The ROAR Podcast: Noah Henderson

# ROAR Podcast: Noah Henderson
**Guest:** Noah Henderson
**Date:** 2025-11-12
**YouTube URL:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmHhzq5GIe0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmHhzq5GIe0)
**Source:** YouTube auto-generated captions (no speaker diarization)

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(0:07) No, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today. >> Absolutely. I'm thrilled to be here. >> It's exciting because there's so many topics to dig into. to you. You have such a wide range of knowledge in the college sports landscape which is so much I guess I would call it the wild west in some ways today changing so much especially around NIL the transfer portal all the things that were not as prevalent obviously when we were younger or early days of college athletics but before we get to that can you give us a little bit of your background is how you got to this place that you are today because it's been such an interesting evolution >> yeah it's been a whirlwind on my end I don't know if this podcast has video or not, but if you're watching this, right, I'm young, so it's been fun. It's been crazy. But I really got into college sports at the turn of all this change. I was a student athlete at St. Joseph's University out in the Atlantic 10 Conference. Came in 2016, was on the golf team there for four years. Was trying to find my way in the sports world. Didn't really know what that looked like. Talked to our athletics director, Jill Bowdensteiner.

(1:12) Tremendous. one of the sharpest 80s out there. And she gave me a lost 22-year-old some good advice when I said, "Hey, your job seems really cool. How can I be you one day?" She said, "Go to a large public law school, right? Go somewhere where you get integrated with the athletics department where you can go and get a quality education." And fortunately, I was accepted into the University of Illinois College of Law. And it was really at that time that was really the peak of CO. My senior year season was cut short due to CO. So I enrolled in law school in 2020. That would be the fall of 2020. So for those of you most people know that was right around the time of NIL implementation. I had already become a pretty big proponent of athlete labor rights and athlete payment as these TV contracts grew and grew. So, I got to hit the ground running getting kind of my first year legal studies out of the way. I was the president of our sports and entertainment law society through some events I run. I got paired up and known in the industry. Ended up working as one of the first few employees at a company student athlete NIL who at the beginning of all the athlete payment were was really the first company who was starting the NIL collective that's now become ubiquitous. That was what we did.

(2:32) We were facilitating payments from boosters to student athletes and managing the regulations and yeah, like you said, evolved quickly. I worked with that company up until my graduation at which point I moved to Chicago jobless. And after shooting around some emails trying to figure out how to pay rent, got hooked up with the sports management department at Lyola who had a recent faculty departure, was an adjunct in the fall of 2023. They moved me to full-time in the spring of 23. My boss retired and I was moved to director in the fall of 2024. So now this is my third semester with the same title, which feels like ages. It was just a rapid climb and a lot of different experiences I had over the course of really the last four or five years. It's a wild journey and I think it's so interesting. It kind of mirrors in some way the hecticness that is the job that you're in. meaning so much change and so many things are shifting in the college athletic space.

(3:32) But with NIL that you mentioned, your journey kind of mirrors that in so many ways of being at so many different stops. But you went from athlete to in law school and getting those skills to professor. How did your journey lead you to become such a central voice in the NIL and college sports reform movement? >> I think that I was emboldened a little bit in terms of the fact that this was all so new, right? that there are no gray beards in the NIL space. You might think that a lot of your skills translate and they probably do if you're a coach. With all the regulatory changes, you needed new and novel ideas.

(4:07) You know, you needed people who understood the college sports landscape. I had interned at San Diego State. I had experience as a non-revenue athlete at a mid- major school, but was someone who was always interested in the system. I had seen the system. And I think that a fresh perspective or a new perspective that wasn't necessarily tethered to the way college sports has been done for the last 30 years, 50 years is honestly a benefit and ways that I can think in new systems and not necessarily hold over all of the tradition that's come with college sports.

(4:42) >> You mentioned it. You are young. I just turned 44 yesterday and so I'm feeling my age for sure. But if for those of you that are just listening and not watching on YouTube, it is really cool to see and you mentioned it, there are no gray beards as you mentioned in that space. And I think it's great to have people like yourself and have those voices because like you said, it brings a new perspective and especially a perspective from somebody who was a student athlete who has been on the other side of this to see that. How has that benefited you as you've gone through not only all the shaping of NIL, but in your day-to-day from a teaching perspective?

