And practically overnight, everything everywhere transformed all at once. All of that changed in 2021 when, under intense pressure from players and in response to lawsuits lost and new laws passed in several states, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) changed its age-old policy, allowing athletes to use their “name, image, or likeness,” known as NIL, for profit. Since the dawn of sporting time, college athletes have been forbidden from making money for playing for their team, be it from product endorsements or having their likeness appear in a video game. That’s because these days, being a college athlete at a Division I school is nothing like it used to be. And in today’s world of college athletics, it turns out, they are precisely the kinds of guys who can help get a top player like Flowers to stay put. Instead, Mutryn, Joe Popolo, Samuel Raia, and Brian Tusa were merely Boston College alums who now work in finance or business and care deeply about their school’s sports teams. They weren’t Flowers’s classmates, much less his teammates, so they couldn’t exactly peer pressure him into staying, either. Mutryn and his friends didn’t work for BC Athletics-or for the college at all-so they couldn’t offer Flowers anything more than the free tuition he was already receiving from the school as a scholar-athlete. When Scott Mutryn and three of his buddies heard the news last summer that other colleges were trying to lure away their alma mater’s star wide receiver, Zay Flowers, they knew they had to do something. Illustration by Benjamen Purvis / Photo by Wangkun Jia/Alamy Stock Photo
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |