BYU Football: The Cougars are winning the NIL game
By Adam Gibby
BYU Football became the first team to accept an NIL deal to work with walk-on players.
On Thursday BYU Football announced a major NIL deal with Built Bars. The deal will give every player enough funds to cover their college tuition, including the walk-ons. While it is hard to imagine that other teams will not follow suit, BYU will always be able to claim that they were the first team to have that kind of deal. And if you don’t think that is important, tell that to the 1,100,000 Twitter views in the first twelve hours after being released with commentary by ESPN.com, Kirk Herbstreit, David Pollack and CBS Sports.
A few weeks ago, BYU announced a deal with Gigg who donated $250,000 to help the Built4Life program. The $250,000 wasn’t for one specific player, or even a group of superstars, but for the team.
BYU also announced that they have the BYU300 program that will have the school work with 300 companies to allow student athletes to have internships with those companies.
This seems to be the direction that BYU Football is taking NIL. While some players have gotten individual deals including Chaz Ah You with ONCOOR or Tyler Allgeier with Balmshot, it appears that much of the deals being done are team centered.
What does that mean though? It means BYU is winning.
BYU Football isn’t going to get a ton of 4 to 5 star athletes out of high school regardless of how NIL looks. The reality is, BYU has one of the best player development programs in the country. The Cougars are competitive against P5 competition with recruiting rankings in the high 60’s most years. Normally those two don’t correlate very well. Yet BYU is known for having players thrive including walk on Dax Milne, Ziggy Ansah or even Baylor Romney.
With the NIL deals that BYU is coming out with, players that aren’t superstar recruits will notice. To get a deal at BYU, all you have to do is be on the team. What other school can say that? What message does that give? Personally, if I were a recruit I would want to play for a team that watches over all their team, not just the few spotlight players.
Billy Nixon, Gary Veron and the rest of the Built4Life team have made BYU the greatest NIL team in the nation, and quite honestly it is even close.
If you are a BYU Football fan and have not seen the NIL announcement by Built Bars then please watch it below, it is well worth your time.