It’s hard to escape the headlines about the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals in college sports. “LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne makes $500,000 in NIL money for one Instagram post.” “Bronny James has record-breaking NIL deals, is worth $7.2 million.” “Arch Manning has highest NIL valuation in college football.”
The names are recognizable—and the dollar figures are exorbitant.
So it’s easy for companies to think they’re going to have to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a collegiate athlete to sign a contract with them.
But they don’t.
As talented and flashy as the athletes with the huge NIL deals are, they represent only a small corner of the NIL market. A number of convenience retailers have found success in the world of NIL at very modest budgets.
A ‘No-Brainer’
Nicholas Triantafellou, the director of marketing and merchandising at Weigel’s, which has 79 c-stores in the eastern Tennessee region and is based in Powell, Tennessee, calls the NIL market a “no-brainer.”
Triantafellou said he was told by someone in the c-store industry that he could spend $25 million marketing with the Green Bay Packers or he could “find a University of Wisconsin kid for a few grand.”
“Where we’re located, we have no professional teams. It would do me no good to advertise with the Tennessee Titans,” Triantafellou said. Instead, he views Weigel’s NIL partnerships with student-athletes as a way to establish “deeper roots in the community.”
Many Weigel’s stores are near Knoxville, where the University of Tennessee (UT) is located. The school—and that famous orange color—really mean something to people. That’s why it made sense for Weigel’s to tap into a devoted fanbase. “We just kind of dove in,” Triantafellou said.
“We need to live where they live.”
Because NIL was so new when Weigel’s was looking to enter the market in early 2022, Triantafellou didn’t know where to start. He would see those headlines about an athlete getting $5 million, which wasn’t within his budget.
Well, he didn’t actually even have a budget. So he started there. He looked at how much Weigel’s paid a month to be on ESPN streaming’s advertising platform and wanted a deal to be somewhere in that range. (Weigel’s first NIL contract actually ended up being for less than that.)
“Now we’re comfortable having the conversation of, ‘Hey, this is what we pay,’” Triantafellou said. “But we don’t ask for much [from the athlete]. We look for some social, we look for a couple of photoshoots, we’re not doing an autograph set, we don’t do any of that other stuff. So I think what we ask is pretty fair for what we pay.” But the end result is that NIL is “just so much more economical” than other forms of marketing.
Weigel’s typically works with a trusted partner, Bridge Management Group, to help iron out contract details.
Finding Players
NIL deals range all over the place. Some contracts can start at $1,000, and some college athletes have joked on social media that they would sign an NIL contract for a couple of free tanks of gas. Some contracts are long-term, while others are one-offs. Some bigger name athletes like to do a lot of smaller NIL deals, while others like to do one or two big contracts. Some athletes understand the value of starting small and trying to build a bigger brand. It varies.
For a long time, the NCAA rejected the idea of paying collegiate athletes or allowing them to earn endorsement income. But that changed abruptly in June 2021 after the Supreme Court ruled that, essentially, the NCAA couldn’t bar endorsement compensation tied to a player’s name, image or likeness.
Weigel’s quickly tried to take advantage of what Triantafellou called “uncharted waters.”
He knew the company probably didn’t have the budget to pay Tennessee’s quarterback. So he worked to understand the market and found it was actually pretty easy to sign an athlete whom the school’s fans would care about.
Weigel’s worked with Evan Russell, a local favorite who grew up in eastern Tennessee, as its first athlete in April 2022. He wasn’t a scholarship student—he walked on to the baseball team his freshman year—and so he used his NIL money to help pay for his degree. Weigel’s tweet announcing the partnership got 1,399 likes and 189 retweets; the company’s tweets generally average about 45 likes.
“We know [the NIL partnerships] are working, because we live in this UT space, and as UT sports go well or the player does well, we are getting engagement,” Triantafellou said. “Community is the biggest focus for my entire team because we don’t exist without [it]. We need to live where they live.”
The store put together an ad where Russell, at the time Tennessee’s starting catcher, delivers items to Weigel’s customers—throwing milk, burgers and other items into the waiting hands of a guy grabbing the paper, a kid sitting in the car, a guy on his run. There was also a campaign with the tagline, “When Evan hits a dinger, you get a ringer.” When Russell hit a home run, patrons could stop into a store with their registered MyWeigel’s Rewards Card for a free ring donut.
After the company’s success with Russell, Weigel’s signed another baseball player, Maui Ahuna, to an NIL deal and put together a #FreeMaui campaign where it offered rewards members various deals, including two hot dogs for $2.22.
“When you have different states with different rules and different schools with different rules, that’s how everything gets really tricky.”
Weigel’s has now worked with six college athletes at Tennessee: Russell and Ahuna in 2023, men’s and women’s basketball players Tess Darby and Zakai Zeigler for 2023 and 2024, football offensive lineman Ollie Lane in 2023 and wide receiver Squirrel White in 2024.
Weigel’s is cooking up a secret menu with White, and the company created fun March Madness campaigns for Darby and Zeigler—they showed up at Weigel’s stores and challenged customers to shooting contests. The stores also had cutouts of the two inside, and people kept expressing interest in buying them; at the end of the season, Weigel’s gave them to customers who made a donation to a local charity.
“It’s a lot of fun,” Triantafellou said.
Natural Partnerships
Midwestern c-store retailer Kum & Go signed walk-on junior transfer football player Jordan Kumm after Kumm sent the company a direct message on Twitter. Jacksons, which has stores across the West Coast, launched football trading card sets with the University of Washington and Boise State University.
