweed, and they would be formulating whatever would become that community.
Is that an apt analogy to the point at which you came into the NIL world? Because it was very theoretical before it became real.
Andrew (06:29):
Yeah, that’s a great analogy, Bill. The reality is, NIL is nothing new—and in true college sports fashion, we had to come up with an acronym, right? NIL is simply an individual’s right of publicity that you and I have had forever and has been available to us. It just so happened that the member institutions that make up the NCAA had passed rules a long time ago to limit an athlete’s ability to do that while they were competing in college.
What we were able to draw from the professional ranks was how you, as an organization, might support your athletes in finding opportunities and navigating those opportunities. But what was really the true new frontier was the reality that what doesn’t exist in the pro space, that exists in college—particularly at the highest levels of Division I—is recruiting.
There’s a draft at the pro level. There’s recruiting in the college space. So, it didn’t take too long—we’re talking maybe a matter of days—for recruiting to rear its head into the NIL space.
What you saw was an intention for athletes to be able to have the same natural right that many of the rest of us have in this country—to go monetize our brand—turn into something that was more synthetic in nature, where you now had program supporters, in the form of donors in most cases, creating justifications to get compensation to athletes. Yes, meeting the regulations, because there was a quid pro quo in that exchange. But were you really creating a public good? Was there really a valid purpose associated with what you were doing?
Whether you like that or not, that’s been the reality of the landscape over the last four years. And it’s not to discount the true, real NIL brand development and growth, and professional business growth, that these athletes and young people have experienced.
But the reality is, where we sit in college athletics right now—as it relates to NIL in particular—is not what was envisioned and intended when we transitioned four years ago.
Bill (08:32):
I’m so glad you said that. I cannot imagine that the intention was to have it look like it does right now, because it’s a major stumbling block—and I think some would say a turnoff—for the good old college university “U” that we all rooted for.
Now, I’ve long been rooting for student-athletes to get a slice of the pie. I mean, it’s ridiculous for the billions of dollars to go right around them.
And one of our other co-hosts on here, David Collins—who’s away tonight—he would be on a soapbox. You would see him pumping his fist in the air. He loves all of it.
Let me go back to my Wild West frontier analogy. They also set up a sheriff in town. There’s a sheriff in town. There’s a new sheriff in town.
NIL appears to be existing either without any enforcement mechanism or a mechanism that’s about as effective as Barney Fife, called the NCAA. And I don’t really know, in a world where everybody will always seek more—I don’t know where the brakes are applied to any of this.
Are there any brakes, or are they still coming? We’re trying to figure that out.
Andrew (09:39):
Yeah, I mean—the House settlement, which was approved here about two weeks ago—I think we’re coming up on the two-week anniversary here soon. It remains to be seen whether this new enforcement mechanism, which they’re going to call the College Sports Commission, will operate differently than what we know of NCAA enforcement right now.
There’s some reason to believe it will, and to believe that there’s alignment amongst institutions philosophically as far as how they will act, and how they will—more importantly—react when they find themselves on the opposite side of the regulations.
But there’s also, and probably more, reason to believe it’s just going to be the same tried and true: we’re not really going to be able to see much regulation.
Here’s something that’s really important, I think, for the lay college sports fan to understand. You may view what the NCAA does—particularly from an enforcement lens—as ineptitude. I don’t think it’s entirely fair.
In part because, if we think about what’s happened over the last four years—and going back even further—the litigious environment that has surrounded college sports…
We go back to the O’Bannon lawsuit, and we go to the Alston lawsuit that ultimately went to the Supreme Court. And the NCAA lost that decision with the Supreme Court—which a lot of people confuse with NIL. It’s not NIL, but the timing was such that it sort of was married to that. And that’s when NIL went live with the NCAA.
But all that to say: what has happened now, because of this competitive recruiting environment, is you have state attorneys—attorneys general—suing the NCAA when it is not convenient to their institutions, when a rule is either violated or deemed to be violated.
