As SEC leaders call for reform, INFLCR's Jim Cavale talks future of NIL

At SEC media days last week, so much time was spent talking about college football realignment and super leagues. Yet, the major players in the country’s most powerful conference had plenty to say on NIL.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey let loose on the need for national legislation, threatening that the SEC may need to take matters into its own hands. Alabama head coach Nick Saban said his team made at least $3 million in NIL last season. And Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin did not shy away from his opinions on NIL collectives.

For Jim Cavale, the founder and CEO of INFLCR, a company that provides brand-building technology to assist institutions’ athletes in maximizing their NIL value, he knows most of these problems inside and out.

He also is not naive. Federal NIL legislation may be the last thing on the to-do list on Capitol Hill. Between the conflict in Ukraine, inflation and the upcoming mid-term elections, the timeframe for true conversations centering around NIL are at least 18 months out.

There is not much that Jim Cavale did not forecast through the first year of NIL. And he has a pretty good idea of what the next 18 months are going to look like: growth and innovation in NIL.

“There’s just going to be more pain and more problems to solve,” Cavale told On3 last week. “But also more opportunity for those who want to innovate and really make strides in helping their student-athletes with new efficiencies, to be able to monetize their Name, Image and Likeness, which is a value add to the whole student-athlete experience.

“It will help with recruiting, and it will make the student-athlete experience better at those football programs in the SEC, who choose to innovate and solve these problems.”

Possibility of SEC creating NIL guidelines

When the NCAA Board of Governors announced in April that NCAA president Mark Emmert would be stepping down next June, NIL oversight felt like it reached a halt. The organization is still working to enforce its policies on Name, Image and Likeness. But the hope of college sports’ governing body laying down the groundwork for change seemed lost.

Sankey and Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff attempted to lobby lawmakers in Washington, D.C., this spring. They walked away with nearly no answers, not even an interim Band-Aid.

So SEC-mandated NIL guidelines are not a crazy idea. But it’s complicated. In the current framework of the league, nearly every state is working with its own set of laws. While Alabama opted to repeal its legislation, Tennessee rewrote its original bill. Now, in the Volunteer State, collectives are allowed to directly work with college coaches and athletic officials. It’s a similar situation in Missouri, too.

It’s a smart idea. But, theoretically, it could put SEC student-athletes at a disadvantage if the conference enacted stricter policies. Cavale believes the commissioner is just doing whatever he possibly can to push forward the discussion.

“At the end of the day, somebody has to act on the regulatory uniformity objective,” Cavale said. “And it’s — it’s just unclear who it’s going to create uniformity. And so no, I don’t know that’s necessarily a cop-out (for Sankey to put forth this ultimatum). I think continuously bringing it up puts pressure on the leaders. Whether it’s commissioner Sankey figuring out how the SEC can have regulatory uniformity, which is very difficult because all their states have different laws. And so finding a way to get all the states to be more uniform, so that there aren’t advantages or disadvantages from state to state is difficult.”

Why collectives could be downfall for athletic departments

Jim Cavale lives in the SEC footprint. He may not have grown up in Alabama — Syracuse, New York, to be exact — but he has been based in Birmingham for the better part of 15 years. He knows how much is on the line come fall Saturdays.

So collectives doing whatever they can to help their team land the best possible players is not a surprise. Collectives, which are independent of a university, can serve a variety of purposes. Most often, they pool funds from boosters and businesses, help facilitate NIL deals for athletes and also create their own ways for athletes to monetize their brands.

That is not the problem, though.

“The problem is when they (collectives) directly interface around the coaching staff around the institution, they directly interface with the student-athletes,” Cavale said. “That is an issue.”

Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin has been adamant on this topic; he brought it up again last week in Atlanta. While he is coaching the team, suddenly, there is a group of boosters acting as an NFL general manager.

Cavale does not see the problems with collectives ending inside the football program.

“I’m over here as an athletic director, trying to run an athletic department,” he said emphatically. “I’m funding scholarships, cost of attendance, educator-related benefits. I’m making our budget work, empowering the development staff to raise money for facilities to make our institution more attractive to come to. Trying to help my student-athletes in a lot of different ways with education and resources to be found.

“And now all of a sudden, I’ve got somebody who is a really strong supporter of the school, running separately from me, raising $50 million, and directly interfacing not just with my athletes, but God forbid, with recruits and transfer portal prospects. That’s a big problem.”

Where Jim Cavale sees room for growth

The INFLCR CEO believes the future of NIL sits with institutions building in-house programs. Not many have done it yet; some have started to put the pieces together.

The company recently struck a deal with On3, which will focus on providing the On3 NIL Valuation, as well as educational resources to all student-athletes at INFLCR partnered schools. 

Cavale laid out a full-blown operation in his discussion with On3. Take Ole Miss, for example. The Rebels could create and build their own system. Anyone who wants to work with Ole Miss athletes must register through this system. From there, the school would review the application and decide if the organization could work with Ole Miss players.

But once a booster or business gains access is where things truly come together. Ole Miss would be able to watch how these groups are communicating and contracting. More importantly, the school would make sure contracts touches on all main points of its policy. And then since all deals are occurring within the system, there’s a central location to disclose transactions.

“And it’s now it’s like, ‘Hey, we’ve got a system, we are not facilitating deals, we’re not violating our state policy, we are simply having a place an environment where everything has to happen,'” Cavale said. “What you get when you do that is you create an authority with the billionaire or millionaire booster that allows them to understand this is going to help them. And it’s also going to protect the athletes and the school from getting in trouble.”

Similar to Capitol Hill, however, Cavale is not innocent. Student-athletes have been working directly with these big-time boosters for months. Trying to pull them away from this line of communication to the cash flow won’t be easy.

But that’s half the battle.