College Hoops

Players, schools, boosters adjusting to new NIL reality

Players, schools, boosters adjusting to new NIL reality

BATON ROUGE, La. — Taylor Jacobs is hustling down one of the many purple-and-gold lined hallways inside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in early August with a cell phone pinned between her ear and shoulder. She holds another in her hands, thumbing through emails and responding to text messages as she navigates her first week in a brand new role for the LSU athletic department.

Jacobs doesn’t yet have a nameplate outside the door of her new office, but in the space of 90 minutes on a rainy Tuesday afternoon she has bounced from one locker room to the next to introduce herself to members of the volleyball and basketball teams to make sure they know who she is and what she does. Her job — the overly-simplified description, at least — is to help them make money.

LSU is among the most progressive of many schools that are getting more involved with helping their athletes manage and maximize the opportunities for name, image and likeness endorsement deals. Jacobs, a former tennis player at Auburn, was promoted last month from her compliance staff position to assistant athletic director of NIL and strategic initiatives. She is overseeing an NIL team that will expand its purview from education into building tools to make it easy for fans and brands to connect with their athletes. The school also plans to facilitate those deals when possible — an idea that was antithetical to the NCAA’s amateurism principles little more than a year ago.

“I anticipated things going a little bit more slowly,” Jacobs said. “It’s just escalated so quickly.”

Jacobs’ small team includes Katie Darby, an employee of consulting firm Altius, who will be embedded with the athletic department as a “general manager” focused on finding and arranging endorsement deals for LSU athletes among other duties. Altius is embedding general managers with at least six athletic departments around the country this school year. They will work on campus at the schools, but remain non-athletic department employees with an aim at providing an outside perspective on the national landscape and also providing a way for schools to manage potential legal liability involved with helping players find deals.

Other schools are filling similar positions in-house. One of Duke men’s basketball coach Jon Scheyer’s first hires was Rachel Baker, a former Nike and NBA employee, to serve as his team’s general manager. Athletic directors in every Power 5 conference have created and filled positions to establish and oversee…

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