You have state legislators. You have congressmen and women. You have senators proposing and having laws passed. You have executive orders being passed that directly defy NCAA rules.
And so, it creates this environment where you don’t have equity across all the member institutions from state to state. And it puts the NCAA, quite frankly, in a no-win situation. Because they could go try to enforce their rules, and then they’re going to be slapped with a lawsuit from the state attorney general saying, “Well, no, no, no, no, no—our rules say that your rules don’t apply here.”
And now, all of a sudden, that’s going to be up to a court of law to decide which trumps which.
At this point in time, as we sit here and talk, there’s more than—I believe at this point—more than half of the states in our country have bills on the books, or laws on the books, or bills waiting to be voted on that directly contradict the authority of the NCAA to enforce its rules.
Think about that for a second. That is an untenable situation.
So that’s the reality of how all of this has existed.
I am certainly not an apologist for the NCAA or NCAA enforcement. Having spent a dozen years in that space on the college—the institutional—side, I face my own frustrations in that realm. But there are some tangential issues here that are a little bit outside of the control of the NCAA that ultimately put them in a no-win position.
Bill: (12:51):
So do you view the NCAA as stumbling along—Inspector Clouseau just coming after cheeseburgers and coaches who no longer are in college—or do they have a role to play in the future of administrating this new world order? Because if they do, they sure aren’t doing a very good job of making that clear.
Andrew (13:17):
So, where the NCAA absolutely has a long runway ahead of it is administering championships. The NCAA does a fantastic job of hosting and administering the championships—the national championships that we see on TV every year. And it’s not just March Madness, it’s not just the College World Series or the Women’s College World Series that we saw here in recent weeks. It’s all of the sports sponsored at not just the Division I level, but the Division II and Division III level.
And so, they do a really, really good job of that.
The NCAA also does a good job of what I would call eligibility certification—helping be that clearinghouse to assist institutions in ensuring that minimum academic eligibility requirements are satisfied, as the rules dictate.
The bigger question becomes: does the NCAA have a future relative to enforcement outside of that academic eligibility space, or outside of maybe playing season rules or actual playing rules that you see in the course of competition? That’s a TBD.
And when you have the House settlement—as part of the settlement—creating a new entity, a separate entity in the form of the College Sports Commission for the very purpose of enforcing these NIL and revenue-sharing rules going forward—all of the benefits-related rules, the things that you’ve read about, the cheeseburger that you’ve referenced—when you now have a new entity enforcing those things, and there are millions and millions of dollars being put into that by these institutions to make sure it is successful…
It’s awfully hard to believe that the NCAA’s future in that space is very long.
Bill (15:00):
Yeah, so, you know—you’re very well-versed in the legal world of all of this. If you were to just—we can’t turn back time—but if you did, if they had simply settled the O’Bannon case 15 years ago, are we in a different place right now?
Andrew (15:15):
We’re absolutely in a different place. It doesn’t mean that the pressures of the system wouldn’t continue to exist. I mean, as I said earlier, the recruiting element of college sports is so unique. It’s so uniquely American at the college level that you’re always going to have pressures that are different than the professional space.
But the reality of it is that the NCAA as an entity—and the institutions that make up the NCAA, and the leadership at those institutions, the presidents, the chancellors, the athletics directors—heck, I’ll even put myself in this bucket to an extent, having been an administrator on campus at the time… not that I was at the authority level at that time to influence this…
But by and large, the presidents and chancellors who are dictating the outcomes as the NCAA Board of Directors—they kicked and screamed at every push for change. For more autonomous authority for athletes. And the ability for athletes to operate in a space where they were sharing in the revenues that were coming about.
And I think, had decisions been made along the way—whether it was strictly related to the O’Bannon case or getting out ahead of this NIL issue, which they absolutely could have done—you’re looking at a very different circumstance. Not just as far as how the institutions interact and the opportunities made available to athletes, but I think from a standpoint of the general public and what we’ve seen in the athlete advocacy space.
I don’t think that fire would have been lit quite as strongly. And so, I think some of these things would have happened more organically, and we probably wouldn’t be in the position we are today.