(5:13) >> It helps, right? I think that you talk to anyone in the sports industry and there's always a little bump you give someone, right? If you're working in pro sports, someone who played at the professional level, if you're working in college sports, someone who played at the collegiate level, right? But those experiences allow you to understand, relate, and sometimes see the bigger picture of what's going on in college sports. I came in not knowing a whole lot, right? I think most student athletes know their sport and probably know their dynamics and their conferences. I could tell you as a freshman sophomore in college, I was I wouldn't say upset, but I saw the way that our men's and women's basketball were treated. I'm like, man, why don't I get the best tutors? Why aren't my gym times the best? Like men's basketball, women's basketball, and that sort of envy quickly translated into me looking into the economic system and going, "Oh, these are the athletes who are actually subsidizing my education. These are the athletes whose revenue that they're generating that is subsidizing me getting to fly and play pretty golf courses all around the country. It changed from envy to thank you and gratuitity. But I think that that evolution of again seeing the landscape, it helped give me a different perspective into not only how the money moves in college sports, but some of the equity concerns that accompany it.

(6:30) That's such an interesting lens because someone like myself wouldn't have that same lens being someone that didn't play an Olympic sport in or any sport in college. I just was having a good time and it was hard enough to have a good time and go can't imagine doing both. But you're right, it does subsidize those things. I think it's really interesting to see it with that lens. But Ben's still looking at it too with the Lindso. There is some level of inequity because of certain economic constraints across whether it's Olympic sports or other sports that are outside of the traditional non-revenue driving like football, men's and women's basketball and so on. It's such a cool lens to see that there you did your undergraduate work in economics and so was there something that initially drew you to the intersection of economics, law and sports management or was it just a confluence that came together?

(7:13) >> You know, I wish that I had this structured life. I think it would give me a lot less stress. I I fly by the seat of my pants to be honest. You can tell in the kind of odd jobs that I've taken over the years. I switched my major three times in college. I came in as international business. I didn't speak another language. I had only been out of the country once. I just thought it sounded cool. Switched to international relations. I couldn't tell you why. And then I took a couple economics classes and it just clicked for me. And that's what I've always done. And I'm thankful that the opportunities have followed. But there's never been a path in my life. I'm very thankful that I get to take a lot of the I'm blessed that I have taken econometrics and microeconomic theory because that course work was hard and I was unsure why I was doing it in the moment. But I think right now a lot of my work is a lot of my weeks I'm talking to basketball coaches and most of them aren't paid to know about economics.

(8:09) They're paid to know X's and O's. And so taking the economics right coursework that I've done and my knowledge and understanding systems through that lens again right it's a place where I can add value right I I will I have no concept of X's and O's compared to a casual fan yeah I do but compared to right someone who lives in this space not at all but that economics is valuable my law degree again I told you it wasn't like I was five years old and had a dream to take the LSAT and go to law school it was my athletics director who was like hey Noah right? If you want to be an AD, take this legal lens. So now I have both legal knowledge, knowledge of undergraduate economics, and like you said, a perspective of a student athlete, and it really allows me to connect things in a unique way that the plurality of people working in college basketball, college football aren't thinking this way. And it's not to say that my skill set's any better. It's just it's always good to have different lenses to look at things through.

(9:06) >> It is. And it's also good to have the adaptability. I think you mentioned the space that you're in, college athletics, NIL, payment players, transfer portal, all those things are shifting and changing, but then to come into that with someone who is adaptable and wants to change and can ride with those changes is much better than we often think of university structures as very rigid and the rigidity of that is not suited that well to one today's student athlete, but also to the changing dynamics in college sports. And so I think it's really interesting that it is a really good convergence for you of coming together in those senses. But you were directly involved in helping amend Illinois's NIL legislation. What was that like? What was the process like behind the scenes?

(9:51) >> Yeah. So I got a really great opportunity. I had reached out to director Whitman AD at University of Illinois is a wideeyed 1L going hey this is I'm all about sports. I'm in law school. He's a Illinois law alum as well. go. I'd love the opportunity to sit down with you and just introduce myself and see if there's any work you have. And then he gave me a little bit of a test and but see if I really meant it. He was like, here's 10 people in the athletics department. I want you to meet with them, right? Schedule independent times. They're going to explain to you what they do, maybe help you in your journey of what you want to figure out and where you want to slot into this whole thing. And and of those many meetings that I had, one was with a guy Cam Cox whose title's changed since I've been there. So I don't know it off hand but uh in my opinion I've talked to so many people in the NIL space he is top three in terms of knowledge and he did have a project right and it was amending Illinois NIL legislation to better fit the departmental goals of the University of Illinois and that again right to my AD at St. Joe's perspective, right?

