Talmage Gunther wasn't expecting an ordinary Thursday in August, amid the often painful monotony of preseason camp, to become the most emotional day of his college football career
The BYU walk-on wide receiver knew something strange was afoot when he walked into the Cougars' team facility after practice to find boxes of protein bars stacked above eye level throughout the room. A few minutes later, Nick Greer, CEO of Built protein bars and a BYU alum, was offering to change Gunther's life with an endorsement deal. In exchange for promoting the company at two in-person events and on social media, Greer was offering to pay each of the team's walk-on players enough money to cover tuition.
"It was a dream come true," Gunther said. "It was, it still is, amazing."
Gunther, who has a wife and a 1-year-old son at home, said he previously had to work from January to July to save up enough money to pay tuition and chip in on the rest of the family's bills. The endorsement money eases enough stress for him to focus more of his time on school and football this offseason.
"I called my wife [Brooke] as soon as the meeting was over and told her, and I could just hear the joy in her voice," he said. "I was in tears for a while after the announcement, and then talking to her again kind of brought it back."
Less than six weeks after the NCAA changed its rules to allow college athletes to profit from their names, images and likenesses, BYU became the first school to broker a teamwide deal on behalf of its athletes. Greer worked directly with Gary Veron, an associate athletic director who oversees the department's NIL program, to set up the details of the endorsement. Veron and his colleagues have since helped find NIL opportunities totaling more than $1 million for at least 450 athletes on campus playing a wide range of sports. The full football team recently received a renewed offer from Built for the spring semester.
Veron says BYU's first announcement back in August remains the "greatest professional day of my life." He and Gunther both compared the reaction among players that day to a locker room celebration after a major victory. A video of the announcement, which quickly went viral, was widely greeted with the usual unbridled joy for a very college sports-specific genre of social media post: the surprise awarding of a scholarship to a former walk-on player.
In quieter circles around the NCAA, though, the announcement also set off alarm bells. If BYU can facilitate a deal to help Gunther and his young family by covering his cost of attending college, what's to stop another school from lining up sponsorship deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for its athletes? And if a school starts asking its boosters to sponsor athletes, at what point does the sponsorship cross the line into a payment that is no different from a salary with some creative accounting?
These kinds of vast gray areas and unsettled questions in the new NIL era in college sports are making the path forward more complicated for NCAA members trying to thread a thin needle. They are currently tasked with making sure athletes receive more of a fair share of the giant profits they help generate while also convincing politicians, federal judges and the general public that college sports are primarily an education-based enterprise.
Veron says he understands the concerns about schools facilitating deals, but he believes that any school with its athletes' best interests in mind is in an ideal position to help them maximize their opportunities while providing an added layer of protection from "sharks and charlatans" trying to take advantage of the new marketplace.
Shortly after announcing BYU's deal with Built, Veron says he heard from more than a dozen administrators and coaches from around the country who wanted to know more about what the Cougars were doing.
"We got a bunch of schools saying, 'Hey, what's going on at BYU? We're hearing about this. How is this legal?'" Veron said. "A coach in the SEC reached out to me and asked how we did this."
BYU hasn't violated any laws or NCAA rules with any of the deals Veron's team has brokered since July. However, not every school would legally be able to do the same things.
The landmark shift in NCAA amateurism rules that opened the door to NIL opportunities was catalyzed by new state laws. Roughly half of the states in the U.S. created some form of legislation in the lead-up to this past July that guaranteed a college athlete's right to make endorsement money. To address concerns about a pay-for-play system evolving in the NCAA, many of those laws included regulations prohibiting a school from being directly involved in facilitating deals for students.
The NCAA initially planned to create similar restrictions when changing its rule to align with the wave of state laws that started going into effect last summer. The organization backed away from any specific nationwide regulations, though, out of a fear that those limits could be seen as thwarting competition in violation of federal antitrust law. The lack of a detailed NCAA policy means that states that didn't push for NIL laws -- such as Utah -- now actually have fewer restrictions than states that were proactively pressuring the association to change.
BYU isn't alone. Georgia Tech, for example, negotiated a deal this fall with TiVo that netted its football players cash and free gear in exchange for social media promotion. But even when no state law stood in the way, many schools hesitated to get involved in helping broker deals because of the unsettled and murky nature of these new rules. Schools remain concerned that arranging deals might cross a line into the realm of pay-for-play, according to Gabe Feldman, a sports law professor at Tulane who has been involved in the NIL legislative process.
"I think part of the reason only a handful of schools are doing it so far is there's a fair amount of uncertainty and confusion in what the applicable rules are, because unlike virtually every other area of college athletics, there is no real uniformity in the NIL rules," Feldman said.
The initial hesitation is starting to fade. Ohio State and Louisville have announced plans in the last few weeks to get significantly more involved in finding NIL opportunities for their athletes. Lawmakers in Florida and Alabama have proposed ways to change their state's laws to drop restrictions that keep their schools from doing what BYU has done.
Their change of heart has been driven by a fear of being left behind in recruiting battles. Alabama Rep. Kyle South told a Patch.com reporter in January that he was rushing to change his state's law because "recruiting just opened up this week after bowl games and we need to make sure we have all the tools and our student-athletes are not put at a disadvantage."
Gunther agrees that BYU's deals could catch the eyes of future players when they are deciding where they want to attend school.
"I definitely think it's something that a recruit will, will look at and say, 'Oh yeah, that's a big deal.'" he said. "Especially maybe a guy who doesn't have a ton of offers to see like, oh, BYU takes care of its walk-ons, I'd rather walk on there than, than somewhere else.