Bill (16:52):
You know, it’s so funny you say that because—we look back, of course, in Big Ten country here—we know the SEC has been paying athletes for decades. And we just couldn’t prove it, right? That’s our theory, and we’re sticking with it—especially now that competitive balance is starting to even out.
And Andrew, I’m not a big fan of Paul Finebaum, but he did—right after the settlement judgment came out, I believe he came out and said, “Amateur athletics as we know it is dead.”
And, I was kind of having a hard time formulating an argument—especially at the revenue sport level.
I’m wondering if you see a world where we’re now going to kind of bifurcate college athletics, and the basketball and football world becomes its own professional league—maybe even disassociated from the NCAA—and then the other sports, that are still important, but they’re not going to pay for themselves, they remain a university sport. Am I tinfoil-hatting this, or are we headed in that direction?
Andrew (17:53):
No, you’re not tinfoil-hatting it at all. I think, to Paul Finebaum’s comment, it depends on how you define amateurism. If you’re really looking at basketball—particularly men’s basketball—and the football landscape, sure, that ship has sailed a long, long time ago.
But if you’re looking at some of the Olympic sports—what we term generally in the space as non-revenue sports—there still are some true components of amateurism in that space, again depending on how you define it and what your tipping point is. If an athlete’s getting anything for competing, do they no longer become an amateur?
Something will have to give along the way here. You have so many different elements to consider as it relates to revenue sharing with athletes, and even going beyond that, outside-the-cap opportunities for athletes that these schools at the highest level are absolutely going to pursue on behalf of their athletes. Why? Because of recruiting—because it’s going to differentiate their ability to be competitive.
As long as those pressures exist, it’s hard to see there not being Title IX challenges and continued employment challenges relative to the control these institutions exert on their athletes. We have ongoing litigation right now at the federal level surrounding that. We had the NLRB looking into athlete employment status.
As long as those things exist, I think new models—whereby maybe sports like men’s basketball and football, potentially even women’s basketball, become privatized in some sense. The institution could sell or allow investment in those sports to separate them from the academy as we know it—the institution of higher education—whereby now they can be regulated in a different way. Perhaps they are not subject to Title IX restrictions, which would be awfully important when we think about the dollars that are being invested and the dollars being provided to the athletes in those sports.
So, I do think that’s something we’ll continue to hear more and more about, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility in the next decade.
Bill (20:02):
So as a sports fan, now you and I are in the weeds right now. We’re doing inside baseball talk and I think it’s fascinating and I’ve got a lot of questions for you, but I want to take just a second and think about all of this from the standpoint of the fan, the season ticket holder who, if they go to the Big House, they’re sitting in a seat that is far too narrow. It’s really hard. You have to kind of sit sideways if you’re me, and it’s kind of a miserable experience, but you’re there for good old maize and blue.
And yet it seems like the days of watching the freshman enter the campus with a lot of buzz around him, and you get to watch that player develop over the years, and then his senior year he’s going to go to the Rose Bowl—you’ve watched him for four years—it seems like that’s going to become extremely uncommon. A player gets either a better offer from somewhere else—and I’ll give you the example that’s actually in my mind here in a moment—gets a better offer from somewhere else, or turns pro a little bit early because now the money’s almost even with what he was making as a sophomore or junior.
When Michigan and Michigan State played in basketball at the end of the season, there was a terrible controversy. The Spartans have a tradition of kissing the Spartan logo at half court, and a couple of the Wolverines were standing within 17 feet of the logo, apparently. And so, there was a big problem, and one of the players, Haladay for Michigan State, had dubbed himself, I think, the logo protector. And after the game, Coach Izzo talked about how proud he was of this young man. He’s our team captain. He’s a member of the Spartan family. And the Spartan family stands together arm in arm. We do not let it.
