| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today we're sharing the third installment of Turf Wars, a series documenting how the pay-for-play era in college sports exploits many athletes. In it, Peter Robison has a rare conversation with a sports agent about how the NIL world shortchanges student-athletes. You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. Sports agent Henry Organ answered a call in September from a mother looking to protect her son. Rated among the top 20 high school football recruits in California, he had committed months earlier to play for the University of Oklahoma. A team official had agreed that he'd be paid $300,000 his freshman year, his mother said, as long as he stopped visiting other schools. By that fall, nothing was in writing, and the high schooler's mother was getting nervous. "I just want to make sure my baby's good," she told Organ. In October she hired him to represent her son, and he began trying to lock down the deal. Days before the Dec. 4 national signing day for college recruits, with the invitations already printed for a celebration at the player's high school, Oklahoma told him it wouldn't have a spot available until 2026. So forget about the money. Welcome to the brutally Darwinian new world of college football, where, to adapt a phrase from Jerry Maguire, plenty of schools will talk about the money; they just may not show it. Fans have the impression that the stars of Division I football are raking in millions now that the National Collegiate Athletic Association allows athletes to sign NIL deals—that is, to sell the use of their name, image and likeness. And it's true that a handful of top players are pocketing big money. Most, however, even a standout like Organ's client, remain at the mercy of the universities. (His mother asked that his name not be used, for fear of harming his career prospects.) The coaches are free to make and break promises with few repercussions. "It's the wild, wild, wild West," says Organ, co-founder of a sports agency called Disruptive. "And the rules—there are no rules."  Henry Organ. Photographer: Alex Welsh Organ, 33, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Saint Mary's College High School in Berkeley, whose alums include a co-founder of Snapchat and the director of the Black Panther movies. His grandfather, Claude Organ Jr., was the first Black chair of the surgery department at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska, where he got to know a young Warren Buffett. Buffett once invited the surgeon to invest $100,000 in Berkshire Hathaway, but, as Organ explains the family lore, "Papa" couldn't afford to tie up his money; he had seven children to put through college. Organ went to Portland State University in Oregon in 2010 and walked on to the team as a defensive back. During college, he got a job at the Nike Inc. company store near Portland. He later rose to a role in football brand marketing at Nike and got a master's degree in sports management from the University of San Francisco School of Management. His dream was always to be a sports agent, even though a professor told him the job amounted to glorified babysitting. Besides, it was in the air where he grew up. LeBron James' first agent, Aaron Goodwin, was the father of one of Organ's middle-school classmates. And Leigh Steinberg, the real-life model for the Tom Cruise character in Jerry Maguire, met his first client in a dorm at the University of California at Berkeley. Organ left Nike after a couple of years and started apprenticing at agencies. In 2019 he got his agent's license from the NFL Players Association and took a job at Elite Loyalty Sports, which has negotiated some of the NFL's richest contracts for offensive linemen. The job soon connected Organ with an investor named Hector Rivas, who had started an online bookseller called ThriftBooks. The two discovered they had the same restless energy. "When it comes to business, I have ADHD," Rivas says. "I mean, I do have ADHD. And it carries over into business." Early in 2020, Organ told Rivas he was looking to start his own agency. While most of the players in college and the pros are Black, most of the agents and coaches are White. Organ wanted minority investors, and Rivas comes from a family of immigrants from Guatemala. Careful and polished in conversation, he's also Mormon, with four boys. Organ, who's direct and frequently profane, delighted in the odd-couple pairing. After months of feeling each other out, mostly on Zoom calls at the start of the pandemic, they became partners in the new agency. Rivas says he's been amazed to learn how much money flows through college football, and even the pros, with technology as limited as sticky notes and Google Drive. "I used to think they're just behind the times," he says. "I'm beginning to think it's by design, because it puts us, the agents, at a disadvantage. What we're trying to do is shift that power from the coaches, the universities and the team owners to the players and the agents." At ThriftBooks, Rivas used software to track, sort and sell millions of books a month. He's taken the same data-centric approach as a sports agent, hiring programmers to develop a software platform called Nukleus. It's meant to automate all the known information about players into a single place—from their statistics to contact information to contract values. That information is now scattered among various sources, and it's especially hard to get in college football. Unlike the NFL, which has standardized contracts that are disclosed to the players union, NIL deals for college players are typically kept confidential. Under NCAA rules, deals worth more than $600 are supposed to be disclosed to compliance departments at universities. The schools collect contract data using various software products, including one developed by a company called INFLCR. But Jim Cavale, INFLCR's founder, says many of the deals aren't reported at all. "There's a whole secret economy of NIL," he says. Public records requests by Bloomberg Businessweek to dozens of universities revealed many such gaps, with some six-figure deals going undisclosed. Rivas and Organ hope to make the Nukleus software a one-stop shop for agents, pro teams, universities and players. For college, it might include information about player transfers—which some online sites now track by monitoring player announcements on Instagram. Over time, users might be able to upload contracts, make changes and sign off on them within the software. Any subscriber would be able to see all the data (with private information anonymized and aggregated). If enough people use it, it could become a clearinghouse for all parties. Keep reading: 'There Are No Rules': Inside College Football's New Pay for Play For the rest of the series: Part 1, NCAA Players Learn an Ugly Truth About Getting Paid Part 2, College Football Coaches Violate Rules Protecting Players | 
No comments:
Post a Comment