For The Ivy League Players, NIL Isn’t Just A Bonus, It’s A Godsend
Jimmy Taylor signed on knowing the deal. No scholarship, no academic merit, no playoffs, no NIL collectives. Simply prestige and the opportunity to play football at the next level. For the vast majority of Ivy League athletes, it’s all but a reality. In a relatively forgotten corner of the Division I landscape, the Ivy League has remained without change for over a century– especially when it comes to football.
The Ivy League schools, or the Ancient Eight by some naming standards consist of the nation’s most prestigious and harrowed institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn, and Columbia. The eight have been a part of the highest level of college athletics since the sport’s inception, ruling the early days of college football. Fast-forward over 100 years later and the schools are still stuck in the 1800’s. Using the justification of tried and true methods, as well as the guise of on academically-focused curriculum, Ivy League schools do not offer any athletic scholarships to their student-athletes. Nor academic merit aid. Players solely have to rely on need-based aid for their tuition. The group, which is it’s own Division I conference, also refuses to participate in the FCS playoffs.
Citing academic reasons, the shoulder turned to post-season playoffs makes the Ivy League one of the most interesting and intriguing selection of teams at the Division I level. So, in today’s age of Quinn Ewers’ mega-contracts and NIL collectives offering truck leases as parts of deals, how does the Ivy League react to a seismic shift in college football?
Like it always has. Leaving it up to the players.
“Yeah, no collectives here. It’s kind of a free-for-all. You have to go out and seek the NIL deals yourself. You have to take matters into your own hand, without that, nothing’s guaranteed,” Jimmy Taylor says. Taylor is a former backup quarterback for Cornell University, where he played for three years and has taken on a student-coaching role in 2024. “There’s definitely no one getting pickup trucks here. A Yeti, maybe. A Lamborghini? For sure not.”
For a player who has to take on the cost of college all by himself, what seemed like something that could be a gamechanger hasn’t really hit the Ivy League like the freight train it was supposed to be. The Ivy League for years has taken somewhat of a backwards stance when it comes to advancement within the game. Ancient traditions hold the conference back from post-season play and quite frankly, the majority of the student body shuns college athletics as a pure extracurricular that is a pesky add-on to the post-secondary life, not as a spectacle. The league doesn’t even allow graduate students to play, to expect NIL to drastically change the way the conference has conducted business for the past century is futile at best.
To each their own, but that leaves Ivy League athletes hanging. NIL hasn’t been the world-changing opportunity as it has been on the DI-FBS level. There, we consistently see multi-million dollar contracts in the form of endorsement deals or collectives effectively recruiting fresh 18-year-olds to come to University A and College B. Colorado quarterback Shadeur Sanders set NIL records when he was revealed to have a $4.7 million NIL valuation according to Yahoo Sports. That’s more than five times what Super Bowl contending quarterback Brock Purdy made this last season. All while the average Ivy League player makes close to nothing, relying on need-based aid to get them through school.
That’s not to say that Ivy League schools couldn’t afford a lofty NIL collective. After all, there are no rules against it. According to the Washington Post, the Ivy League doesn’t explicitly ban NIL collectives like the ones we see at the upper echelon of Division I. However, there’s an important distinction to be made– truly what good would it do?
“Imagine the rosters if the Harvard grads or the Penn grads pooled their money together,” one Ivy League assistant coach said. “But will it happen? It’s still the Ivy League.”
According to On3, the largest NIL collective currently in play today is Tennessee’s close relationship with Spyre Sports Group— which works in tandem with the associated The Volunteer Club. Tennessee by itself sits about average with it’s endowment with $1.34 billion. Harvard University’s endowment topped $49.45 billion as of 2022, a number that steadily rises every year. To say that the Ivy League’s are behind the eight-ball monetarily is a large fallacy, it’s just that the Ivy League hasn’t been apt to recognize and adopt the customs of higher-level college football yet.
“I think a large allure of the Ivy League doesn’t come from the money aspect of it. No one comes here because they were promised a big check or is looking for the next biggest brand deal,” Taylor says. “The main drawing point is the education. The league prides itself on being the premier academic destination and setting you up for life. However a check wouldn’t be so bad either.”
Don’t ask the Ivy League about NIL. They won’t tell you. The brass of the league have been notoriously dodgy regarding NIL questions and the status of the conference’s position throughout litigation in various states doesn’t help the climate for Q&A. The NCAA– which the Ivy League is a member of is the defendant in a plethora of antitrust cases and the recent vote by the Dartmouth Men’s Basketball team to unionize have all lead to the hesitation by top ranking officials in the conference to speak out about the recent rule change.
Last month, the National Labor Relations Board stated that Dartmouth basketball and other Ivy League schools had an employee-employer relationship, paving the way for schools such as the Ancient Eight to host unions and change the college football landscape forever. This would give another avenue for student-athletes to monetize themselves amidst a plane that is unhospitable to student-athletes as is.
