Michigan athletics to sign a strategic advisor to help with NIL
Michigan athletic department Warde Manuel is bringing on a strategic advisor to help U-M athletics with its NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) efforts, effective immediately. Manuel has informed people at the university that Ann Arbor resident Charles Scrase, a 1998 University of Michigan graduate and Duke MBA, will be brought on to assist him in developing an institutional strategy and provide recommendations on how to enhance current NIL efforts.
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The stated goal is to ensure they are doing everything they can for the Michigan student-athletes and put Michigan in the best possible position going forward.
Scrase will sign a three-month deal to assist Manuel in this endeavor. He runs a strategic advisory firm in Ann Arbor after a 15-year career at Google, including heading Google’s 500-person Ann Arbor office. He has an extensive corporate strategy, sales, and marketing experience and built a $500 million business at Google in public sector advertising sales and marketing.
Currently, Michigan has several collectives in place trying to raise money for U-M’s NIL efforts, including the Champions Circle and Stadium and Main, among others. The Champions Circle, run by Valiant Management, was behind the “one more year” campaign that brought Blake Corum, Trevor Keegan, Zak Zinter, and several others back for another season at Michigan. They’ve reportedly raised over $4 million for Michigan student-athletes and are now working with student-athletes from all 29 sports after starting out focused on basketball and football.
Stadium and Main functions as an LLC and is partially operated by the NIL company PlayBooked. Hail! Impact joined the market in April as a nonprofit. All five have been endorsed by athletic director Warde Manuel in a letter sent out to Michigan donors and fans.
The Wolverines’ improved NIL efforts have helped football, especially, in recent months, but Michigan basketball and other sports seem to be in a position of playing catch-up. All-American Hunter Dickinson recently left for Kansas after three years at U-M after claiming he made less than $100,000 on his name, image, and likeness at U-M — other sports have seen defections, as well.
To their credit, the basketball coaches have continued to recruit the transfer portal well, too, in dealing with the realities of the new era of college athletics.
“I think you could spend time complaining about it, or you can navigate it,” Michigan associated head coach told The Wolverine recently. “To me, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’ve moved into a transactional world from a relationship driven world. I always thought recruiting was relationship driven. Now, it’s, ‘what can we do for you, what can you do for us?’ and then we’ll revisit it in a year.
“So, it is what it is. If you take a step back, you see the collision between immediate eligibility, NIL, and the COVID year … how it’s changed college basketball, and it’s changed how you make up your team, how you run your program. It certainly doesn’t feel the same. I think as we come out in the wash so to speak, we’re going to find out who it benefits.”
To be clear, he said, he doesn’t begrudge the student-athlete from trying to profit on their name, image, and likeness. On the contrary, he’s all for it. But NIL was never supposed to be a bidding war for talent, and to many, that’s what it seems to have become.
Finding ways to combat that in 2023 and beyond is one of the challenges the department faces. With this hiring, they appear to have taken a step to help be more competitive.
Watch for more on this development in the hours and days to come …
