Unpacking Cooper Flagg’s reported $28 million NIL earnings

The $28 million figure being reported for Cooper Flagg’s endorsement earnings in his freshman year at Duke University is staggering. It’s also unconfirmed, unclear and incomplete.

Flagg is an unprecedented player at an unprecedented time.

Never has a kid from Maine done what he did in college basketball this year, amassing nearly all of the player of the year honors and leading his team to the Final Four.

And never have college sports seen such a lucrative time for athletes, who are now able to amass millions of dollars in name, image and likeness deals while they are still in college.

With all of that money also comes a layer of murkiness. Terms of NIL deals aren’t necessarily disclosed. So people and online platforms that track NIL money can estimate what a player might be worth or already getting through sponsorship deals, but a lot of those numbers are just that: estimates.

So while the recently reported NIL number for Flagg is gargantuan, it raises as many questions as it answers. In a May conversation between longtime journalists Howard Bryant and Bob Costas, Bryant told Costas that Flagg made $13 million in a deal with footwear and apparel company New Balance and $15 million with sports merchandiser Fanatics.

That $28 million reported total between just two companies has drawn significant attention. And understandably so. But Bryant saying it and Flagg or the companies confirming it are two different things (that’s a reflection on the very nature of NIL funding and not on Bryant’s sourcing).

When each of these deals were announced, New Balance in August of 2024 and Fanatics in January 2025, their totals and structure were not entirely clear. And it remains unclear if those reported numbers cover just one or multiple years for these deals. The Athletic reported the Fanatics deal to be a multi-year agreement in January, and ESPN described the New Balance deal as “significant” when that news broke last August. The New Balance partnership is widely expected to be a multi-year deal as well.

The two companies are also not the only businesses that Flagg has inked agreements with.

On Tuesday, Flagg’s Instagram account featured a link to Cort Furniture, another of his NIL partners. And just think about some of the other prominent commercials that Flagg was featured in during this year’s March Madness tournament. There was the AT&T commercial with his grandmother, and the Gatorade spot that he appeared in with JuJu Watkins from USC and Paige Bueckers from UConn.

These other partnerships surely add significant value to Cooper Flagg’s sizable but still undisclosed NIL total. So while there still may be some uncertainty about that reported $28 million, there is no doubt that Flagg’s NIL earnings transcend those two deals alone.

As others have already pointed out, the gulf between Bryant’s reported figures and other existing estimates for Flagg’s NIL valuation is wide. On3, an online media and technology platform that tracks NIL valuations and college recruiting, has Flagg’s project annual NIL valuation at $4.8 million. While drastically lower than the $28 million that Bryant has reported, that estimate still ranks Flagg second overall in the entire country in On3’s calculations (behind University of Texas quarterback Arch Manning of Texas).

These different sets of numbers don’t necessarily mean that anyone is wrong. There could be different methodology at work, especially when it comes to the question of annual valuation vs. multi-year deals. But as that $28 million figure continues to garner attention, remember that it doesn’t tell the whole story in a dizzying NIL landscape.