If Joey DeZart played the right kind of football, he could make millions.
With California’s new law granting college athletes the right to benefit from their name, image, and likeness — and similar legislation proposed in more than a dozen other states and Congress — football and men’s basketball stars figure to benefit the most. Big-name quarterbacks like Tua Tagovailoa and one-and-done basketball players like Zion Williamson, if he’d stayed at Duke University, could stand to make millions under such legislation.
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If Joey DeZart played the right kind of football, he could make millions.
With California’s new law granting college athletes the right to benefit from their name, image, and likeness — and similar legislation proposed in more than a dozen other states and Congress — football and men’s basketball stars figure to benefit the most. Big-name quarterbacks like Tua Tagovailoa and one-and-done basketball players like Zion Williamson, if he’d stayed at Duke University, could stand to make millions under such legislation.
College athletes from nonrevenue sports could make five or six figures if they do it right, says one sports-marketing expert.
But for nonrevenue players like DeZart, a midfielder for Wake Forest University’s soccer team, those projections are much smaller.
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On paper, DeZart might have a solid claim to monetary potential. He’s a captain of the fifth-best soccer team in the country, has aspirations for next year’s draft, and has played for Jamaica’s U20 national team. If the proposed federal legislation was already in effect, DeZart could leverage that status into compensation.
Except, while the law doesn’t discriminate between football and soccer, sponsorships would. College athletes in nonrevenue sports, like DeZart, will have the same opportunity to profit from their image rights as their peers on the football and basketball teams, but those opportunities are likely to be orders of magnitude smaller.
Rashida Gayle, director of talent marketing at GSE Worldwide, estimates that college athletes from nonrevenue sports could make five or six figures “if they do it right.” Gayle, who represents professional athletes in both kinds of football, expects a competitive, oversaturated market. And even with limited opportunities, athletes with already rigorous practice and class schedules will need to spend still more hours cultivating their image.
“There’s got to be more than just ‘I’m a baller on the field,’” Gayle said. “You’ve got to bring more to the table for brands to feel incentivized to spend their money on you.”
None of that deters DeZart, however. He believes that he could pursue simple things, like promotions on social media, and that the promise of increased leniency is a big step. But he also describes soccer as a “second job,” consuming at least 30 hours every week.
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“Besides getting to play the sports that we all love, there’s no other reward,” DeZart said. “We’re tired, but still have to get up and do our school obligations. We still have to do all the work that everyone else is responsible for, so I feel like this is really good and could help everybody.”
In theory, he’s right. In practice, seeing those rewards might be more pie-in-the-sky than an attainable reality for the vast majority of college athletes.
A Crack in the Foundation
The tremors of change started in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Fair Pay to Play Act into law with a theatrical flourish in early October. He did it on the basketball mega-star LeBron James’s HBO show, The Uninterrupted, alongside athletes like the basketball player Diana Taurasi and the gymnast Katelyn Ohashi.
Once California had shaken the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s amateurism foundation, other states proposed or announced plans for similar legislation, amplifying the pressure on the NCAA. Some states, like Florida and Pennsylvania, would jump ahead of California’s 2023 timeline, granting name, image, and likeness rights to athletes next July 1.
The NCAA responded, saying college athletes could receive “benefits” as long as they stayed within the “collegiate model.” The NCAA did not define whether those benefits would be money or something else, and the collegiate model has long been used as a justification to allow colleges to profit from amateur athletics but prevent the players from doing the same. The NCAA’s deadline for change was set at January 2021. Much like putting duct tape across a fault line, the NCAA’s statement did little to close the rift between the organization and state lawmakers.
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Beyond Florida and Pennsylvania’s early implementation date, the next expected development comes at the federal level. Legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, a North Carolina Republican, along with U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana Democrat, would grant unrestricted image rights to college athletes nationwide. Walker sees the issue in terms of free-market principles, Richmond in terms of civil rights. Athletes are unfairly being denied a right every other American has, they argue, so both want to grant them that right and then let the market sort out who gets what.