Yet, the journey to get this far and even further has been a steep road. Reports have emerged that Dartmouth has repeatedly refused to sit down with a school— a theme that very well could extend beyond basketball.
For football, the Ivy League is an interesting place. A barren landscape that has no direct NIL collectives, despite the fact that the sport in the conference is anything but a dying breed. For example, the annual Harvard-Yale game attracted 51,127 fans– a number rarely surpassed even at the FBS level except for the upper echelon of schools. The argument that the league can’t support NIL due to its relative size is a logical fallacy, and simply incorrect.
While the Ivy League has zero collectives, the New York Times was able to find one for every single team in the FBS Power Five, a group of the biggest conferences which includes the Big Ten, ACC, SEC, Big 12, and the now-defunct Pac-12.
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“I don’t think NIL will ever make a big impact on the Ivy League”, says Taylor. “Kids here aren’t competing with Alabama or Texas. At most we’re competing with NESCAC schools and the other Ivies. No five-star athlete is going to be persuaded to come here based off of a promise unless it’s hefty. Which I can’t see the Ivy League doing as a group of schools anytime soon.”
Schools have learned to live with NIL however instead of completely shunning it. Think of it as an oversight or an omission.
“Cornell… it’s more of a risk-management approach,” says Taylor on Cornell University’s philosophy on NIL. “They try their best to educate you on what’s allowed and what’s not. They don’t actively help or seek out any NIL deals for you. They let you do that on your own. It’s more of a covering their own behind situation. They don’t want to get in any compliance issues, so they pass that education on to you. They haven’t completely ignored it, but definitely not on the level of major FBS-teams either.
It can be for the better or worse depending on what way you look at it. If you’re crushing it in the Ivy League, you might want a hefty NIL deal– because that’s what it was meant for. But for the vast majority of athletes here, they’ve found ways to make do by going out and searching for deals on their own.”
In the era of the transfer portal, college football has turned into de facto free agency where talent rises and migrates to the places where it’s best used. Think of college ball as the free market, and the transfer portal as the facilitating vehicle to swiftly move about.
The fact of the matter is, talent that deserves to be and wants to be monetized in the Ivy League, moves out and transfers to a school that’s much more apt and willing to fund prospective recruits. The remaining left in the conference have to find a way.
For a conference with no athletic scholarships– not even academic merit aid, athletes here see name, image, and likeness laws as a way to make ends meet.
It’s definitely a big help, no doubt about it,” Taylor states on how NIL has impacted the minute details. “Kids who might’ve been struggling– that extra $500 a month they get now from a brand deal could mean the difference between paying for books or not. For a conference so locked away, so apt to shun itself from the outside world, a big shift like that’s forced on the league is monumental– and a metaphor for the rest of the sport. College football has changed, and it’s really interesting to see that not even the Ivy League can run from it.”
The Ivy League has witnessed a cosmic shift, one that has been in the making for decades but the conference hoped it would never have to address. The NCAA and the Ivy League in particular have fought tooth and nail and maintained the fact that players are “student-athletes”, a model that’s been contested to the brim as of late and one that’s been under fire since the 2021 Supreme Court ruling that opened the door for athletes to be paid and monetized off their name and image.
But that world has been hard for Ivy League athletes, not having a direct method to make their way through school. The NCAA has harped on the fact that athletes are compensated by scholarships for those who get them, but that’s a luxury the Ivy League has backed away from– for their entire existence, meaning those who go there must find separate avenues.
As in the case with the Dartmouth Basketball team, the players argued and the NLRB found that the school has enough control over them to classify them as employees– leading to the massive paradigm shift that NIL has had on the league.
According to Taylor, “it’s enough. Would I like the opportunity to maybe get a huge deal with Lululemon and Nike? Sure, who wouldn’t. But is the current situation enough? I do believe it is. It’s a huge change from what we had before and now kids are able to take some of the load off when it comes to groceries or textbooks.”
NIL goes far beyond major brand deals too, which is a huge bonus for Ivy League athletes. Players can now make YouTube videos that allow them to be sponsored and monetize themselves through YouTube itself, they are now granted permission to sign trading cards– something former Princeton and now Bengal receiver Andrei Iosivas inked a deal to do, and even perform small acts such as get paid to wear a t-shirt for a local restaurant.
The new law comes in many shapes and forms for athletes– with plenty taking advantage of the new opportunities to ease stress in other places.
At the end of the day, NIL came in like a roaring wave for the Ivy League. Every single school now had a monumental change to take care of and athletes now didn’t have to find less efficient ways of paying for their education. The new name, image, and likeness laws are most likely here to stay, but the Ivy League has refused to grab the bull by the horns– instead opting for the players to rein in their own opportunities, something plenty have taken advantage of.
