Michigan Announces New Executive GM Position to Bolster NIL Partnership

Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said this week that the school will create an executive general manager position in collaboration with Altius Sports Partners and with Learfield and Michigan Sports Properties to work with Michigan's student-athletes on NIL. 

Speaking Wednesday at a videoconference roundtable, Manuel said that he will take any criticism around the athletic department's handling of NIL, but he said a more studied approach will have a greater success rate for student-athletes. 

“I assure you we will be as aggressive as we can be within the rules and making sure our current student-athletes and our prospective student-athletes know Michigan’s focus and investment in providing NIL opportunities to them,” Manuel said, according to The Detroit News.  "This partnership is here to enhance what our student-athletes are provided and to talk to prospective student-athletes. If we can engage deeper, we will, but we won’t break any rules or give into inducements, but we will live in the area of being more aggressive about the conversations in the marketplace on behalf of our student-athletes and prospects as much as we can.”

Casey Schwab, CEO of Altius Sports Partners, and Solly Fulp, executive vice president of Learfield Sports, were also on the call. 

Manuel said the timing was right for the partnership. 

“Because we've been working on this for months to put this together in a way that supports our student-athletes,” Manuel said. “In the timing of it, you have to remember, in December or in the end of November, the NCAA came out with this proposal for everybody to think about. And it included the potential to pay student-athletes directly from, I think, up to $30,000 for half of your student population. So there's some different things that have come up that have made us think and talk through what is the right strategy. And this is the right strategy to benefit our student athletes.

“If there's criticism, I'll take it. I want to make sure that we move in a way that's beneficial for our student-athletes in the short term and the long term. I've been a proponent of NIL for our student athletes from the very beginning. In what we do and how we do it, and how we talk to our donors and getting them to support, we don't have that culture here of paying student-athletes directly. So we are encouraging and giving more and more of our messaging out to our donor base about supporting our student athletes through collectives, through internships, through opportunities to endorse their companies or signing engagements and different things that they can do. And so I'll take the criticism because I'm the leader of this department, but we have been active in actively promoting NIL opportunities for our student-athletes.”

Schwab said he has been working for the past four years with Manuel on the partnership, and he took exception to criticisms that Michigan was lagging behind in NIL. 

“In that time, from October of 2020 to today, I believe the number is around 50 collectives that shut their doors or there's been a lot of consolidation in the market,” Schwab said. “And a lot of those, our staff, myself, we've helped the athletic director navigate those types of starts and stops. And from the time I talked to Warde before that, so four years ago, it was ‘We want to do this thing the right way. And we want to learn from other people's mistakes.’ And I think about the NFL versus the other professional leagues and there's a reason that the National Football League isn't necessarily always going first, but they get it right.

“And I think that's a good analogy here where, as Warde talked about the support of all the collectives at Michigan, it has been a more cohesive, strategic approach that is going to be more long-term and sustainable — and as part of this partnership, we're going to enhance all of that — than some of these other schools who have had all these stops and starts. So I would just caution anybody from using the phrase ‘behind in NIL,’ because it's changing by the week. There's an NCAA working group that's working on institutional involvement guidelines that’s coming out in two months. You have (NCAA president) Charlie Baker's (Project DI) proposal. So I would caution anybody from talking about being behind in NIL. and more, ‘How do you approach this space where you can be aggressive, but also be nimble?’”