(10:56) That's not an opportunity you get at a mid- major institution. They don't have the time. They don't have the resources, right? Someone in the Big 10, they're going to have the time, the resources, the lobbying power, the connections to state representatives to get this done. And we went through this entire analysis where I think at that time there were roughly 30 states who had active NIL legislation. And we found all the clauses that repeat themselves. When you read every state's NIL bill 15 times over, you start to see a lot of the similarities. We had all these spreadsheets where we were looking at what's the morality clause, right? What products are student athletes not able to endorse? Usually that's alcohol, tobacco, firearms, sports, gambling, adult entertainment. What are the educational requirements? Is there a class that's mandated? Is there financial literacy that's mandated? And we looked at 15 different common sections. And we go, okay, how can we articulate these? How can we steal from Texas? How can we steal from Florida to make this bill one, the best for student athletes, ensuring education policies and other things that we expanded, right? Our definition of NIL to include jersey number and voice, right? Jersey number besides 01 and whatever the current academic year is, but took things, we added to things, we talked about it. uh we had great support from a state senator and we were able to push it through pretty easily and it was again just a great learning opportunity for myself. I had no experience in policy or legislation. I just had not even a lot of free time. I was working for student athlete NIL and going to law school full-time. But but it's one of those things where when an opportunity like that presents itself, you can't say no. But again, like that's skills that I can hearken back to now, right? and understand public policy and NIL legislation. But that's that was the majority of it rather pain-free. I was more on the grunt work of research and parsing through things. But, you know, any opportunity to be involved and work with Cam Cox down at Illinois, it was a blessing.

(12:58) >> And I think that's a great lesson for listeners, especially those that are students, is that often times people are looking for traditional sports, jobs in sports, whether it's an athletic department or a front office. But what a great story that you have here of hey reaching out and trying to find something that you could dig into and in some ways not only if it didn't lead you directly to where you are today has a huge impact on what you do today because you can like you said hearken back to those things but also in your teaching and so on. So I think it's a really cool story of how that evolved in that sense when you look back at those early NIL frameworks that you worked on.

(13:32) What you get and are there things that evolved really quickly or things that you think still need to evolve today? >> I think that I it's hard because a lot of you remember what you were right about and you sometimes forget about things might have mistaken on. I think that I was always a bit bullish on just how much these athletes would be making. I remember in 2022 though when I remember signing power four receiver from the Big 10 to a school in the SEC. He was not getting any snaps in the S or in the Big 10 and we signed him to an SEC team. And I remember this guy was making $120,000 a year. And I told my f I didn't show him the contract, but I told my friends, you guys will never believe we got this guy who's going from Big 10 to an SEC score and he's making $120. Nobody could believe it. Now that's nothing. I think that a lot of the things that I was right about have come more recently. A lot of I think I forgot to mention that I wrote for Sports Illustrated NIL Daily publication for the last year and a half. I recently went independent and started a Substack College front office which is primarily geared towards like understanding the professionalization of college sports. But that's something that I've been saying forever, right?

(14:45) And I think that of anything that I can hold my hat on and say I was on this way before most people, most if not all, is that when it comes to college sports, we we were really seeing a change, right? That for the last four or five years, everything was development focused, right? If I wanted to win in today's NIL landscape, I had to fundra. I had to get in front of boosters. I needed my coaches communicating to boosters the importance of NIL, right? That was the key to success. But we're we're living in a semicap system now. And that's all muddied and complicated. But the teams who are succeeding right now weren't the teams who emphasized development. It was the teams who emphasized efficiency. Right?

(15:27) If I have this budget, how am I going to spend on these players in a way that's efficient? My I want my $70,000 wide receiver to outperform your $200,000 wide receiver. Right? And that's how my G5 team, insert Boise State, right, is actually going to make a dent in all of this and really be tremendously successful. That's where I've been living. That's where the majority of my work focuses now on is right, how can we operate our budgets most efficiently that even if we are underresourced, we can still win in this new environment. >> It's you have a lot of jobs, right? You mentioned the writing and I think that it some of your writing is great in those folks. You mentioned your subsack.

