We have had a ton of posts about NIL and Nebraska on this site. We are fortunate enough to have a little bit of access to the inner-workings of that side of things. The reality of the situation is Nebraska spent a good year or two just spinning its wheels trying to get things up and going when NIL became legal, which made us essentially not go anywhere and have other programs take off with theirs and get a jump start on us. But is that always a good thing? Remember how much attention Texas A&M got for signing a 25 million dollar recruiting class with NIL? That ended up getting their coach fired and most of those kids transferring out.
If you’re curious about some of my NIL posts in the past, my tune has changed, but here are a couple of them:
Let’s get into a conversation we had about where Nebraska was, the challenges we still face, what is starting to go right and in our favor, and how us as Nebraska fans can help. I will caution people that I took my opinion out of what was being said and just tried to listen, so this talk was coming from the collective side.
Where we came from
An odd title for this part with NIL being so new still, but it’s important to go over. With all the work that 1890 is trying to do now (they’ve stepped up their marketing considerably in the last 30-60 days), sometimes people forget just how discombobulated things were for Nebraska athletics when it came to NIL and more specifically collectives. Remember, Nebraska had a few collectives trying to raise money, then all of a sudden just said screw it and threw Gerrod Lambrecht into a role to raise more for ABM that was going to be the main collective for football as well as a few other sports. With that news, you also had the Big Red Collaborative headed by former kicker Kris Brown in Omaha, so we were already at 3 collectives in about a 1-2 year span. While some schools have multiple collectives because different “boosters” want to have their hand in things, ours was more from the situation of not knowing how to attack the situation.
Now, if that was so that we could have multiple buckets to pull from for NIL across multiple sports, great. But it seemed like each one was jockeying for the majority pie and ran into issues. Rumors of some not being able to get off the ground, some of them not paying players, and donations just going missing for what they were supposed to be intended swirled, and once Frost got fired it was time for a clean slate and to really get something going. So while tweets like the one below surfaced and fans thought this would be our path to evening the playing field and getting us back to 90s status, it just wasn’t right.
The reality is the fact that Nebraska was probably closer to 50th in terms of what we were paying guys and how we were organized. Don’t forget, we grabbed Trey Palmer by telling him he would sell NFTs to our fans among other things:
That site can’t even be reached anymore. We did a little better grabbing guys like Ben Scott, Billy Kemp, and Jeff Sims the following year. But lost out bidding wars for guys like Walter Rouse to Oklahoma. Things just weren’t right. We needed a ton of help.
1890 Collective
I apologize for the language, but it was a fucking shit show for Nebraska and NIL collectives the first 2 years. Luckily we had some of Nebraska’s most powerful donors Tom and Shawn Peed decide to reach out and ask what they could do to help. With Matt Davison no longer in a football role with the University, and having a pretty extensive resume for fundraising in different capacities, it almost made too much sense for them to have him heading the efforts of 1890. After all, Matt had already been doing most of the heavy lifting for securing the funds for the new football facility. Him being an alum helped, as he was going to have to have conversations with players on what the football team can do for them. And by the way, if football doesn’t work out, look what playing for the team can do for you like it did for him.
Sandhills helps with nearly everything when it comes to 1890. On top of the Peeds being some of the biggest NIL donors due to their company Sandhills Global being so successful, they also give resources such as IT, web design, marketing, etc. , to the collective to help build the brand. With overhead costs so low for 1890 (or non-existent), it made it so we have some very distinct competitive advantages now in the world of NIL. They hold happy hours for boosters/donors, bring players to their offices on visits and during football games, and we are one of only a handful of teams that has a collective with a building right across from the football stadium.
“100% of your donation goes to the athletes”
We’ve seen this broadcasted by the 1890 Collective, and on the surface it is very telling. But I don’t think many people give a second thought to what that actually means for the athletes and how that sets us apart from others. The Peeds along with their company Sandhills Global take care of all expenses for the 1890 collective. Collectives at other schools have operational expenses, salaries, and in some cases are even taking cuts/percentages of what the players are earning. Let’s be real, no one is just such a good person they are volunteering all this time for the athletes. Even Davison needs paid, but the Peeds take care of that, not the players NIL deals. So if you donate 100 dollars at other places, some of that has to cover said expenses like the person in Matt Davisons positions salary, bills to keep the lights on, etc.. Not at Nebraska.