And Casey’s recently joined the market, too. The company, which has stores across the Midwest and the South, launched a March Madness partnership with men’s basketball players Kris Murray (University of Iowa) and Tyreke Key (University of Tennessee) and women’s basketball player Sydney Parrish (Indiana University) to launch Casey’s Pepperoni Pepperoni Pepperoni pizza.
A post on Parrish’s Instagram—which has 125,000 followers—shows her walking into a Casey’s to get one of the new pizzas while an announcer says, “Here comes Sydney Parrish. She’s headed to the line, and there’s the handoff! The three is up … and it’s goooooooooood!”
Katie Petru, Casey’s director of communications and community, said it was crucial for the company to find the right brand fit. “You have to start with your brand because you’re giving partners a role in it as they become an ambassador with their key audiences,” Petru said. “Everything we do needs to help us reach new and existing fans. … Great partnerships can work really hard to build brand awareness and love.”
Casey’s focused on leveraging the athletes’ social media presences. Murray has over 30,000 followers on Instagram and almost 10,000 on Twitter; Key has about 7,000 followers on Instagram and 4,000 on Twitter.
“College sports are a huge source of fandom in our markets and with our guest base,” Petru said. “The flexibility and new space of NIL gave Casey’s an opportunity to integrate collegiate athletes into our strategy.”
Petru’s advice is “to focus on the role [NIL] plays within your strategy first, ensure partners are a brand fit and be flexible, because you’re working with student-athletes.”
Compliance Is Key
Because of the ever-changing nature of NIL compliance within the NCAA—senators recently proposed bipartisan NIL legislation that calls for the creation of a central oversight entity—it’s important that companies work closely with schools to make sure everything they’re doing is above board.
“For me, there’s a personal aspect of ‘I better not screw this up or I could ruin this kid’s future,’” said Triantafellou. “We better be absolute in everything we do, in every possible way, shape and form.”
That’s where people such as Darien Harris, the assistant athletic director for NIL at Michigan State University, come in. Staying abreast of NCAA rules is hard enough, but “when you have different states with different rules and different schools with different rules, that’s how everything gets really tricky,” Harris said.
Once a brand and an athlete finalize a contract, that deal needs to get reported on something such as the app INFLCR, which is used by over 3,500 teams and 7,000 athletes. Michigan State has its own NIL exchange on INFLCR, which allows businesses to register as members of the exchange and contact student-athletes directly.
Harris said players are a lot more approachable than companies might think. He pointed to an NIL deal Darius Snow, a linebacker for the Spartans, recently signed.
Snow tweeted, “When it comes to this NIL stuff, all I really want is a Darius Snow Cone, if I’m being honest lol.” Michigan-based soft-serve ice cream retailer Spad’s Twisters reached out to him—albeit with some skepticism because the company didn’t think it could afford a deal. But Snow and the soft-serve purveyor reached an agreement and have created a popular menu item.
“I think people look at those prominent student-athletes who have all the followers and the notoriety, and they think that every single NIL deal has to be that,” Harris said. “A lot of [companies] are afraid to even propose a deal because they think they have to come up with really, really big bucks because of what they’ve heard out there.”
Consumers are looking for partnerships that don’t feel like they’re out of left field.
One trend Harris has started to see in the NIL space is women’s sports dominating. “I mean, it’s honestly not even close,” he said.
James Clawson, the founder of sports marketing and media agency Spyre Sports Group, said, “I think brands are looking for more authentic partners, and it’s just been proven that female athletes are more engaging.”
Female student-athletes tend to have followers who are purchasers, and they have higher social media engagement rates—likes, comments, shares, bookmarks, etc.
Dollars and Cents
While a lot of companies were slow to catch on to the potential of NIL, they’re getting more comfortable with the idea of college athletes being brand ambassadors.
“I think brands now are realizing the cost of entry for most athletes is pretty low,” Clawson said. “It’s relatively inexpensive to test out marketing strategies, like all these different social media campaigns or promotions. They generally have a fun kind of component to them, and I’ve seen a lot of news outlets cover these deals as news stories. So, you know, you’re getting the athlete to do stuff for you, and you’re also getting it covered as a news story. So I think it’s a win-win for the athletes and the brands right now.”
It helps if there’s some chemistry between the brand and the athlete, because consumers are looking for partnerships that don’t feel like they’re out of left field. Companies are also really paying attention to student-athletes’ engagement rates because that metric has proven to be more important than follower count when it comes to who will buy a product.
While companies are more willing to enter this market and test the waters, they still want to be careful; college athletes can be prone to mishaps. Spyre Sports recently revised its standard contract to include things such as penalties for not showing up.
“You would think that dollars would make everybody just drop what they’re doing, and that’s not the case,” said Brandon Spurlock, Spyre Sports’ vice president of fundraising and engagement. “We had to learn the hard way on a couple things.”
On the upside, Spyre Sports has seen the value of spontaneity. When a University of Tennessee baseball player had a home run disallowed because the sticker that cleared his bat as legal for use had fallen off, the head coach ranted after the game and referred to the player as Mike Honcho, a nickname for a character from “Talladega Nights.” Spyre Sports created a custom T-shirt playing off the nickname and was marketing it less than 12 hours after the game ended. Clawson said that the player alone earned around $20,000.
“It’s critical to capitalize on moments like that,” Clawson said. “We couldn’t have waited until the weekend was over to sell that shirt. … You’ve gotta be nimble. You’ve gotta have very few processes. You’ve got to make decisions fast.”
The agency has been able to have fun in the NIL realm and thinks companies can, too.
If a company has something it has wanted to try out with professional athletes and in large cities, try it out in college markets, Clawson suggested.
“Sample sizes are smaller, and the process of entry for doing it is a lot cheaper. … There’s no better market to test and experiment with things you want to try.”