(16:08) It for those interested in college athletics and the business of college athletics, there's a lot of great reads in there and I think one thing that I picked up on in going through some of that was you've written a lot about the need for an updated uniform athlete agent act. What are the protections you believe are still missing or talk more about what you're getting at there for athletes in that sense? Yeah, I think that the UAA is again that's just standard law, right? That's the uniform code exists in contracts. It exists in various other parts of law that's just right often written by law professors and up to states to enact on their own.

(16:44) I think that's one way that we could go about perhaps providing a better regulatory landscape landscape for athletes in all of this. My point is broader than just the code, right? My point is more that there's definitely some things that still need to be resolved in college sports. I don't think anyone's going to sit here today and say system we have is great. It's not. Right? It's there's a lot of work that still needs to be done. One of those things that I'm passionate about is agent certification, right? If you look at any of the professional sports leagues, right? All of their agents are going to be certified by their respective players associations, right?

(17:22) Labor unions. And that's good. There's a vested interest in these player unions to protect their athletes from unscrupulous actors in NIL, not just an agency, but across the whole spectrum of NIL, you had a lot of very opportunistic actors. Truly people seeing, wow, like you can look at open doors reports about the billions of dollars in NIL money that's floating there through playing deals, through endorsement deals, and people said, wow, this looks like a great place for me to cash in. a lot of tremendous agents out there that I know, right, that act ethically, uphold their fiduciary duties. I talked to enough coaches and have friends who have gotten into coaching to hear the horror stories that exist of in the NBA or every professional sport you're charging, right? The max allowed for player agents on player deals is 3 to 5%. as prescribed by their CBAs. I've heard stories of agents charging college athletes north of 25% closer to% and you take out tax. These are usually athletes who are maybe not they don't have the sophistication of understanding the agent landscape, right? They're not pros and only dealing with pros. This is really in the beginning. You're looking at six, seven times the rate of what a comparable deal in the NBA, NFL, MLB is paid for these sorts of deals. And it's highway robbery to put it candidly.

(18:51) Beyond that, it would be Instagram DMs from these agents, all these kids who are playing out their season going, "Hey, if you jump in the portal and sign with me, I can get you x amount of dollars." And luring them away from teams. And again, that was all out of self-interest, right? That they wanted these players on their roster. those promises were probably not good in the first place and then say they get him $60,000 after income taxes after a high collective fee. These athletes are worse off than they would be if stayed. For me, I think that there's a huge need for some regulation of athlete athlete agents that right revenue sharing deals at a minimum probably should have some upper limit to what agents should be able to charge. I think the market's getting more sophisticated as more players get agents, right? That sort of sorts itself out in a way. Background checks, right? Things that can ensure that the people getting into this industry truly are in it for the best of the best interest of their athletes, upholding their fiduciary duties. And again, it's a small subsection of people who are not acting in this way. Usually, they get pushed out on their own, but definitely more to be done to protect student athletes in that regard.

(20:01) >> Yeah, 100%. And I think that we've talked you and I about how in both of our programs a lot of students come in and they want to be in a front office or another thing they want to do is be an agent, right? And teaching students and getting that experience can help spinning that forward. But in the teaching regard, that's a big part of what you do on the day-to-day basis. And so how do you bring all these rapidly evolving issues, NIL, gambling, antitrust things into the classroom in real time? I usually reserve Fridays for those discussions. A and what's nice is in my sports law class, we talk about antitrust, we talk about contracts, we talk about labor, and we can discuss Dartmouth's petition for a college union in Northwestern's recent bit. It integrates itself just fine. There's always opportunities within our materials. And it's it's funny all the textbook we use, even if they were published in 2023, it's vastly outdated.

(20:53) So there's places for me to interject and go actually this has changed quite a bit even in these two years. Something that I pride my teaching on is something that I felt was missing from a lot of my education and that was empowering students to take on things that they care about. All of my classes the main will have exams but the main assignment will be a research project that you do. And I think that's really helpful for my students because it rather than telling them, hey, look into a college sport, look into Johnson VNCA, which is like an employment case out in the Third Circuit, I go find something that interests you in sports law, right? I would say that you're going to get a lot more out of it if you look up an arbitration case pertaining to the New York Knicks, if you're a big basketball fan or a Knicks fan. In my sports journalism class, you do seven assignments every year and the medium and the topic is ultimately up to you, right? If you want to do a podcast about A10 basketball, knock yourself out. I've had students do op-eds about cocaine abuse and Australian rules, football, right? ultimately empowering students to to find avenues to look into the sports that they care about, empower themselves, take more ownership of their work because that's how they come out as experts in their own regard. I am so happy to have a student leave my class and remember more from the project they did than my lectures, right? Because that means that they're building expertise in something can speak to it, right? Are understanding that area better. But a lot of my students are student athletes or work in college athletics. So I feel like they've gravitated more towards taking on college sports topics, whether that's title 7, title 9, employment or NIL. It's the hot button issue.

