Will Tulane Benefit from Player Payments for Name, Image, and Likeness Next Year?
A Deep Dive into the new Tulane "Wave Brand Works" Program
Tulane Athletics announced last week that the Green Wave would form an innovative new program called the “Wave Brand Works.” In short, WBW (my new name for it), is a new center that will be dedicated to helping Tulane Athletes leverage their “Name, Image, and Likeness” rights or “NIL” for short.
Some quick background: For most fans of college sports, NIL may be on your radar as it picked up steam in state legislatures in the past year. Florida, which represents a pretty important state when it comes to College Football, escalated things further by passing a new law that will require the NCAA to allow players to make money from these rights by the 2021 season. So this thing is coming, and it’s going to come soon.
This supercharges the need for the NCAA to finalize its NIL rules by next year. There are many details that need to be hammered out. While college athletes will be able to accept legal payments in exchange for publicity opportunities for the first time in the modern era, these payments will still be governed by (currently undecided) NCAA rules. But still, this is a really big deal for college players and very new territory for college sports.
Back to Tulane. AD Troy Dannen and the Athletics Department aren’t going to wait until this pivotal change happens. Instead, Tulane will form WBW as a way to begin preparing Tulane players to use NIL to their advantage, including:
Guidance on brand management for Tulane athletes to maximize the value of their personal brands;
Education on working with agents and advisors;
Assistance on compliance and the law, including involvement from the Tulane Law School;
You can read the school’s announcement here. At a high level, it’s great to see Tulane build a proactive plan to set their athletes up for success. Could there be other impacts on the Green Wave down the road, though?
Can Tulane Use NIL as an Opportunity to Improve on the Field?
On the Andy Staples Show (a podcast from The Athletic you can find here), host Andy Staples asked that question. Some of the initial debate around NIL was that it would function as another way for the “Haves” of college sports to further dominate the “Have Nots” of the G5 and lesser leagues. In short, they argued that all of this NIL money would be going to the athletes in Baton Rouge and Tuscaloosa and further cement the hierarchy that we see today.
Staples had both Troy Dannen and Gabe Feldman of the Tulane Center for Sport on to debate this question. Instead of fighting it or waiting for NIL to pass officially, Dannen thought it was critical for Tulane to be a leader in helping athletes leverage their NIL rights:
“I think for us, keeping it in-house comes from having a unique set of assets that not many places do. Starting first and foremost, that starts with Gabe [Feldman]. There are likely not many people in the country as well-versed in Name, Image, and Likeness as Gabe… We have all of the assets for our athletes to capitalize on their value here at Tulane… Tulane is a unique institution. We are in one of the greatest cities of New Orleans, and our players are in a position to capitalize on this.”
In the post-NIL world, Tulane can offer some notable assets that many schools won’t be able to provide. Aside from WBW, Green Wave athletes could benefit from playing in a major metropolitan city while their peers may be in small college town with fewer opportunities to monetize their personal brands through appearances or advertisements. Dannen and Feldman think this could offer a major benefit.
Staples asks, “How does the potential rule change help a school like Tulane?” Feldman was adamant that NIL could be a very positive game-changer.
Are there ways we can improve competitive balance and the opportunities that Tulane has to compete? Allowing college athletes to make money off of NIL may actually level the playing field. It will remove some of the entrenched differences like facilities or coaching salaries and open it to the free market. A player doesn’t have to be in Columbus or Baton Rouge, and they may actually have more value by being in New Orleans… We think with the resources we have at Tulane, this will be a huge boost to all of our athletes on campus.
With this potential competitive advantage — where athletes may want to play at Tulane instead of, say, Lawrence, Kansas in part because of our ability to help them leverage their NIL rights — it’s important for us to get started now.
Dannen affirmed that he isn’t going to wait. They’re moving ahead with Wave Brand Works to start educating our current players and staff for when the NCAA finalizes NIL next year:
In the next year, as this rule is passed or to the degree that it passes, by the next academic year that there will be some right to gain off of this. Let’s figure out in the next year how we can maximize your brand. Once you have built the brand, we’ll help figure out how to use that brand… Most of our student-athletes will have to sign their first contract, and they’re going to get exposed to things they’ll need to know for their professional lives down the road.
Check out the Andy Staples Podcast for the full episode, but I wanted to highlight a few of those comments here for you.
This will be an interesting storyline to see how this program could evolve and potentially act as a recruiting tool for Green Wave coaches down the road.