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Casey Schwab’s background doesn’t exactly scream “gamer.”

A Wisconsin graduate with a law degree from Southern Cal, Schwab’s career has included stops at NFL Network, Fox and, eventually, the NFLPA, running business and legal affairs for NFL Players Inc. He followed all that by founding Altius Sports Partners in 2020 amid the advent of NIL.

So, how and why, with a CV like that, is Schwab’s latest venture centered on, of all things, video games?

“There’s a lot of uncertainty [in the college space] around revenue sharing, the [House] settlement, employment status — or not employment status — collective bargaining,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of uncertainty around the commercial opportunities for college football players when it comes to video games.”

That clarity is why Schwab has moved on to a new venture — Pathway Sports and Entertainment.

Pathway’s business model is simple: The company aims to develop a video game group license for college football players by offering individual upfront payments of $1,500.

The real potential comes as those players signed on with Pathway could earn further compensation, should the group license subsequently be sold to a developer such as Electronic Arts, at which time players would receive no less than 70% of the net royalties.

So far, that pitch has been heard loud and clear.

Pathway has signed more than 2,700 players across the Power Four, just under half the total scholarship athletes at that level. That includes inking deals with at least 75% of the rosters at Alabama, Baylor, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Oregon, Nebraska, Wisconsin, SMU, Washington, Texas Tech and South Carolina, among others.

“It’s incumbent on us to perform,” said Eric Winston, president of Winners Alliance, the firm backing Pathway financially. “We’re not telling college players, ‘Hey, trust us,’ or ‘There’s a hope and a prayer and we’ll see what we can do.’ We’re out laying capital to these players so that they’re no worse off than the baseline — and we still believe that we can do multiples of that baseline better over time.”

The college football video game ecosystem exists in a relatively monopolistic state — opening the door for a disrupter such as Pathway.

EA, which declined to comment for this story when reached by Sports Business Journal, signed more than 11,000 athletes in relaunching its college football franchise last year via EA Sports College Football 25.

Those deals are technically individual and nonexclusive, though the majority of those athletes are also part of a group licensing agreement with OneTeam, which handles player payments and other responsibilities related to the game.

Pathway’s approach, albeit more aggressive, is essentially betting if it can sign enough players, developers would have to buy its group license in order to maintain a certain level of user experience.

After all, would the lone major college football video game sell to its maximum potential without half the players in the Power Four?

“There have been some headwinds,” Schwab conceded. “There’ve been some people who are confused by what we’re doing. There are some people who are challenged by what we’re doing. All of those are to be expected and, frankly, welcomed when you’re trying to disrupt and innovate and do something new.”

The announcement dropped like a hopeful hammer.

“For those who never stopped believing…” the post from EA Sports College’s X account read on Feb. 2, 2021, confirming the return of a college football video game.

While it was three more years before users had a downloadable game in front of them, EA Sports College Football 25 has since become the bestselling sports video game of all time, according to Circana (EA has not disclosed its exact sales figures).

“I was expecting it to debut as the biggest college football game in a launch month,” Mat Piscatella, Circana executive director, video games, told SBJ last year. “But I did not expect it to more than triple the lifetime dollar sales of the previous bestselling game [NCAA Football 07].”

For what massive success the revamped franchise has enjoyed after a decade-long hiatus, there has been ample consternation over athletes’ compensation related to their inclusion in the game.

The initial wave of onboarding real players into EA Sports College Football 25 — a significant shift from past iterations, given restrictions around NIL at the time — was done via a joint effort by EA, Learfield and OneTeam Partners.

Players were offered a flat payment of $600, regardless of position or school, along with a copy of the game for either PlayStation or Xbox. Cover athlete and “Ambassador” deals also were struck with a select number of athletes (terms of those deals have not been made public).

The issue Pathway intends to rectify: The upfront cash paid to players reflected neither their value to the game nor offered them a stake in how well it sold.

“Whether it‘s EA, whether it‘s whomever, we really think that we can bring value into a place that, quite frankly, players have not received it yet,” Winston said. “That just comes back to that core premise of why we’re doing this.”

Pathway’s efforts aren’t entirely novel, considering the machinations entailed in launching EA Sports College Football 25. But the backing behind Pathway, its key players and the group’s early returns are significant enough to merit notice.

The company’s three-person leadership team includes Schwab, former Georgia NIL collective frontman Matt Hibbs and Bob Philp, a longtime sports marketing executive most recently at CAA and Roc Nation. It also added Sami Robbins, who’d been managing college NIL partnerships at OneTeam, as its new director of college.

