After teasing for a half-year about its next big play in the college sports name, image and likeness arms race, Learfield announced earlier this month a technological escalation. Or consolidation: The multimedia rights company says it plans to expand its in-house NIL platform, Compass—previously utilized for its “large-scale NIL merchandise licensing programs”—to handle all of Learfield’s local campus activity, as well.
Left unmentioned in Learfield’s announcement was that Opendorse, the athlete NIL marketplace platform, was already supposed to serve this very purpose through next summer. And that the two companies, which had been civil if uneasy collaborators in the newly fluid college sports marketplace, would become more directly competitive.
The latest Compass announcement significantly narrowed the three-year “strategic relationship” unveiled in April 2022, in which Learfield agreed that it would provide its scores of school partners free access to Opendorse’s platform and “turnkey solutions.”
For Learfield, the alliance was designed to further its “Allied” initiative, originally launched in 2021, to facilitate brand agreements that incorporate athlete NIL and school marks. Opendorse, meanwhile, would receive a fee for the various new deals conducted over its platform. It seemed like an easy win-win for two college sports-focused companies that weren’t—at the time, at least—direct competitors.
But evidently, the key didn’t turn so well, prompting a strategic recalibration of the relationship and contrasting assessments about how big a role technology plays in successful NIL dealmaking. There also seem to be questions on the future of the Learfield/Opendorse partnership, which is currently slated to go through next June.
Over the last two years, Opendorse spent what CEO Blake Lawrence calls a “tremendous amount of time” trying to train Learfield’s national and local sports property sales staffers on how to leverage its platform. About 55 of Learfield’s 160 schools already had separate, preexisting software agreements with Opendorse.
For the other hundred or so athletic departments, Lawrence said, things didn’t go so smoothly. But by Lawrence’s telling, the real sticking points had much less to do with technology adoption than with teaching campus-based Learfield employees how to incorporate athlete NIL into their salesmanship.
“The last-mile logistics of how you contact and contract an athlete is not the challenge—that is the wrong problem to solve,” Lawrence said. “Instead, it’s, How do you equip the largest sales team in college athletics”—Learfield’s—“with the training to sell NIL to local and regional sponsors?”
Though the head of a tech company, Lawrence says this experience with Learfield, along with other collaborations over Opendorse’s 12-year run, has increasingly compelled him to argue against technology as a panacea.
“You absolutely need a platform to facilitate the last-mile logistics, but the biggest challenge and greatest oversight for most marketplace startups is the skill set and ability to actually sell the value prop of athletes and capture the attention of advertisers,” Lawrence said. “Software doesn’t replace the sales component of NIL.”
Learfield, on the other hand, is the company now emphasizing the importance of those last-mile, software-based logistics.
In fiscal year 2023, Learfield says it was part of 177 multimedia rights deals for schools that incorporated “significant NIL assets.” Already in FY24, it has executed more than 500 of those deals, according to executive vice president Solly Fulp, who oversees the company’s NIL endeavors.
“It was really important for us to control the deal-making process from beginning to end,” Fulp said. “We had to control our destiny in terms of making sure we had our own customized platform.”
By using Compass, as opposed to Opendorse, Fulp contends Learfield is able to gain greater “dealmaking efficiency,” along with increased data insights across the entire spectrum of the company’s “12,000 unique brand relationships.”
Fulp says the company’s decision to keep its business in-house is “not a disparagement of any platform,” including Opendorse, which will continue to serve Learfield for its national NIL campaigns with companies like Dunkin’ Donuts and Zips Car Wash. And yet, despite Fulp’s contention that things are copacetic between the companies, it is clear that they are not exactly aligned on their future plans or current messaging.
While Lawrence expressed optimism that Opendorse and Learfield would continue collaborating at the national level for “years to come,” Fulp was noncommittal.
“I don’t know,” Fulp said. “As fast as the NIL landscape is developing, we are keeping all our options open on what the future would look like. We are not going to close any doors right now—no pun intended.”
Fulp acknowledged the adjustment Learfield’s sales staffers have had to make in incorporating athlete NIL into their pitches.
“Up until three years ago, we had an entire sales and service force that was prohibited from that,” he said. “Now, there is a new value proposition that we can bring to our brand partners, and we have to get up to speed quickly. …We are all incorporating (NIL) into our job descriptions.”
As for Opendorse, Lawrence downplayed the lost opportunities from Learfield, saying that local sponsor deals represented only a “low, double-digit figure” of the total NIL money passing through its platform.
“In any emerging market, there is a lot of energy put into things that do not create the amount of value that is expected,” he said, “but you can’t predict a future that is ever-changing.”
One thing Lawrence is confident in predicting is that NIL activities will only grow as time goes on, if only because the market will demand it.
“We’re three years into NIL,” he said. “The next three years, there will be additional efforts by everyone to increase the NIL sales, because they will need to recoup some of the investments the schools are making into NIL services. …The success we will see over the next three years—through Opendorse or Compass or any other marketplace—will be less tied to the platform itself, and more to the emphasis athlete compensation will have in the minds of athletic directors and presidents trying to create a competitive advantage.”