Further, one of the things that is coming to light with other collectives is they will sign student-athletes to deals and that locks the player into what they are going to make for the year. If you make over that, the collective many times will keep the “extra revenue”. Let’s use round numbers for an example. Let’s say someone signs with Miami for a 500k collective deal, but really starts pouring it on and making a name for themselves during the duration of that contract, and new businesses come on board with wanting an appearance and will pay for it. The collective in some instances keeps that extra money, and then it is negotiated for the NEXT deal. At 1890 and in Lincoln, if you sign a 500k deal (which would be very rare, again just using a round number) and all of a sudden more things come in, you get the additional dollars. The entire crew is paid from the Peeds, so there’s no commission or bonuses that come from the player for a job well done. This is truly about the student-athlete.
Let’s take Raiola for example, as he’s a very different guy from what we usually do with NIL. For numbers sakes, let’s say Raiola signed a 1 million dollar per year deal, for 3 years with 1890 (typically athletes are on 6 or 12 month deals but he’s in a very unique category). He is guaranteed that. Let’s say he becomes a Freshman All-American and more companies jump on board wanting him to promote their brand… at other schools he inked a contract, so any additional dollars aren’t guaranteed to go to him. But at Nebraska and with 1890, Davison isn’t getting a cut from a player doing better and getting more deals. They are all for the athlete, so if they make more, the player gets more. No strings attached. When players hear that, it really resonates.
And lastly with the fees, and Matt Davison hit on this with a radio interview earlier this week, but taxes are a huge issue with a lot of these kids. The last thing you want to have happen is a kid get a good thing like money for NIL and then after 12 months be upside down with the IRS. 1890 withholds taxes for 99% of the athletes. But there’s some challenges there. Some players are married, have kids, different tax brackets, etc. which has a fee for it. Essentially Sandhills Global takes care of the accounting for them instead of having to go to H&R Block and do it yourself, and hopefully they see a bit of a return come April of the following year.
Donors Are Confused
Now for some of the challenges that are still present with our collective and the University. Donors are getting pulled into multiple directions from the University, and now they have an NIL collective trying to pull them another way in an effort to help the University. Guys that have a ton of cash and only have 30 minutes to talk have said “The University needs to get their shit together and tell us where the priorities are. I have a lot of money, but I don’t have 7 figures for the stadium project, 7 figures for NIL, 7 figures for the med center, etc.”
While AD Trev Alberts has said a couple times that the 1890 initiative is helping, the support hasn’t been as strong as some other athletic directors from across the country. ”NIL is an important piece of being competitive in the world of college athletics now. If you are wanting to contribute in that way…” and then state the website and how to donate to aid in 1890s efforts to raise more money. Rhule has done a great job promoting 1890, as he’s not as worried about the stadium project or other things. He wants a big NIL bucket for his players.
But How Does Alberts Cement His Legacy?
And part of me gets it for AD Alberts… NIL isn’t in-house, so every dollar sent that way is a dollar that could potentially be coming his way for the Go Big Project which is the 450 million dollar stadium renovation project. Keep in mind, we just had trouble raising the 160 million dollar football renovation that will be completed this spring.
As one higher profile person put it to me “what is going to cement his legacy? Telling people to donate to a collective he doesn’t have really any part in? Or a brick and mortar stadium expansion to complete the transition of Memorial Stadium?” I of course responded with “well if he’s the AD when the football team or other programs get back to dominance, that looks pretty good for a legacy, does it not?” That was greeted with a pretty emotional “that’s exactly what I’m trying to say! How many games is the Big Red Project going to win us? We going to the CFP in 2029 because a ticket holder in the south stadium has more leg room? But you know what will get us more competitive? Continuing to grow the NIL bucket.”
He went on to say how most of the people on board for the stadium expansion are the ones that aren’t going to be paying a majority for it. The ones that will end up being on the hook are the ones that are having to decide between matching NIL contributions or giving to the stadium project. And again, depending on who you ask, the priority for money should be allocated to different spots. He believes eventually that the stadium project will continue to get shaved down and shaved down for how much that project ends up costing and what gets renovated.
“A Good QB In The Portal Costs 1-2 million dollars now”
For those that don’t remember, here it is:
Many people thought that this was Rhule’s subtle way to tell donors we need more money and we are going to pay that. But what if I told you that comment made negotiations a little more difficult for us? Imagine having a portal QB in for a visit, or on a Zoom call with your collective and the they hear that from Rhule, but then they see the package they are being offered and it’s 250k? ”Does this mean Nebraska thinks i’m not a ‘good portal QB’?”
