The Dude wrote:

Florida Colonial wrote:

 Friends of George (FOG) Collective, the NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) collective supporting The George Washington University student-athletes, is proud to announce the launch of its new brand and user-friendly website as the official NIL collective for GW Revolutionaries. This initiative aims to enhance the support and empowerment of GW student-athletes, while also providing an experiential membership program that offers exclusive benefits to supporters, fans, and alumni. 

https://fogcollective.com/


 

If you want the program to thrive, we need support of the alumni. Here's how you do it....

Who is "we"? Wasn't aware you were involved.

Gwmayhem wrote:

Am curious as to whether NIL rules have changed.  The original tenets were:

a) No pay for play
b) Athletes would need to do something aside from playing their sport in order to receive NIL funds.  This definition could mean anything from endorsing businesses to making personal appearances to signing autographs to generating social media posts.

My interpretation was that I could earmark funds for a specific athlete or athletes, and that he/she/they would be doing something on my behalf in exchange for this.

The website seems to be asking for money in general (not towards a specific athlete) and nothing more.  Am I missing something?
 

Two different things.

First, you can enter into a direct arrangement with a specific player for a promotion. For example, if you have a business, the player can promote your business or product or provide some other service for a fee. This would be arranged by a written agreement between you (or your business) and the specific player. The collective or coach may be able to help you arrange this.

Alternatively, you can donate to a collective generally that benefits a school's student athletes and the collective decides how the money is spread among the athletes with strong input from coaches. This can be done as a tax deductible donation or a taxable donation. There are more restrictions on the use of tax deductible funds. Now, this is the grey area where you can donate to a collective but with a wink and a nod, it is understood it is going to player X and the collective acts accordingly.

Still the Wild West out there.

 

Last edited by GWRising (10/10/2024 2:33 pm)

Anybody have any insight? Or any connections where they can ask directly? I donate and they have tweeted a few times recently asking for donations, but haven't seen much else. Are students getting the money? Are there any companies already involved? Any kinds of activities, events, presentations, etc? How can people get involved and help out? UMass and others have been doing webinars, regularly update on what's going on, having contests and giving out prizes, etc. It seems like it's been several years and I really haven't heard anything. 

I emailed a few folks in April, didn't get a response from one person, and the other said they are working on some things. It's been 8 months though. I obviously want it to succeed, it's very important this day and age, but wish they shared more info. I don't think people are going to want to donate if they don't see anything happening.

Yeah I think I do a monthly already. And have donated before, but haven't heard anything since, just "thank you for your donation".

I'll email him, but what I mean is you shouldn't have to email a specific person, they should be saying what they are doing more broadly and clearly so more people see it, more people understand the value, etc. And are they actually doing things? It's not clear to me.

That's good to know. 

I think they need to work on their comms though, like I am saying, I haven't really seen anything about what they are actually doing and what the money goes to. As noted above the monthly ones include a zoom call and other benefits, which is good, but you can't only talk to folks who already donate, you'll need to talk to other folks to get them to start donating too.

And in this case, I haven't heard anything since donating aside from an email announcing a new logo and website and the monthly membership, nothing like "here is what we have done with your donation, here is what the student athletes are receiving," etc. Maybe that's coming, but it would be good to make that more clear and more public if so. I think demonstrating the value more publicly would help make this bigger.

And I think visibility/awareness is lacking, in April I did a twitter poll, the majority of folks didn't even know there was an NIL. Not great considering people who follow me are probably already GW fans or at least interested. I'll do a new poll shortly and see if more folks are aware  https://x.com/GWcolonialhoops/status/1780008652184997908
 

Last edited by squid (12/06/2024 5:06 pm)

Squid I reached out to Cooper and he emailed back almost immediately and offered to get on a call. My main question was about the BPS/non profit that bOI was donating to. That has ended and now you need to go to the FOG site and sign up for a membership. 

Gw plans to so the same thing as VCU: payments of a similar amount for men's basketball directly from the university w/o NIL/Collective

1. The $4-5 million for VCU is for all sports but heavily weighted towards men’s BB

2. VCU is expected to raise their student athletics fee to $1,400 to cover the amount. That fee can’t be used to pay players directly per VA law, but money is fungible obviously.

3. GW is expected to opt in to the House settlement which means that we will be bringing our NIL in house and paying players directly.

4. We haven’t publicly stated how much our budget will be, but conservatively it will be many multiples greater than what we’ve been able to raise for FOG.

5. There are some rumors that the A10 will be telling schools to commit to a minimum spend for players otherwise they may be asked to leave the conference.

6. Four schools are rumored to be weighing whether to opt into paying players directly: Fordham, La Salle, URI and Richmond. The latter two are because they have higher level FCS football and if they opt in, they’ll be responsible for more direct payments. They can’t opt in just for basketball.

Football focused, but it explains some of the jargon and what is at stake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKuEg8QJNUw