The day after their season ended, he transferred because of a better NIL deal. So there goes your team captain. And we’re not talking about a guy who’s riding the bench and never able to see the floor. But the bidding war drew him elsewhere, away from what you thought might be his collegiate home. I’m not saying I blame the kid. I understand—earning is what you’re after in college anyway, whether you’re going to be a scientist, a teacher, or a basketball player. But are we going to lose the allegiance of sports fans who now realize it’s not the kid anymore? I guess it’s just the jersey. Like Seinfeld says, it’s just the jersey.
Andrew (22:31):
Yeah, this is one where I’m not so sure we are. And the reason—I’m sure there will be some that are uninterested, that don’t feel as much of a connection to the athletes and to the institution as they did previously. But if we really look at particularly the last five years—or maybe let’s truncate it even more, the last four years since NIL has been a thing, or the last two or three years—viewership is way up in college football. People are tuning in at higher rates than ever.
Attendance has seen an upswing back after it had a downturn toward the end of the 2010s. And I think that would tell you some of the fearmongering surrounding, “Oh, if you pay the athletes, you’re going to lose your fan base, that’s going to become an issue”—I’m not so sure that’s true.
I think the logo, the affiliation and association, and the affinity for the logo and the institution—that is so uniquely American college sports—the pageantry surrounding college sports, I think we’re seeing, at least if the NIL era is any indication, that those things are outweighing the player loyalty individually.
And so sure, maybe over time, if we had this conversation five, six, seven years from now, we would have a better pulse, being a decade into that era, to understand. But early indications are that it’s not making a whole heck of a lot of difference as it relates to Johnny or Susie tuning in on Saturday and still supporting their alma mater—or just the school that they love.
Bill (24:10):
I would love to learn a little bit of how your world works, because I don’t know the order of events. Here’s the context for the question. We’ll just take Alabama, for instance. Does Alabama come to Altius and say, “Andrew, we need to develop a corporate support program so that when we go and recruit a player—whether it’s out of high school or from our archrival—we know we have X number of dollars available to offer the kid?” Or is the order of events that they come to you and say, “We really want to go and get this kid. Can you match us up with somebody who will underwrite what we need to bring that kid here?”
I don’t know how the whole thing works.
Andrew (24:57):
Yeah, so I guess it depends on how much you want to get in the weeds here. It’s more akin to the former than it is the latter, but there’s some nuance to that because particularly now that House has passed and effective July 1, you have this revenue sharing cap at an institutional level. If you do believe that some of the enforcement is real, there are going to be limitations on the aggregate value that a school can offer or be involved in guaranteeing an athlete to come to their institution.
And whether it’s institutional dollars through revenue sharing or a third-party deal with a corporate partner or a local business, if the institution is guaranteeing those dollars to the athlete, technically by rule they have to count against the cap. So really more of what we are doing is helping schools put infrastructure and process in place to ensure that they can create sustainable opportunities for their athletes and that they can equip their athletes with the tools to generate opportunities for themselves in a true commercial sense and helping educate the stakeholders in the university ecosystem—your administrators, your coaches, your university administrators, your program donors, your corporate partners, your affiliates from a vendor standpoint at the institutional level—to make sure everybody’s got an awareness not only of what is this whole NIL thing, but how can you as somebody that has a vested interest in the success of the program, contribute in a legitimate way to enhance your program’s opportunities to recruit, retain the best talent, to be competitive, and to be successful.
And I know that sounds broad, pie in the sky, but the reality of it is we’re working with about 40 schools where the motivations and the priorities of those schools, they’re not always the same. And so, our approach with institutions has to be: what are you looking to achieve?
Bill, I could tell you that some of the schools we work with, they’re having a hard enough time coming up with the dollars to get up to this $20.5 million cap in year one that they’ve not yet turned their attention to how do we find additive dollars and more deals outside of the cap for our athletes. And so they really want to just focus on their existing revenue streams and enhancing those dollars, which is a totally different investment and approach to how they’re going to manage NIL and revenue sharing than an institution that says I need to go find another five, six, seven million dollars on top of the cap and I need to do it now so that I know I have that available when the next transfer portal window opens.