The bipartisan nature of the federal and state bills and the overwhelming public opinion against the NCAA’s status quo make it hard for the organization to stem the tide. But legislation like Walker’s, free-market based and without protections, leaves athletes like DeZart with far fewer opportunities for profit.
In North Carolina alone, 74 percent of college athletes across all divisions compete in nonrevenue sports, which include all women’s sports and all men’s sports outside of football and basketball. Nationwide, over 78 percent of college athletes compete in nonrevenue sports.
College basketball and football players, in years past, have starred in video games, DeZart observed. “For soccer, it’s not really like that.”
Nonrevenue sports will have “modest opportunities” at best, said David Carter, an associate professor of clinical management and organization at the University of Southern California and the author of four books on sports business. In all likelihood, he said, athletes like DeZart will have to resort to local business endorsement deals, but “few will make any meaningful income.”
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In fact, the path to actually making money commensurate with the time that goes into college athletics might not depend on an athlete’s on-field performance at all.
From Athlete to Influencer
Katelyn Ohashi, the University of California at Los Angeles gymnast who was on the set when Governor Newsom signed California’s bill into law, went viral last January. Like, super viral.
A video of her floor routine garnered more than 700,000 likes on Twitter and 70 million views on YouTube. The former Olympic hopeful, whose gymnastics career was guaranteed to end after college because of lingering injuries, was an overnight sensation.
A lot of students don’t really have the time or the resources to fully invest in this the way professional athletes would.
Ohashi suddenly had a valuable online presence, yet as long as she competed at UCLA, she couldn’t profit from it. She was the rare nonrevenue athlete to achieve mainstream acclaim for her sports pursuits, putting her alongside stars like Sabrina Ionescu, a University of Oregon women’s basketball player, and Katie Ledecky, the former Stanford University swimmer who has won five Olympic gold medals. Recently, Nike released a limited run of Ionescu jerseys and sold out within two hours. Ionescu made no money from the sale.
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More typically, nonrevenue athletes and those with little on-field recognition must build their brand in some other way.
Donald De La Haye, a former kicker for the University of Central Florida’s football team, created a successful YouTube channel that he decided to prioritize after the NCAA said he could either have the channel or play football. And Kendall Spencer, a long jumper from the University of New Mexico, became an acclaimed speaker with a Ted Talk through his role on the NCAA’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.
“I could have obviously profited thousands of dollars off of that,” said Spencer, now a law student at Georgetown University. “It’s about branding. It’s about, How can I use my brand and monetize that?” If the name, image, and likeness rule-change had come when Spencer was competing in college, he said, “of course I would have benefited off of this financially.”
But as far as branding and marketing opportunities go, Spencer and De La Haye were at the top of the food chain. Their side hustles, YouTube and public speaking, gave them status to leverage. And those extracurriculars are how nonrevenue athletes can make money, said Kimberly Miloch, an associate dean at Texas Woman’s University and a sports-marketing researcher.
If your grandmother is not going to be proud of what you’re going to post, don’t post it.
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With social media in particular, Miloch said, college athletes don’t need to have the most followers to make money. They just need to have the largest core of “loyal followers.” It helps to think of the eventual world of image rights in college athletics like the current world of social-media influencing, said Gayle, the agent.
“If you play for an HBCU and your games aren’t televised but you have a comedy channel that does wonders on YouTube, why would I not want to represent you?” Gayle asked. “You may not be as marketable as an athlete but you may be extremely marketable as an influencer.”
Talaya Waller, a personal branding expert, said athletes hoping to become social-media influencers will have a built-in advantage because they already have visibility.
What Would Grandma Say?
The problem with influencing and personal branding is that no matter how easy it looks to a person’s followers, building a successful brand is incredibly time-intensive.
“Posting on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, on its face that doesn’t seem that hard,” Spencer said. However, “there’s a difference between someone who posts something and gets 100 likes and someone who posts a picture and gets a couple thousand.”
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And few athletes have time to spare. In 2015 the Pac-12 conducted a study that found athletes spend 50 hours weekly on their sport on average during the season. Spencer, an Olympic hopeful, estimated the average college athlete spends 40 to 50 hours, but he said those with championship and Olympic aspirations easily spend more than 60.
