Pitt players find unique opportunity in new NIL club

As Name, Image and Likeness arrangements have evolved in the last 13 months, many iterations have emerged, from letter-of-the-law endorsement deals to pay-for-play setups that are a bit less by-the-book.

But one of the newest developments has been a unique way for fans to support student-athletes directly, and this week saw Pitt’s football players get on board with the latest means of generating revenue through NIL.

Generally, the arrangement is called an “NIL club,” and the idea is simple: a paywall community where fans contribute on a monthly basis for exclusive member content. The money goes directly to the student-athletes, creating a unique opportunity for fans to show their support and for the student-athletes to make a little extra money.

The company behind the idea is YOKE, a technology company that provides the platform for the student-athletes.

“We built a technology platform for athletes to easily launch NIL Clubs, which are really paywalled communities for their fans to come and participate in a cool fan experience and be able to directly support the players on the team,” YOKE co-founder and CEO Mick Assaf told Panther-Lair.com shortly after the Steel City NIL Club was launched this week.

The Steel City NIL Club is one of the most recent groups to launch, as YOKE is now supporting clubs representing more than 20 schools across the country. NIL clubs for football players at Texas A&M, Tennessee, Ole Miss, Kentucky, Minnesota, Baylor, Nebraska, Mississippi State, Oklahoma, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan State, Florida State, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, LSU and Iowa State are all operational or close to launching. They each have unique names that reference the geographic area but not the school - Twin Cities NIL Club is for Minnesota players; Lincoln NIL Club is for the Cornhuskers; Tallahassee NIL Club represents FSU players - and they all operate on the same central function:

Fans donate monthly for access to the players. That could mean virtual Q&A’s, video updates from the players, day-in-the-life content or any other way the student-athletes want to interact. All the players have to do to be eligible for revenue is sign up - Assaf compares it to signing a terms of service with Instagram or Twitter - and participate by contributing content or being involved in a club activity. If they do that, they’ll get a monthly share of whatever money is raised through the club.

Of course, YOKE takes a portion for the technology build and maintenance. Right now, that’s 18%, but Assaf said the fee started at 25% but has since dropped and will continue to drop as the company adds more teams and participating players.

This iteration of YOKE’s platform seems tailor-made for NIL opportunities, but Assaf and two others started it in 2019 with a different idea in mind. A walk-on running back at Notre Dame, Assaf was close with former Irish receiver and current Pittsburgh Steeler Chase Claypool. As Claypool went through the process of preparing for the NFL Draft in the spring of 2020, he found that there was little to do beyond working out. But one activity Claypool did during his free time was play video games, so Assaf and his co-founders started looking into ways technology could help the future second-round pick turn his free time into revenue.

“Our vision was that, a lot of the challenge for athletes in monetizing was that there wasn’t really good technology in place, and without technology, it has to be human labor, which is cost-intensive,” Assaf said. “So the vision was to build technology to help athletes monetize. We looked at all the different things they were doing and tried to build a full suite of solutions that could help them.

“We started by building technology around gaming and them interacting with fans through video chatting, so we worked on building fan-engagement tools and found a lot of success once NIL came around.”

As student-athletes navigated the brave new environment of college football in the first year of NIL, fans also were looking for ways to support their favorite teams and favorite players. Assaf saw an opportunity to simplify the process for all parties, and it didn’t take long for the word to spread throughout the sport.

“It’s mostly referrals and then players ask their teammates or we kind of help them,” he said. “Once there are a few people on the team who are interested, then it’s pretty easy to kind of spread the word amongst the team. It is what the players want to make of it. The more guys that are involved, the more they can push fans to the platform and the more money they can make together.”

When it came time to start an NIL club for Pitt players, Assaf already had a few connections.

“They were one of the first. We got connected with them really early on. I’m not positive exactly where it started, but I know we’ve been in touch with a bunch of those guys. I know (Notre Dame transfer) Shayne (Simon). I played with Shayne and (Notre Dame transfer) C’Bo (Flemister), so that was a pretty easy point of contact for us to be able to work with them.”

“One of the YOKE people came and talked to the whole team,” junior defensive end Dayon Hayes said Wednesday, “so we basically got on that. We’re all trying to get something. The whole team can get NIL, so that’s a great team-bonding thing, honestly.”

The even-split model of revenue has been appealing for Pitt’s players. All of the money that’s donated goes into a pool, YOKE takes out 18% for the platform and the rest is split evenly among all active participants.

“We realized the strength of the team was the ability to work together,” Assaf said. “So launching these paywall communities where athletes could work together, they were a lot more powerful when they worked together.

“In college football, you do everything together, so being able to do NIL together felt really logical.”

By rule, Pitt can’t be involved in the NIL process aside from clearing it through compliance. To that extent, head coach Pat Narduzzi isn’t too aware of the details.

“I don’t know much about it,” he said Wednesday. “I don’t get involved in it. I’m not supposed to be involved in it. If our guys are smiling, then I’m happy. I want our guys to be happy. Our big collective is Alliance 412; that’s the one I pay a little bit more attention to. Some of these little initiatives - it’s great to line our kids’ pockets in some of those different ways.”

Ultimately, what Assaf set out to do in the NIL space was to connect fans and student-athletes in a way that benefits all parties and operates within the rules of NIL and doesn’t place unreasonable demands on the student-athletes’ time.

“We’re a technology company,” Assaf said. “We have people who help them with moderating and help them with social, but the players really drive the vehicle. We just kind of built a ton of technology tools to make it as easy as humanly possible, to automate it as much as possible. You’ll see a lot of their marketing efforts are pretty coordinated, and a lot of that has to do with the technology tools that we built in order for them to make it super easy and not become a full-time job. They have to put in work because it’s their operation and their community, but from playing college sports, I know that if we spend hundreds of hours building technology so that it takes them one minute to promote it instead of 15 minutes to promote it, that’s going to make a huge difference over the period of a season.”