So, it’s really contingent on what the priorities are, what the makeup and philosophy is of the institution we’re working with.
Bill (27:43):
You’re welcome to tell me if I’m all wet on this, but I’ve never met an 18-year-old who’s capable or prepared to handle $300,000 or more. Is there a support structure for the kid who teaches him about things like taxes and responsibility? Because, man, let’s take it to the NFL where they’re 21 years old, and the statistics tell us that roughly 75% of them end up in bankruptcy five years after they retire. Clearly there’s a vacuum, especially for those young athletes who grew up without really anything, and all of a sudden everybody says, “Yes, take this, take this.” How are we providing a foundation so that it doesn’t implode on them?
Andrew (28:27):
Yeah. So that’s where, with Altius, that is kind of the foundation of where we started—was education and training, particularly of the athletes. And so we have a whole curriculum, where we have folks on our staff, some that are located on the campuses of the schools that we work with, many of whom are remote and travel to those institutions or work with athletes virtually, that support them in those spaces, that walk them through workshops, do one-on-one consultation, put them in touch with the right resources to help them—whether it be how do I negotiate a contract, how do I get started in the NIL space, once I get this money what can I do to make sure I’m holding some back for the purpose of paying taxes, and where can I put this in a space that can grow. We provide those resources to support schools and, by extension, their athletes with that.
But even far beyond that, institutions do a pretty darn good job of providing those types of resources to their athletes, whether it be through internal means that already exist within their student-athlete development programs and within different resources on that campus, or partnering with groups like us and beyond. I could tell you from my stops, having worked on college campuses, whenever we had a corporate partnership with a financial institution, baked into that corporate partnership was that entity providing financial literacy, education, and support to our athletes. And so, you’re seeing that expand across other campuses.
Now, the reality of that is there’s got to be a willingness on the part of the athlete. And this is not me casting dispersion broadly on the athletes, but look, the reality is they’re getting pulled in a lot of directions. They’ve still got to go to class, whether people believe it or not.
Bill (30:06):
Do they really? Are there still eligibility concerns for a student athlete who’s at the top tier?
Andrew (30:15):
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, and look, here’s the reality. This House settlement passed two weeks ago. Last week, the NCAA comes out with, if I’m remembering correctly, a 36-page question-and-answer document. Within that document, it outlines some of the parameters, from an eligibility—an academic eligibility—standpoint, that athletes need to satisfy in order to participate in revenue sharing.
So not only now do you have this risk of, “I can’t compete in the sport I love, and the sport that in some cases is the main reason why I came to this institution,” but now you’re also going to lose out, and it’s going to hurt your pocket. So those things are still very real. I don’t see those going away anytime soon.
Bill (31:02):
I was talking with a football coach at a Division II level. And obviously, in all of this, they’re kind of hoping to catch some of the kids who don’t land the contracts that they think they’re worth. And so, they’ll come to D2 for a year or two. And I always feel for these coaches, because they put just as much time, effort, and energy into developing a student-athlete as they do at the D1 level. But that kid is only there to rent them for a year until he catches the attention of somebody who’s going to come through with the money.
Anyways, my question is, how often do you find yourself—and obviously you’re not going to give me any names or examples—but do you find yourself having to say to a young athlete, “Listen, I know your mom thinks you’re worth this much. I know your uncles are all telling you this. I know that you have an agent whispering in your ear to hold out for anything. I’m just telling you that’s not what you’re going to get, because you don’t bring that, I don’t know, whatever it is, résumé to the table.”
Do you find yourself in the position of having to do reality checks for an athlete who may be living a bit in fantasy land?
Andrew (32:13):
Yeah, absolutely. And it exists across the country at every level in every sport. And so, it’s, you know, I wouldn’t say that it’s a frequent engagement that we have in our role with the institutions, but it’s not infrequent. When we do have those athlete engagements, that we’re having to level set on expectations and help the athletes, in large part, understand that, look, this is no different than your talent on the field, your competitive success—you’re going to get out of this what you put in.
