Dave Portnoy's Brick Watch partners with The Grove Collective to support Ole Miss NIL
Dave Portnoy is throwing his support behind the Ole Miss-driven NIL entity The Grove Collective.
The founder of Barstool Sports announced Monday night that his Brick Watch Company will begin sending a portion of its sales to The Grove to support Lane Kiffin’s program.
According to the collective’s executive director Walker Jones, the organization will receive $1,000 for each watch sold. In the announcement, Portnoy outlined the $2,400 watches would be marked down to $2,000 for the Ole Miss campaign.
It’s one of the most public moves yet by a celebrity to support an NIL collective.
“Join me, let’s put money in their pockets, players on the field,” Dave Portnoy said in his video posted on X. “Here we go, Brick Watch. Let’s go Ole Miss, come to the Sip. Let’s keep building, Lane, let’s keep building.”
Brick Watch, which was also started by Portnoy, was founded in 2022. Ole Miss superfan and Barstool employee Ben Mintz was the brand’s first employee, brought on in May. This came after he was fired by Barstool; he has since been re-hired after Portnoy bought the company back from Penn Entertainment.
Kiffin is in his fourth year at Ole Miss. The Rebels are 5-1 on the season, ranked No. 13 in the country.
“We are pumped to partner with Barstool and Dave on this first-of-its-kind partnership,” Jones told On3 on Monday night. “Just another example of Ole Miss leading in the NIL landscape.”
What does this mean for Ole Miss in NIL landscape?
When Jones took over as executive director of the collective in September, he had some heavy lifting to do. Ole Miss was playing catch-up in NIL, a position no collective wants to be in.
By late November, the collective topped the $10 million mark in fundraising. It remains one of the top reported totals in the NIL collective market. While Jones hammered home the importance of donors contributing to The Grove, he made sure the collective was locating revenue outside of the fan base through deals with local and national brands.
Before the start of this season, the collective ran a seven-day NIL fundraising campaign. The organization raised more than $3 million in roughly 10 days.
Adding more than $3 million to the bank account made a strong statement before Ole Miss even started its football season. And now receiving such a public show of support from someone like Dave Portnoy helps even more.
When On3 released its top 20 ambitious NIL collective rankings at the end of June, The Grove clocked in at No. 9 on the list. At the time the collective had contracts with 165 athletes with at least one player from each varsity sport.
“Their school has really gotten behind Walker and his team,” a source recently told On3.
The Grove Collective’s success surely played a role in Kiffin’s return to Oxford. The NIL program was also attractive to athletes in the portal, as Kiffin and the Rebels picked up Spencer Sanders and Walker Howard.
Re-signing Quinshon Judkins in early December definitely made a statement before the portal opened. Collectives have become the leading source of compensation in the first two years of NIL.
Where the collective now stands in the SEC, Jones isn’t sure. But he’s confident in the backing fans and donors have put in NIL.
“I don’t know where that ranks on the grand scale thing,” he said. “I think that being able to raise $3 million in seven to 10 days, really, I think speaks to the trust and the commitment our fanbase has in our collective and really in NIL. If they didn’t believe in NIL or thought it was going away, regardless of how well we were run on The Grove Collective side, they wouldn’t give to it.
“The fact that they trust, not only the collective but also NIL is a real deal. It makes all the difference.”