(22:37) >> It's something you and I certainly agree on. I try to do the same in my courses and giving the students the latitude to not only pick the not only the topics they explore but the format in which they do that and talked about do a podcast about this write a paper I think that putting those constraints around them sometimes is frustrating for students because just tell me what to do tell me to write a four-page paper double spaced APA formatting but if you give them the freedom to say do it however you want that's when that creative work comes out I think it's really good for students to get that because in their day-to-day job when they're postprogram, no one's going to say, "Hey, solve this problem and give me a paper that's four pages about it."

(23:17) It's really preparing them for life as they go forward. You have some interesting courses you multiple that you teach. I think one of something that has come up, you know, you mentioned doing these discussions on Fridays. Has there been a discussion or debate recently that has surprised you whether it's topic itself or where students took it? We sports gambling has been one of the hot button issues. In all of my classes, we talk about it and Illinois has interesting I actually brought a sports gambling class to Loyola, one of the first of the countries at the undergrad level. But so we have that specific class, but it permeates into every class really. I'm most surprised it again we're a Jesuit school, right?

(23:58) Where our pedagogy is ignation values and ethical learning, right? So sports gambling is a feeding ground for those sorts of discussions and I think for the most part my students want to have them right. Sports gambling advertisements, the ethics of having promoted parlays on sports gambling broadcast, we have discussions about referral bonuses, discussions about right all of these hot button issues like much like NIL sports gambling the rapid emergence of it outpace the regulation of it. Yeah, it's also governed by state law. There's a lot of work to be done in sports gambling, too.

(24:34) I think events in the last couple weeks have certainly shown that, but those discussions have been so robust. Our students have such a vested interest in it because in our residence halls, in our fraternities, right, it runs so rampant. And students see firsthand how it can be really damaging. They can see firsthand how people are able to use these systems without any detrimental impacts. Those discussions have been awesome lately >> and I think it's good to have those discussions because I'm someone who likes to to bet on sports and someone that can step back from it and say this is an enjoyable thing to give me some level of stakes in the game. But there's the flip side of that too where some people can't and it becomes much more immersive and much more addictive because I think for two reasons. one, the gambling component of it and the dopamine hit you get from it, but also because it's so predicated on technology today and those apps just like social media designed to keep you in that, keep you engaged in it. And so it permeates on itself. You mentioned the advertising part. It's weird to me sometimes to see pick the sports network that you want to have on television talking about the issue a couple weeks ago at the NBA and so on, but then they cut to commercial break and it's a DraftKings commercial or it's a FanDuel commercial. There's a weird dichotomy in that. But you mentioned the course that you teach. Is there a specific way that you approached a topic with students given its explosive growth, but as you talked about the ethical concerns in it and the university that you sit within?

(26:03) >> Yeah, I think being a part of Loyola, I always try to emphasize whether it's sports law, sports economics, sports whatever, right, that we are having ethical frameworks around it. I think sports gambling lends itself really well. I do everything to help my students understand it's a broad course. We talk about horse racing. We talk about dog racing, which both of those have ethical overlays to them. We understand the systems. We talk about paramutual wagering and how that's different than like sports gambling as we commonly know it. Then we talk about animal rights and to be quite candid that's not an area of my expertise which is great because it turns a lot more into just an open forum and open discussion of I would say bigger philosophical and bigger moral stances that these students have that aren't granular to the course. We talk about tribal casinos and sovereign immunity and right a lot of the stuff going on in California trying to block mobile sports gambling because it's the main economic driver of tribal communities and understanding the dynamics that go into supporting the that we talk about there's a lot of emphasis on the business side of things DraftKings and FanDuel with their market share because they operated DFS long before anyone and then we talk about modern DFS players sweep state contests like flips and I guess when I teach the new class something I didn't or teach the class the next time something I never talked about but I have to talk about now are these predictive markets poly market and others and how that fits into things. So again that it changes so quickly it's important that we outline the systems our students understand the systems and then we can take an evaluative look at them and beyond that right an evaluative look at who the regulators are the state of Illinois has a vested interest in all of us participating as much as possible because they make a lot of tax revenue off of it right are they the best institution to really be monitoring sports gambling when they have such a financial investment to make sure it's bit right we talk about these kind of conflicts that exist And I think for the most part my students are quite interested in having those discussions about governance and ethics.