And so that almost sometimes is the more frequent conversation with the athlete: to say, “Hey, let’s help you have an understanding of what’s realistic. And now let’s have an understanding of what’s realistic based on what you put into this.” Because there are some athletes that are just sitting back hoping it comes to them.
And the reality is, if you’re looking to build your brand and make true NIL dollars and get involved in the commercial space with your name, image, and likeness, it takes work. It takes practice. And it takes an investment of time and resources.
Bill (33:14):
Just one or two more for you, I promise I’ll let you go. You’ve been great. If you had the magic wand—if you were the czar of all of college athletics—what would you change about the current place we are in to make it even better?
Andrew (33:31):
If this magical wand was mythical in nature and you could change people’s motivations and get everybody to align on the greater good, it would be to get folks to actually take the rules seriously and to abide by what they have agreed to as a membership. But let’s not forget that. The NCAA doesn’t make up the rules. The member institutions make the rules by voting on those, and then the NCAA gets the rap for it when the general public doesn’t like a specific rule, or when an institution decides to challenge a rule that they should have spoken up about previously when the voting process happened. So that would be the mythical answer.
The realistic answer, I think, is look—at the end of the day, I don’t think federal intervention is coming anytime soon. That’s my personal opinion, relative to an antitrust exemption, that would give the NCAA and, by extension, the institutions the ability to limit athlete opportunities in this space and to have a better enforcement mechanism that goes beyond this third party and is supported by federal legislation.
And so, if that’s not going to happen, and we’re going to continue to have this activity at the state level—which we’re going to continue to have, it’s inevitable—I truly think there’s going to have to be some type of collective bargaining with the athletes. And I know a lot of people do not want to view them as employees. I certainly know a lot of administrators and the folks I work with on a daily basis on campus don’t want to acknowledge that and don’t want to think about that potentially coming to fruition. And I certainly recognize there are massive complications and challenges with that.
What’s the bargaining unit? Is it football players in the Big Ten? Is it football players at the P4? Is it football players across the country? Is it football and basketball players together? Where’s volleyball? Where’s field hockey? We could talk about this all day. It’s very complex, and there are people much smarter than me that would be challenged to come up with the right solution to that.
But the reality is, absent federal intervention that’s providing that antitrust protection, I think that’s going to have to be the solution—to give the athletes a real voice to bargain for their rights, from a compensation standpoint and how they’re being treated and the opportunities that are made available to them, to ultimately have some semblance of calm, consistency, and a level playing field within the landscape.
Bill (35:58):
By the year 2030, are basketball and football their own separate professional entities that are licensed to a particular school, but not under any authority of those schools?
Andrew (36:13):
I don’t know if that’s the exact model, but I’ll say that I think they exist in a different realm than all of the 30-plus NCAA-sponsored sports do right now. And I think they’re governed by a separate entity. And I think the capital that is flowing into those sports is in a very different manner than what we’re used to right now at the academy level.
Bill (36:40):
Andrew, I think we could go all night. This is fascinating, it really is. And I wish my other guys were here. We’ll have to have you back as we get closer to football season and when the whole landscape changes again in eight weeks—because that’s how things go in the Wild West.
I can’t thank you enough, though, for your insight. He’s president of Altius Sports Partners College Division, and as you can tell, the man is well-versed in a world where most of us are just speaking a different language. So, it’s really helpful to have you help decipher the code for us. So, thank you.
Andrew (37:11):
You’re very welcome, Bill. I really appreciate you having me. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.
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Altius Sports Partners
Since its inception in 2020, Altius Sports Partners (ASP) has become a trusted strategic advisor to more than 40 Division I collegiate athletics programs, including nearly half of the P4. Through a unique blend of data-driven, creative, and practical strategic guidance, ASP College equips campus leaders to navigate the evolving landscape of collegiate athletics with confidence and precision. Additionally, ASP Brands helps blue-chip brands, including Verizon, Powerade, FedEx, and NBC Sports, develop and execute their college sports strategies and campaigns.
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