Did anybody notice that the NCAA college football championship took place this week? Yep, the Indiana University Hooisers beat the University of Miami Hurricanes 27-21 in a hard-fought match that not only cemented Indiana’s perfect season but also secured the school’s first national title for its football program. Yet, what would normally elicit a litany of social chatter across the internet just kind of came and went with very little fanfare. But the Hoosiers’ epic victory isn’t the only major milestone in college sports to occur under the radar, so is the same for Name, Image, and Likeness—aka, NIL.
NIL rules took effect in 2021, allowing college athletes to profit from their personal brands, a move to quell a long-debated issue in college sports. On the surface, it seems simple enough. NIL provides overdue recognition of athletes’ right to benefit from their own popularity and hard work, a benefit once afforded only to schools, broadcasters, and brands. But dig deeper, and you’ll find that NIL is much more than a policy change quietly happening within college sports. Instead, despite its quietness, it’s setting the stage for a cultural revolution.
For decades, the NCAA’s amateurism model was the status quo for college athletics, a seemingly immovable pillar across the institution. It was a system that generated billions in revenue while student-athletes—the very individuals at the heart of this economic engine—were prohibited from earning a dime from their talents beyond their school scholarships. The justification for this model rested on the basis of preserving the “purity” of college sports, reflecting a deeply ingrained societal belief about the value of education, the role of athletics in academic institutions, and the power dynamics between students and the system. Enter NIL, and suddenly, we’re witnessing what economist and Harvard professor Joseph Schumpeter famously termed “creative destruction.”
Like a collection of LEGO pieces that once built a castle is now disassembled and refashioned to create an airbase, according to Schumpeter, creative destruction is a process where new innovations disrupt and eventually replace existing systems, creating new markets, new companies, and new growth within an industry. Through this process, long-standing arrangements and assumptions are dismantled or, in some cases, altogether destroyed to free up resources and energy for new ideas. This is precisely what we’re seeing unfold in college athletics, whether we’re aware of it or not.
Traditional power structures are being challenged, affecting the orthodoxy of team recruitment rituals, for example, as newly empowered athletes have greater influence and agency to shape their own destinies. The old guard is crumbling, as the NCAA no longer regulates the economic exchange of value between schools and their players – not to mention the outside intervention of third-party interests. In place of the old, a new paradigm emerges, one that recognizes athletes not just as students or performers, but as entrepreneurs and brand builders in their own right. The result of this has made way for innovative thinkers (who perhaps intuitively understand Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction) to make hay.
Take PeakNIL, for example, the technology company that connects brands and student athletes. Co-founded by former University of Michigan star-running back and current running back for the LA Rams, Blake Corum, who also serves as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, PeakNIL provides a marketplace for endorsement deals and appearances thanks to the freedom that NIL provides without the arbitrage of a broker. Since its founding in 2021, the firm has brought top talent to the platform like Texas Longhorn quarterback Arch Manning and USC’s women’s basketball star JuJu Watkins, boasting a roster of some of the most coveted student athletes in high school and college.
NIL: The Creative Disruption Reshaping Both College Sports And Culture
At a glance, you’d think someone like Arch Manning with 1.5 million Instagram followers would be the most in-demand talent on the PeakNIL platform. However, a woman’s High School Volleyball player in Texas with 15,000 followers, for example, might have five times the conversion rate of a national star, which is super compelling for smaller brands on a small budget. In fact, a brand could afford to engage hundreds of lesser-known local players on the platform for the price of one Arch Manning and benefit from a potentially higher conversion rate. This is the world that firms like PeakNIL are navigating and leading, one that operates beneath the radar of most marketers.
The shift that NIL has catalyzed not only generates revenue for athletes and brands but also fundamentally realigns value and agency across the collegiate sports ecosystem more broadly. Stories of players who saw their names on the backs of for-sale jerseys or on video game avatars but could hardly pay for a slice of pizza are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. Athletes like University of Michigan gymnast and Olympic bronze medalist Fredrick ‘Flips’ Richard, who boasts close to 1 million followers and 40 million likes on TikTok, have leveraged the possibilities of NIL to make an impact beyond the school or the sport. They are no longer merely part of a team or a school’s brand; they are their own brands, with the power to shape their own narratives and their own futures.
But the impact of NIL extends far beyond the playing field. It’s reshaping the very nature of the college experience and the institutions themselves. Universities are now grappling with how to integrate NIL into their athletic programs, academic curricula, and overall brand strategies. We’re seeing the emergence of NIL collectives, brand partnerships, consultants like Rachel Maeng, and even courses dedicated to personal branding and entrepreneurship for athletes. Considering all the many stakeholders involved, it’s clear that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s to come.
This is where the cultural significance of NIL truly comes into focus. It’s forcing us to reconsider long-held notions about amateurism, the value of labor, and the role of education in preparing young people for the future – completely reshaping cultural orthodoxies. In a world where personal branding and entrepreneurship are increasingly crucial skills, NIL is providing a real-world laboratory for students to develop these competencies and for professionals to learn a new game, even if it’s not as loud as it likely should be.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author, Marcus Collins – best-selling author of For The Culture and clinical professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan – and do not necessarily reflect the views of Brand Innovators.
