When Taylor Jacobs was a student-athlete at Auburn University, she played tennis, a sport which most major universities would consider a “non-revenue generating sport.”
She was a walk-on for Auburn’s tennis team and didn’t get the publicity or celebrity treatment that we’ve come to associate with college athletes nowadays. That was during her undergraduate years. Fast forward more than a decade, and Jacobs is now overseeing an initiative at Louisiana State University which has the potential to generate big money deals for LSU athletes and the university itself. Jacobs is LSU’s Associate Athletic Director of Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) & Strategic Initiatives. If you don’t have a clear understanding of NIL, you have company. Jacobs told me NIL is a relatively new and quickly evolving phenomenon for many universities.
“I don’t know if everybody has a concrete understanding. I think people are very confused. NIL stands for name image likeness. The passing of the rules now allows for the student athlete to profit off their name, image and likeness. The intent of that was student athletes could go become social media influencers. They could sell their jersey on campus with their name and number on the back of it, and earn a profit off of that. It could be in a commercial, marketing a product or a business or something. I think I think that was the true intent of the NIL rules passing in July 2021, but there is a lot of confusion surrounding it,” Jacobs told me.
To say LSU embraces the changes to the rules governing NIL in collegiate athletics would be a huge understatement. When the rules took that major shift in the summer of 2021 to allow college athletes to profit from their NIL, LSU expressed its support through an electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square. One day before the announcement of the expected changes to NIL, LSU’s billboard read “NILSU, what’s the deal?”. On July 1, 2021 when the NIL rule changes were announced, the Times Square billboard read “NILSU, the real deal.” Since then, NIL and the money it produces has exploded, not only for student athletes at LSU but across the country. I sat down with Taylor Jacobs to get a better sense of NIL’s impact at LSU, the millions of dollars at stake, and what that all may mean for the future of college athletics. Listen to the podcast here.