Adding branding considerations on top of those time demands would most likely create a no-win, pick-two triangle for college athletes. They could practice their sport in order to perform well, they could study and pass their classes, or they could cultivate their brand to make some money. But they would be hard-pressed to do all three capably.
“Marketing, if you’re doing it for yourself, nobody is paying you to do it,” Waller said. “So a lot of students don’t really have the time or the resources to fully invest in this the way professional athletes would.”
And the thought that goes into social media posts, as Spencer put it, is about more than just maximizing profit potential; it’s also about staying out of trouble. Athletes at every level have been publicly shamed for years-old social-media posts over the past couple of years. Miloch advised high-school athletes hoping to compete in college to be conservative in their postings.
“One of the greatest pieces of advice is just ‘do no harm,’” Miloch said. “If your grandmother is not going to be proud of what you’re going to post, don’t post it.”
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The easiest way for nonrevenue athletes to make money would be through the “modest opportunities” that Carter, the USC professor, mentioned: endorsing local businesses, signing autographs at a sporting-goods store, hosting sports camps over the summer.
Scott Wollaston, executive director of the North Carolina Fusion youth soccer club, said his organization would pay college athletes to talk to players as long as it was beneficial. But any athlete would have to be “a great role model and example.”
So as long as Joey DeZart heeds Miloch’s advice on social media, he has at least one potential money-making opportunity.
Overstating the Imbalances
Ultimately, DeZart doesn’t care about the conversation around name, image, and likeness. He’s a senior, after all. While he hopes that nonrevenue athletes at colleges where those sports are more prominent or successful than the revenue sports (e.g. soccer at Wake Forest) will benefit more, he’s not sure it’ll actually work that way.
“It should be relevant to your sport, just like it is in the real world,” he said. “If you’re one of the best, you get paid higher. If you’re not as good, you don’t get paid as much.”
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And he doesn’t think it will affect recruiting the way so many NCAA supporters have claimed. Many who oppose granting athletes their image-licensing rights have said that the big sports schools like Alabama will be able to lure recruits with the promise of endorsements. To be fair, that could happen, but DeZart said that’s not how most potential college athletes think.
“When we’re 17-18 years old, we’re thinking about development and stuff like that. Not so much monetary stuff,” DeZart said. “If UCLA is not good at soccer and Wake Forest is good at soccer, I’d still come to Wake Forest because in the long run, I want to be a better soccer player.”
Gene A. Marsh, an emeritus professor of sports law at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, also thought the concerns about the impact on recruiting were overstated. Past fights over allowing athletes to work inspired the same sort of rhetoric, he said. Now that conversation is barely brought up.
“There’s people that have been making really dire predictions about, Oh if you let this happen, then the wheels will come off,” Marsh said. But such changes “end up being not that big of a deal.”
And while Spencer, the long jumper, thought that the potential for imbalanced earnings could have a drastic effect on team chemistry, Justice Bigbie, a baseball player at Western Carolina University, didn’t see that as a problem. His teammates would be happy seeing one of them make a bit of money. Most don’t even have time to work summer jobs, he said, so opportunities for extra cash are always welcome.
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Proponents of the various bills aren’t necessarily fighting for the right of stars like Zion Williamson to make millions, but for the opportunities of athletes like DeZart, Bigbie, and Ohashi.
Nancy Skinner, the California state representative who introduced the Fair Pay to Play Act, said that part of its motivation was to help women athletes who have fewer post-college professional opportunities profit from their sports skills. Representative Walker pointed out that “of the 450,000 student-athletes, nearly 200,000 have no scholarship of any kind.”
DeZart is graduating in the spring and hopes to play professional soccer after that. For his first three years at Wake Forest, he was on a partial scholarship, earning a full ride only during his senior season. When asked what he would buy with any hypothetical endorsement money, DeZart initially said “books.” Then he changed his mind.
“Actually scratch that. I’d probably spend it on my tuition.”
Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.