NIL

New Notre Dame Hoops General Manager Reveals Views on NIL Strategy

The ever-shifting landscape of NIL has forced big-time college hoops programs to drastically reshape the way they construct their rosters. Reports have surfaced that multiple teams are set to spend upwards of $10 million in 2025 on their respective rosters. This type of spending has, in turn, put a ton of extra downward pressure on […]

Published

2 months ago

May 26, 2025

Your Sports Nation

This type of spending has, in turn, put a ton of extra downward pressure on the teams that aren’t quite in that upper echelon of the college basketball landscape. Among these programs are the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, who haven’t made the NCAA Tournament in three seasons.

This lack of success in the NIL era has forced the university to seek extra help navigating this new era of college hoops, and they did so by hiring Pat Garrity, a former Irish player, to oversee both their men’s and women’s basketball programs as general manager.

Pat Garrity on Notre Dame and NIL

Per On3’s Dan Morrison, Garrity recently spoke about his plans for getting the Fighting Irish back on the big stage and how the impending changes to NIL will impact that framework in 2025 and beyond.

“This summer, I think, is maybe a bad example to develop any thoughts on it,” Pat Garrity said. “Because it was probably the most unregulated that it’ll ever be. You had kind of the ending of the collective era and everyone preparing for the revenue-sharing era.”

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NIL

The new college sports agency is rejecting some athlete NIL deals with donor-backed collectives

FILE – Camp Randall Stadium is seen during an NCAA college football game between Wisconsin and Miami of Ohio, Sept. 12, 2015, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Aaron Gash, File) The new agency in charge of regulating name, image, likeness deals in college sports sent a letter to schools Thursday saying it had rejected deals between […]

Published

27 minutes ago

July 12, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Wisconsin Miami NIL Lawsuit — FILE – Camp Randall Stadium is seen during an NCAA college football game between Wisconsin and Miami of Ohio, Sept. 12, 2015, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Aaron Gash, File)

The new agency in charge of regulating name, image, likeness deals in college sports sent a letter to schools Thursday saying it had rejected deals between players and donor-backed collectives formed over the past several years to funnel money to athletes or their schools.

Those arrangements hold no “valid business purpose,” the memo said, and don’t adhere to rules that call for outside NIL deals to be between players and companies that provide goods or services to the general public for profit.

The letter to Division I athletic directors could be the next step in shuttering today’s version of the collective, groups that are closely affiliated with schools and that, in the early days of NIL after July 2021, proved the most efficient way for schools to indirectly cut deals with players.

Since then, the landscape has changed yet again with the $2.8 billion House settlementthat allows schools to pay the players directly as of July 1.

Already, collectives affiliated with Colorado, Alabama, Notre Dame, Georgia and others have announced they’re shutting down. Georgia, Ohio State and Illinois are among those that have announced plans with Learfield, a media and technology company with decades of licensing and other experience across college athletics, to help arrange NIL deals.

Outside deals between athlete and sponsor are still permitted, but any worth $600 or more have to be vetted by a clearinghouse called NIL Go that was established with the help of auditing giant Deloitte and run by the new College Sports Commission.

In its letter to the ADs, the CSC said more than 1,500 deals have been cleared since NIL Go launched on June 11, “ranging in value from three figures to seven figures.” More than 12,000 athletes and 1,100 institutional users have registered to use the system.

But the bulk of the letter explained that many deals could not be cleared because they did not conform to an NCAA rule that sets a “valid business purpose” standard for deals to be approved.

The letter explained that if a collective reaches a deal with an athlete to appear on behalf of the collective, which charges an admission fee, the standard is not met because the purpose of the event is to raise money to pay athletes, not to provide goods or services available to the general public for profit.

The same would apply to a deal an athlete makes to sell merchandise to raise money to pay that player because the purpose of “selling merchandise is to raise money to pay that student-athlete and potentially other student-athletes at a particular school or schools, which is not a valid business purpose” according to the NCAA rule.

Sports attorney Darren Heitner, who deals in NIL, said the guidance “could disproportionately burden collectives that are already committed to spending money on players for multiple years to come.”

“If a pattern of rejections results from collective deals submitted to Deloitte, it may invite legal scrutiny under antitrust principles,” he said.

On a separate track, some college sports leaders, including the NCAA, are seeking a limited form of antitrust protection from Congress.

The letter said a NIL deal could be approved if, for instance, the businesses paying the players had a broader purpose than simply acting as a collective. The letter uses a golf course or apparel company as examples.

“In other words, NIL collectives may act as marketing agencies that match student-athletes with businesses that have a valid business purpose and seek to use the student’s NIL to promote their businesses,” the letter said.