(28:07) >> You mentioned the regulation and you mentioned it previously too and it's also something you've written about and you've argued it's time to regulate sports gambling promotions for sure and what are the risks that you think are there if that doesn't happen or if it continues the way it is. I I try to stand in it. It's hard because I feel like sometimes my views might contradict themselves because I'm completely against the paternalism that would stop people from sports gamble. I think it things are always worse than they're left to the black market. We've introduced sports gambling through things like loot boxes and Fortnite and other video I don't know Fortnite has a loot box, but right the majority of video games 12 and 13 year olds are playing have loot box mechanics which are just priming their brains to gamble.

(28:50) uh it's everywhere. So there's a an increased market for sports gambling and I don't think that we should move that to the black market. I also don't believe in paternalism where you could deny that to someone in this country or the right to do that. But at the same time, we have to really watch our language, right? And we have to watch some and the state of Massachusetts has already stepped in and curbed this, but those incentive rewards where it's bet five get 200, right? We see this as a very common like >> new to the platform, bet $5, get 200.

(29:22) Who who is that >> targeted towards, right? Who is that promotion targeted towards? Usually people who $200 would make a gigantic financial impact in their life. I think that we would see it's no secret that sports gambling's addictive, right? We might have qualms if Benny's, our local beverage retailer here in Chicago, did spend $5, get $200 in free bills. We might have issues if a cannabis company did a similar promotion. In the state of Illinois, we don't even have the traditional happy hour, right? That that is something regulated in that sense, right? making sure that our promotions are not disproportionately targeting populations who might be more susceptible or view sports gambling more as a way to find financial freedom rather than entertainment. Perhaps bigger disclaimers like we see on cigarettes. All of these things that can just do their it's you're anytime you bring an addictive substance or something that's considered a vice, right, to to individuals, you run the risk of them abusing it.

(30:29) You certainly do. And I think that keeping it as an entertainment product is vitally important. Those big, beautiful buildings in Las Vegas didn't get there because we're winning all the time. >> Yeah. >> And I think that it's a really good thing to keep in mind for anybody doing it, but much like you, I agree that the oversight of no, you can't gamble on sports. Don't know if I want that either because I enjoy it myself and I think it makes for economic sense in a sports perspective. It creates a lot of jobs for our students that get out of our programs and really good jobs and ones that can help in different markets. So, I think that there's a lot of good to it, but the oversight and understanding some of it is really vital. We spin that forward. There's been so much change in college sports. We talked about gambling, we talked about NIO, we talked about all these things that really hit them. If you look forward to the next five years, you think there'll be more major change and if so, what do you think that would be?

(31:26) There's a couple ways forward. Right now, we're in this we have a framework, but it's a house of cards, right? We had this house settlement which effectively has put a salary cap into college corpse, right? This year, it's it went into effect July 1st and a lot of really big programs frontloaded before that July 1st deadline. So, as we currently stand, every athletics department is able to revenue share $20.5 million across its athletics teams that there are schools that have shared 30 $35 million because they frontloaded with effectively signing bonuses to a lot of their student athletes. Those teams are probably the teams you think they are the biggest brands in college sports.

(32:04) There's also an auditing arm that's become created out of it that's looking to stop what I used to do at Student Athlete NIL, which is those sham deals that were fake endorsement contracts to pay athletes where the deliverables weren't really checked and it was effectively we were exploiting a loophole. I it had I was providing equity to these athletes. So I had no qualms about >> but right it was a loophole nonetheless. So Deoid's running this auditing arm. We'll see, right? Next year, I think, will be a big challenge to see if schools are disclosing these deals.

(32:36) We'll see if these schools might file an antirust complaint about deals that are stricken down for their athletes and see if we can have this cap that holds and see really what the strength of this house settlement is. The way that I like to frame it is student athletes aren't employees and instead of having a collective bargaining agreement, we've taken all the really important language from collective bargaining agreements, right? roster limits, salary caps, salary cap manipulation rules, and we've used a class action settlement to make a CBA for college sports. There's a couple bills in Congress right now, the SCORE Act, the SAFE Act. Those look to effectively codify that House settlement into federal law. I I have mixed thoughts on that because for title nine equity concerns, for concerns about maintaining international student athletes in our collegiate arena, for concerns about employment scares me in college sports.

