Oklahoma Sooners NIL Teampaper

OU and Oklahoma Sooners are highly recognized and respected national brands within the college sports world.

Now the student athletes who participate and compete under the Oklahoma banner are able to establish and benefit financially off their own brands.

NIL, the acronym that stands for name, image and likeness, has changed the landscape for college athletics. NIL has opened up a whole new opportunity for student-athletes to make money off their brand as an athlete.

For many athletes there is no professional sports career after college, and as such their likeness will never be more valuable than it is while they are in school. In other instances, NIL may be used as an under-the-table bidding war for schools to find ways to acquire extraordinary talents particularly in the high-revenue sports such as football and basketball.

While certainly there is nothing wrong with making an honest dollar, there are consequences and issues with NIL that will need to be addressed. One of the many issues is, how do you help the young athletes that won’t have a future as a pro in their sport?

Teampaper a website designed by Pat Griffin, a former Harvard baseball player, has come up with a solution that can help both the very popular as well as other student-athletes who may little, if anything, from their name, image or likeness, or for the sports that generate less revenue.

This is where the Oklahoma Sooner softball team as well as other Sooner athletes have found their home.

The premise of the Teampaper is team and player profiles that fans can purchase to see exclusive content. This is similar in a way to sites like Patreon, which allow you to patron an individual for exclusive content. Where it differs, however, is the revenue and how it works.

Each member of the respective team that signs up and partners with Teampaper will get a share of the pool of revenue created by all the athletes on that team. Eighty percent of the revenue goes to the player money pool, 10 percent to Teampaper, and the other 10 percent goes to the Boys and Girls Club of America.

So, if you sign up and wanted to view the items posted by OU softball player Jordy Bahl, you would also be supporting her teammates who are a part of the site. When you talk specifically about softball the pro leagues do not pay well and are not nearly as exposed nationally on TV. For softball players being a part of an elite college team is the peak worth of their likeness, so these opportunities are important.

When interviewing Robert Kelliher, who is the Teampaper manager of player acquisition, he expressed his desire to see all athletes benefit from NIL:

“Our fundamental belief of our business is based on the idea that NIL should be for everyone. Whether you’re the star player on the team, or the last person off the bench. Student-athletes have a small window to earn money off the sport they dedicate their lives to, and we are the ones who well help them maximize their earning potential.”

Kelliher told me, “We currently work with over 40 student athletes from OU. Some on each the women’s and men’s basketball teams as well as softball. We did have contact with OU football as well.

“We have to rework some of that now, with the changes and the new staff coming in,” he said, “but we are working on getting that set back up. In total we have partnered with over 400 student athletes from across the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, and SEC.”

As we continue to navigate the vast new opportunities in the world of name, image and likeness we should always keep in mind how it can positively affect student athletes, many of whom have a limited time to take advantage of their brand.

It is incredible to think that fans themselves can have such an impact on the life of the student-athletes they cheer for on the field, court or other arena. The landscape is changing, and sometimes change can be positive.