NIL tournaments

[CHROMEBIRD]

Do any of the D1 wrestling tournaments offer NIL deals? I was reading about the Players Era basketball tournament, which offered participating teams $1mil for participating as well as bonuses for advancing through the bracket and for winning. From ESPN: 

Quote

The inaugural event was considered a success by all parties involved. There was high-quality basketball, with Oregon beating Alabama in the championship game to take home the title -- and an additional $500,000 in NIL opportunities on top of the $1 million it earned by playing in the tournament. Alabama received an extra $250,000 in NIL opportunities for reaching the title game... Oregon coach Dana Altman said the program was able to bump up everybody's NIL package as a result of the initial $1 million every team earned by participating. 

This seems like a much better implementation of NIL. Wrestling won't have anywhere near the prize money that basketball offers, but it would still be nice if sponsors setup a pool and awarded deals to participating wrestlers. It would encourage high-level participation, reduce ducks & MFFs, and help fund cash-starved programs. Tournaments like Midlands, Scuffle, etc. (and the media companies that broadcast them) would see new life. And it would create an automatic pool of high quality ambassadors for NIL sponsors.

One catch with the basketball tournament is that the NIL money and goes to the schools' collectives. I'm not sure whether it would be better for NIL money to go directly to the athletes instead (or if it could work in an individual sport like wrestling), but overall I like this version of NIL more than deep-pocketed schools fishing around in the transfer portal and luring kids with bags. Or maybe it's all the same in the end, idk.

[EntertainMe]

I like the idea 

[CHROMEBIRD]

I forgot to post a link to the ESPN article. Second half of this piece: https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/42805108/mens-college-basketball-players-era-festival-change-nonconference-november-traditional-mtes

[Idaho]

On 12/9/2024 at 3:40 PM, CHROMEBIRD said:

Do any of the D1 wrestling tournaments offer NIL deals? I was reading about the Players Era basketball tournament, which offered participating teams $1mil for participating as well as bonuses for advancing through the bracket and for winning. From ESPN: 

This seems like a much better implementation of NIL. Wrestling won't have anywhere near the prize money that basketball offers, but it would still be nice if sponsors setup a pool and awarded deals to participating wrestlers. It would encourage high-level participation, reduce ducks & MFFs, and help fund cash-starved programs. Tournaments like Midlands, Scuffle, etc. (and the media companies that broadcast them) would see new life. And it would create an automatic pool of high quality ambassadors for NIL sponsors.

One catch with the basketball tournament is that the NIL money and goes to the schools' collectives. I'm not sure whether it would be better for NIL money to go directly to the athletes instead (or if it could work in an individual sport like wrestling), but overall I like this version of NIL more than deep-pocketed schools fishing around in the transfer portal and luring kids with bags. Or maybe it's all the same in the end, idk.

So the teams that have the most money that spend the most on NIL can now win more NIL? Is that correct? 

[CHROMEBIRD]

3 hours ago, Idaho said:

So the teams that have the most money that spend the most on NIL can now win more NIL? Is that correct? 

Fair question. It depends on how the tournaments implement it for wrestling. With the Players Era basketball tourney, teams get $1mil in NIL money just for participating, plus bonuses based on placement.

Since wrestling is an individual sport, a better system might be to give teams NIL money for participating and award individual placewinners with bonus deals. The team incentive could level-out NIL imbalances across programs a little and help fund programs like Campbell and Stanford; the individual prizes would encourage guys to go 100% as if they were at Nationals, and not duck. If the NIL prize money was big enough, it could blunt transfers since wrestlers could win the deals no matter which school they were at. It might also be fun because teams could theoretically send out multiple wrestlers per weight for an even deeper field.

There would of course need to be a fair way to select and invite the field of teams since hypothetically all teams could want to participate in the tournament. It might also be tricky to award NIL deals to the top x placewinners, since it's still against the rules, I think, to structure deals around athletic performance. I'm not exactly sure how basketball is getting around that.