NIL is here; get used to it

By Dan Smith

Name, Image, Likeness is the new buzzword in college sports. What are its limits … if there are any?

Victor Cardwell has this recurring fantasy that his namesake son, Victor, a freshman track athlete at Division III Roanoke College, will sign a lucrative NIL deal. Sure, it is a fantasy right now, but just a couple of years ago, NIL deals of any kind were a fantasy and

Cardwell’s dream is as possible as anybody’s these days.

NIL, of course, is “Name, Image, Likeness,” the newest buzzwords in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NCAA), but it primarily involves athletes at the highest level and mostly only the best of those. It allows what was forbidden since there has been an NCAA: professional payment for use of an athlete’s name, image and likeness for promotion, advertising and goodness knows what-all the agents will come up with to rub two sawbucks together.

Already, we have multi-million-dollar freshman quarterbacks at major universities. We have soccer players and track athletes being paid in six figures, quarterback bench warmers looking at half a mil a year.

We have a woman gymnast, Livvy Dunn of LSU, raking in north of $2 million and a pair of blonde, twin basketball players at the University of Miami with lot to play with, as well. The twins represent 40 brands and $1.7 million, according to various sources. The Cavinder sisters, transfers from Fresno State, are above average basketball players, though hardly great, but they have the elusive benefits: they are beautiful and outgoing, and they are in a major advertising market.

This is one area of athletics where women are not being left in the locker room. Virginia Tech basketball players Ashley Owusu and Elizabeth Kitley (ACC Player of the Year) sit