First time poster, long time lurker of the old and new forum.
Does anyone have a current understanding of NIL as it relates to Ivy League basketball? I remember after the Sweet 16 run, Mitch made a comment about how the NIL hasn’t made it to the Ivy League.
Where do we stand today? Are collectives forbidden? Can individual boosters provide individual players with compensation? Did Xaivian / Caden get anything to stay?
It feels like this is an important topic for us fans to consider - Princeton has always punched above its weight as a basketball school, but with the combination of NIL and our inability to bring in transfers (while we simultaneously can lose players to the portal), it seems like that is an environment where we won’t be competitive for long.
Obviously, if there was an easy path towards NIL contributions at Princeton, there is some money floating out there willing to support the Tigers… then it just comes down to whether that money is willing to support 18 year olds instead of buildings, and whether that money is willing to lose the tax benefits of their contributions.
Would love an education, and even some strategy for how this might work in practice.
Here’s a good article from earlier this year:
The money from the other schools comes from NIL collectives—groups of boosters, alumni, and companies that pool money to compensate athletes. There are 32 NCAA Division 1 basketball conferences. According to the online tracker NIL-NCAA, in 29 of them at least one school has a basketball collective. The only outliers: the Northeast and Ohio Valley conferences, which are among the weakest in the nation in men’s and women’s basketball, and the Ivy League, which is not.
The Ivy schools have done little to help athletes secure NIL deals, mostly hiring companies to set up the equivalent of bulletin boards where students can match with potential sponsors, usually alumni.
You’ll notice that top Ivy players like Lee, Pierce and Kino Lilly (as well as rising stars like Dalen Davis) have NIL companies linked on their Instragram pages. So they make money via endorsement deals and whatnot, which was the original intent of NIL. The caveat is that such earnings presumably impact financial aid packages, which seems partly self-defeating.
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Welcome to the board.
Someone on the Penn site said it well known that Caden Pierce has received 80K. No reference cited.
I wouldn’t anymore trust “someone on a Penn site” than DT saying, “people are telling me …”.
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