That statement is a tough one, because I see both sides. But in the end it’s why every penny donated matters.
The Med Center In Omaha
Another thing brought up to me is how low Nebraska is ranked in terms of academics amongst other B1G schools, and how we are one of the only ones to have our Med Center not in the same city. ”Think about Iowa doing the wave to the Children in the hospital, their med center is right across the street. Tommy Armstrong got hurt at Ohio State and went to the hospital and was back for the second half in Columbus.”
There’s a private group of doctors that don’t really have any affiliation to the University of Nebraska taking care of things and we send our players to the couple hospitals and practices there in Lincoln. For us to get UNMC on board, they’d have to bring full-time doctors down to Lincoln, have a surgery center, etc.
But the juice may be worth the squeeze, having UNMC would immediately bolster our academic standing. We’ve all heard about the AAU affiliation and whether or not we were a part of that, an academic hospital counting towards that for us would go a long ways. Further, the med center brings in millions in grants from big time donors in the Omaha area (ever heard of the Buffett Cancer Center up there?) that could in turn connect some of the major players in the booster/donation game to UNL and the athletic department. As it stands now, UNMC and Nebraska Athletics are not looked in conjunction with each other. Something I hadn’t really thought about and again, another part of Nebraska that is trying to get some of the pie of donation money. Big time Omaha donors could potentially see the athletic department or NIL as an afterthought.
The Marketing Push
If some of you remember a couple of my earlier articles on our NIL situation, I referenced how places like KState were doing a much better job of marketing to their fan bases to get money into their collective with tweets like this:
When I referenced this, many fans shot back at me saying “we are Nebraska and don’t have to pander to smaller donations. We have tons of people donating tons of money.” Unfortunately that just wasn’t accurate if you believe what someone from 1890 says as recently as a week ago:
As we talked about prior, we need everything we can get. We just weren’t organized or ready. But in comes 1890 trying to get us to what places like KState were doing a year prior to us:
Donating To A Specific Athlete
I brought this up and Matt Davison was also asked on the radio yesterday about it. As of right now, there isn’t a drop down to contribute to a specific athlete. However, there is a drop down to contribute to specific sports, or just the collective in general. When asked, it was said “donating to one person doesn’t really help our overall cause and goal. If that is absolutely what someone wants to do we can do it, but to make Nebraska Athletics what we want it to be, general donations are the best route.”
When you think about that and his answer on 1620 about how you can “call to talk to him about it” if that’s what you are wanting to do, i’m sure the phone call would be greeted with “this is what we would like you to do, but we need help every way we can.” Tough to argue with someone intimately involved in the entire process for these players.
There’s No Playbook, Collectives Aren’t Sharing Notes
What I found interesting is that this is so new that we still don’t know what works and what doesn’t. Going back to the first paragraph of this article and how A&M got all sorts of praise for their collective raising money to buy a recruiting class. While I didn’t think that was the way to do things, I did talk about how that’s a good indicator we aren’t on that level yet of donations, let alone organization. So while in 2022 you may have thought that was the trajectory we needed to be on and the goal, in December of 2023 we’ve seen that that gets a head coach fired and more kids into the transfer portal than most other teams. Ok, so not a great way to do things.
“This is so new, we are basically waiting to see how things pan out. Coaches need to be moved around from team to team for a few years to be able to compare what worked and what didn’t at previous stops. It’s not like one collective tells another “this is how much we have raised and this is how we do it, it works really well. And even if they did, i’m not sure i’d believe the number they are saying.”
The reality of the situation is the fact things aren’t going to be perfect yet, every team is learning on the fly, and there are going to be bumps in the road. Further, it somehow depends on what your head coach wants to do. For us, Matt Rhule wants to give a bulk of the money to players that have already played here and keep them here. He wants to have big high school classes and develop so he can lean less and less on transfer players in the portal each year. It’s not really 1890s fault that we only signed one transfer player so far (we will sign a couple more). I tend to like how Rhule sees it, it makes it so we don’t have to shell out all sorts of dollars for high school players that haven’t proven themselves in a Power 5 yet (I know I know… Raiola).
Wrap It Up Bro
The great news is we are in a much better place now than we were a year ago. It took some time, and we were definitely behind, but we now have the ability to get us in the right place when it comes to NIL. I was the first one to tell people to pump the brakes when everyone was saying how all of a sudden we got our edge back, “no one is going to be better at NIL than us”. We just weren’t ready yet.
