Prospect of player pay another wrinkle for HBCU schools, where big NIL deals still taking root

By John Zenor

Marc Smith was relaxing in his basement when he got an alert on his phone. An athlete at his alma mater, Grambling State, had posted on social media about not having enough food and needing help.

That incident led Smith to form the Icon 1901 Collective in April 2022 to help Grambling athletes land paid endorsement deals at the school best known for iconic football coach Eddie Robinson. Smith searched and couldn’t find a single historically Black college or university with a collective focused on name, image or likeness compensation so he expanded Icon 1901 to represent HBCU athletes elsewhere as well.

“These kids want to be inclusive in the NIL space and many of the universities don’t have the resources,” Smith said.

Outside the biggest and wealthiest athletic programs, the financial strain of offering robust NIL options to college athletes is a constant concern and is often especially pronounced at HBCUs. The four major HBCU conferences recently agreed to work together to increase the value of HBCUs and send more athletes to the pros, but now there is a new wrinkle.

The mammoth $2.8 billion antitrust settlement agreed to by the NCAA and the biggest conferences in the nation includes the prospect of schools paying athletes directly starting as early as 2025. Revenue sharing is a new and daunting factor for all schools with modest resources, including HBCUs.

“There may be some questions about how are they going to be able to navigate this, but if past experience is any indication they will find a will and a way based on alumni coming together to figure out a way to push these institutions forward,” said Texas Southern Professor J. Kenyatta Cavil, who studies HBCU athletics.

Less money to work with

Only a handful of Black colleges have NIL collectives to help arrange deals for athletes, though efforts have grown in the past year or so as alumni have rallied and in the wake of Deion Sanders’ football coaching tenure at Jackson State.

Many HBCU schools don’t rake in nearly as much money from sports as their Championship Subdivision peers. Out of 64 FCS schools, none reported less total athletic revenue in 2023 than Mississippi Valley State’s $4.8 million, according to Knight-Newhouse. Eight of the bottom 11 were HBCUs.

Alcorn State, like Grambling and Mississippi Valley part of the Southwestern Athletic Conference, reported $7.9 million. That compares to James Madison’s $68 million at the top of the list (not acounting Ivy League schools).

Big picture

SWAC Commissioner Charles McClelland said he doesn’t know what the athletics landscape will look like down the road. But he knows big-money schools and conferences don’t either, and that whatever happens will ultimately trickle down to his league and the rest of the FCS.

The SWAC and Southeastern Conference are both headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. That affords McClelland and SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey chances to meet and discuss the potential changes.

“One thing he said to me, he said, ‘Charles, we have the same problems. There might just be differences in zeroes at the end of those problems. We’re all in this thing together,’” McClelland said. “We have to share ideas. And what better opportunity to learn and grow than to share ideas with the SEC from the Southwestern Athletic Conference standpoint?”

Dollars and departures

Prairie View A&M football coach Bubba McDowell said his SWAC program lost a half-dozen top players because of NIL money. His school didn’t have it, others did. He is leery of what revenue sharing might do to recruiting and retention of players at HBCUs.

“It’s going to hurt big time,” McDowell said. “That’s what these kids are looking for and that’s what society has done for these young men. I’m not against that. I’ve said from Day 1, if we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it the right way. We just still haven’t figured out how to do it the right way.”

McDowell and his SWAC peers are realistic. Unless their name is Sanders, now at Colorado, top recruits were likely headed elsewhere anyway.

Now they are also more likely to develop and then lose players who are missed or not recruited by bigger programs out of high school. Alabama State coach Eddie Robinson Jr. (no relation to the former Grambling coach) went from a walk-on with the Hornets to a second-round NFL draft pick at the same school.

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