(33:32) I think that a lot of people rally behind it and I don't know if it's our best path forward. These federal bills could provide like a limited antirust exemption for the NCAA to provide equity for athletes, right? some formulation of that salary cap and actually be able to enforce it without having employment unionization and all these things that could have have downstream impacts that not everyone is readily seeing. So, I think that in the next 5 years, I hope that it's like everything, it's becoming quite partisan, right? Hopefully, we can have some consensus across party lines of a way to better regulate college athletics. I wish I was more confident in that. I don't know if that's coming. If they don't get that squared away, then within the next five, maybe seven, eight years, I could see men's and women's basketball players and football players becoming employees of universities. And that really spins off into a semi-proleague, and then the rest of college sports, has more regional conference, and kind of looks more like club teams today than the big time varsity athletics we see. I think what's really interesting about that is you're right. It's so hard to predict and there's so much shifting and changing, but you've done such a good job of writing that wave and I think it's good advice for all the listeners of being able to be dynamic and be nimble as those things shift and change to help not only craft where it goes, but react to it as it moves forward.

(34:58) There's so many things, so many areas that we could go. But I'll get you out of here on this. I think it's a good question that not only about yourself but for our listeners because it does a lot of them are in this place but if you could go back to your college self your student athlete selves and give one piece of advice about the NIL era what would it be? >> That's a hard one. It's a hard one but a good one. I think it would be to trust your intuition. I think it's trusting your intuition. I think that I've spent so many unnecessary nights looking at an article, looking at something I've written, looking at thinking back to arguments I've had with friends or other stakeholders in the industry and going, it's a lot of imposttor syndrome. We've talked about my age before, but what do I really know in all of this? And it's a lot of trusting my gut, leaning on past experiences, and I think it would to be develop a bit more trust in myself and my vision and my thing. Everyone's going to be wrong at times, but as long as you've put concrete thought into it, you are thinking in logical frameworks, right? Trust yourself and your intuition. I've been right about several things. Not everything, but several things. I think I would I got really lucky like that. My advice is a lot of the stuff that I've already done maybe to just trust in it more. But for other listeners or students especially, it's what questions do you have? Right? When you have a question about college sports or why it's done this way or this should be changed, don't just sit there and think about it or ask ChatGpt about it, right? Go actually solve your question. That's what I've done and it's given me a tremendous amount of success, right? Why is this the way things are being done?

(36:37) Is it the right way? So, when you have questions, investigate it. Scratch your own itch a lot of the time, right? Everything that I've been so fortunate to have over these last few years is because I've asked those questions. I've taken opportunities when they were handed to me and I've made my own opportunities hustling, cold emailing this and that. Again, not to the point of your question, but again to the younger listener, right now is such an amazing time for you to be an undergraduate, a master's student in sports administration, a law student, because there's 135 FBS football teams, 85 players on those rosters. They're all good. And I know you said earlier there's jobs that aren't GMs and sports agents.

(37:19) >> A pro GM or a pro sports agent, those athletes need competent representation. >> 100%. Most athletics departments need people who have a front office mindset. That is unprecedented growth. That's football. There's 365 division one basketball teams. You can do them similarly there. Right? If I was in law school or I was a master student or I was a couple years out, oh my god, the amount of opportunity that's already happened but will continue to expand as we see teams like Vanderbilt who have taken this pro front office model and run with it and been really successful when other schools start to see, oh man, maybe we really do need a GM and an assistant GM. If you can position yourself today as a master student, a law student, an undergrad, is someone thinking about this, writing about it, even if there isn't an audience, that's going to set you up so well for like we these coveted positions, right? MLB, NFL, NBA GMs, right? There's more active US senators than those sports leagues GMs. You have these new opportunities that should excite the heck out of any student currently out there.

(38:27) >> Is such great advice, not only in this space, but in life in general. that curiosity and trusting your gut and just digging into things and taking the opportunities that you can is great advice for not only students but people in general and know we appreciate the time so much today. It's great to talk to you. There's again a million ways that we could have gone but it's great to dig into what we had and we'd love to have you back sometime. We'll put in the show notes your substack and all the ways that people can reach it but we appreciate so much all the time today.

(38:52) >> Absolutely tremendous conversation. Happy to do it anytime. >> Thank you so much.