Frankly, I never thought Nebraska would be the kind of place that fumbled the start of something that their passionate fanbase could help so directly with. But with our turnover stats on the football field this year, maybe fumbling the launch of a few initiatives to get it right was what we should have expected. You can’t really worry about where you came from and the hurdles along the way, but you need to feel comfortable about where you are going.
And let’s be honest, is being a top 10 donated NIL and throwing around the “most” money going to yield the best results? Probably not. In fact, if what Matt Rhule says about wanting mostly high school recruits and developing/building from there and not the portal, we may not need to do that. Get everyone on smaller NIL deals, like 25k a year to keep them around, and supplement some massive deals for instant transfers or high impact freshmen like Raiola where there are holes in your team that you need replaced. You don’t have to have massive money to do that, at least not as much as A&M was throwing around that didn’t work anyway. And if we can just be the best organized and most inclusive collective, we may very well be able to develop one of the deeper rosters in football. Again, who knows, but I can get on board with that thought process. I don’t think we will ever be a top 10 donated program, but from how our HC wants to do things right now, we don’t have to be.
You can say what you want about the Peeds, Matt Davison, or anything else involved with this, but I promise you that everyone just wants us to be better on the field. No matter your thoughts on paying players and NIL, it is here to stay. If you’d like to donate to 1890, please find the link below:
https://www.1890nebraska.com/make-a-contribution/
Yesterday we had our article summarizing the recruiting class and going over our Terrific 10:
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Holy smokes, great article! You hear bits and pieces, but it’s nice to see it laid out like this.
absolutely understand now with the history and current you laid out there.. Nice!!
Always interesting to hear how things are looked at from behind closed doors to me. Wish I would have had more time with them.
Thank you for the very informative piece. NIL is such a black box to me, it’s good to have a better idea how it works though it remains pretty mysterious. I have a couple of maybe dumb questions: Can walk-ons get NIL money from collectives? Do they? Can a collective offer a “football retirement” buyout to a scholly player (maybe who doesn’t get picked up off the portal) if the team is over the 85 limit? Sorry if this is common knowledge…
It was actually really refreshing to hear “we are still trying to figure this out” and not have someone tell me they all have this figured out.
Walk-ons can get NIL dollars, yes. However, you can’t just give someone that took an official visit to you or some other parameters on a 100k NIL deal to cover the cost of a football scholarship. There are “guard rails” up to prevent that.
Essentially you can’t move someone off of a full scholarship and into an NIL deal if they signed with you originally. The best way to look at this (though there are a few exceptions) is walk-ons who gain a full scholarship due to earning it have it for a year, then can be put on an NIL deal. Very few and far between such as Bullock, Boerkircher, and other Bullock.
Long and short, the people that say “just put them on NIL scholarship to make room” isn’t possible for 95% of our guys. However, NIL can help with guys like a one year transfer that may only be here for a semester. Pay him 100k with his school only being about 50k with taxes and don’t eat up a scholarship. Hoping that makes sense?
I was aware that you can’t remove someone from scholarship and replace that with NIL money while they remained on the team. My 2nd question is could someone be “encouraged” by a payment from a NIL collective or “generous person” to retire from football entirely to free up a scholarship for an incoming player?
Usually these kinds of shower thoughts fade from my mind but these have persisted
Re. UNL and UNMC … The Omaha Medical College became part of the University of Nebraska in 1902 when the private Omaha Medical College was brought into the university; at the time the first two years of medical instruction were in Lincoln, the last two in Omaha. It was part of the Lincoln-based University of Nebraska until the state screwed all that up when the University of Nebraska system was created in 1968 and a financially-distressed University of Omaha was brought into the system. As part of the System’s creation, the flagship institution in Lincoln was administratively separated from its medical center, effectively dooming it to lose the AAU affiliation it had held since 1909. The fact is, we did this to ourselves, and Omaha’s self-perception as a city-state, not quite wholly Nebraskan, is the reason.
Great write up. I gave my first donation to 1890 when we signed Raiola. How could you not? My favorite sports team in my favorite sport just brought in the best player at the most important position. I potentially got thousands of hours of enjoyment watching Nebraska football, thinking about Nebraska football, and talking shit to my Iowa friends last week…so it was a small price to pay. GBR and thanks for all you do SSO.