“Between myself, our investors and our operational team, we have quite literally decades of experience of structuring those deals, monetizing those deals, maximizing those deals for the athletes,” Schwab said.

In all, signing every scholarship player at the FBS level (134 schools) using Pathway’s $1,500 baseline could cost more than $17 million, or around $127,000 per school.

The company also is creating an activation program slated to feature up to 200 athletes for varying opportunities beyond the base payment.

Winners Alliance — an agency that has handled group licensing efforts in professional tennis and cricket and is headed up by OneTeam founding CEO Ahmad Nassar — is fronting the money to get Pathway off the ground. Winston declined to disclose how much is being invested, but it‘s understood enough capital has been poured in to pay players for multiple years.

Eventually, though, there will need to be a return on that investment.

Schwab told SBJ that Pathway’s profit plan centers on taking a cut of any deal that might be struck with potential game developers.

For example, Pathway and EA could hypothetically agree to a deal granting Pathway 10% of game sales in exchange for EA incorporating those players captured under the group license. If that game recorded $340 million in sales, Pathway would net $34 million, or double the rough investment it would take to sign all 11,000-plus FBS players.

Schwab noted at least 70% of the profit Pathway generates from a group license sale will go toward players. In this case, around $24 million of the theoretical $34 million agreement would be earmarked for athletes (about $2,100 per person) — $17 million toward the initial investments the company made in player signings, and roughly $7 million in new money. Pathway would then pocket the remaining $10 million.

“They have a value proposition for college players that is unique to anything else I‘ve seen in this space,” Arizona Cardinals tackle and Pathway adviser Kelvin Beachum said in a statement provided to SBJ. “They have a dedicated team and long-term vision that puts the players first, which is something I wish I had as a college player.”

Pathway has roared out of the gates since its first set of meetings with teams in February, but forecasting its long-term feasibility and potential isn’t as simple as back-of-the-napkin math.

For one, Pathway and EA have no current business relationship in place, and the latter is certainly under no obligation to create one.

There’s also competition on the market.

OneTeam — which handled NIL agreements for EA ahead of last year’s launch of College Football 25, and has played a major role with the NFLPA and EA’s Madden arrangement since 2020 — upped its one-time payments to athletes from $600 to $1,500 in March.

Still, the swath of agreements Pathway has struck should have a consequential impact in the not-too-distant future.

The deals the company inked in recent months are nonexclusive in 2025, but become exclusive in 2026 and extend through a player’s eligibility (exclusivity would end at that point).

More significant, Pathway also has included a right of first refusal in its deals for players who make a pro roster, giving the company a 90-day window to negotiate video game rights for those athletes.

That could theoretically create an impasse (or, on the flip side, incentivize partnership) between Pathway, the NFLPA, OneTeam and EA related to group licensing and the Madden franchise.

The NFLPA and OneTeam declined to comment for this story when reached by SBJ.

Schwab, however, insisted the ROFR included in Pathway’s deals is unlikely to be exercised.

“The only way it would make sense for us, or anybody, to exercise that right is if we had a deal with a video game developer to go pay more for those rights,” he said. “The analogy is if somebody has a right of first refusal on my house, and I’m trying to sell my house, I‘m going to be able to drive the rest of the market up for the value of my house.”

Pathway may also serve purposes beyond college football video games — though Schwab is adamant it‘s not a precursor to a union.

The company’s advisory board includes co-head of WME Sports Karen Brodkin and National Association of Basketball Coaches Executive Director Craig Robinson, suggesting a potential foray into college basketball.

More immediately, college sports leaders are determined to avoid classifying athletes as employees, despite seeking a way to collectively bargain (federal law requires one be deemed an employee in order to do so). Group licensing, thus, might provide a way to pseudo-organize without needing employee status or an antitrust exemption from Congress.

The approach is also one schools may look toward in a post-House settlement world, where NIL deals are likely to face more scrutiny from a Deloitte-run clearinghouse designed to judge fair market value on agreements worth $600 or more.

“I‘m a firm believer that the path forward [for college sports] is a situation where the student athletes can act collectively and we can reach an agreement with them in some form,” said former Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick, who‘s serving as an adviser for Pathway. “There are a lot of different ways to skin that cat, and so I‘m super supportive of anybody who‘s laying the groundwork for that. Casey certainly is.”

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