After teasing for a half-year about its upcoming major play in the school sports title, image, and likeness arms competition, Learfield made the announcement earlier this month that there was a technological escalation. Or combination: The multimedia rights firm says it plans to expand its in- house NIL platform, Compass—previously utilized for its “large- scale NIL merchandise licensing programs “—to handle all of Learfield’s native campus activity, when also.
Left unrecognized in Learfield’s news was that Opendorse, the performer NIL market platform, was now supposed to serve this pretty objective through next summer. And that the two businesses, which had been civil if uncomfortable partners in the just smooth college sports market, would become more directly dynamic.

The most recent Map news drastically narrowed the three-year” proper relationship” Learfield agreed to offer its scores of school partners costless access to Opendorse’s platform and “turnkey solutions” in April 2022.
For Learfield, the alliance was designed to further its” Allied” program, initially launched in 2021, to promote brand partnerships that incorporate gymnast NIL and school signs. Opendorse, meanwhile, would receive a fee for the various new deals conducted over its platform. It seemed like an easy win- win for two college sports- focused companies that were n’t —at the time, at least—direct competitors.
Evidently, the key did n’t work out as planned, leading to a strategic rebalancing of the relationship and opposing assessments of how significant a role technology plays in successful NIL dealmaking. There also seem to be questions on the future of the Learfield/Opendorse partnership, which is currently slated to go through next June.
Over the past two years, Opendorse has spent” tremendous amount of time” educating Learfield’s local and national sports property sales staffers on how to use its platform. CEO Blake Lawrence describes this effort as” tremendous time.” About 55 of Learfield’s 160 schools already had separate, preexisting software agreements with Opendorse.
For the other hundred or so athletic departments, Lawrence said, things did n’t go so smoothly. However, according to Lawrence’s analysis, the real sticking points were much less related to adoption of technology and more to teaching campus-based Learfield employees how to incorporate athlete NIL into their salesmanship.
The “last-mile logistics of how you contact and contract an athlete is not the challenge– that is the wrong problem to solve,” Lawrence said. ” Instead, it’s, How do you equip the largest sales team in college athletics “—Learfield’s —”with the training to sell NIL to local and regional sponsors”?
Though the head of a tech company, Lawrence says this experience with Learfield, along with other collaborations over Opendorse’s 12- year run, has increasingly compelled him to argue against technology as a panacea.
The biggest challenge and greatest oversight for most marketplace startups is the skill set and ability to actually sell the value prop of athletes and capture the attention of advertisers, Lawrence said.” You absolutely need a platform to facilitate the last- mile logistics. ” Software does n’t replace the sales component of NIL”.

Learfield, on the other hand, is the company now emphasizing the importance of those last- mile, software- based logistics.
Learfield claims it was a part of 177 multimedia rights agreements for schools that included” significant NIL assets” in fiscal year 2023. Already in FY24, it has executed more than 500 of those deals, according to executive vice president Solly Fulp, who oversees the company’s NIL endeavors.
Fulp stated,” It was really important for us to control the deal-making process from beginning to end.” In order to ensure we had our own customized platform, we had to control our destiny.
By using Compass, as opposed to Opendorse, Fulp contends Learfield is able to gain greater “dealmaking efficiency”, along with increased data insights across the entire spectrum of the company’s” 12, 000 unique brand relationships”.
Fulp claims that the company’s decision to keep its business in-house is” not a disparagement of any platform” including Opendorse, which will continue to support Learfield’s national NIL campaigns with businesses like Dunkin’ Donuts and Zips Car Wash. Despite Fulp’s claim that things are copacetic between the companies, it is obvious that they are not exactly aligned on their future plans or current messaging.
Fulp was noncommittal, even though Lawrence expressed hope that Opendorse and Learfield would continue to collaborate at the national level for “years to come.”
” I do n’t know”, Fulp said. We are keeping all our options open about what the future will look like as the NIL landscape is evolving. We are not going to close any doors right now—no pun intended”.
Fulp acknowledged the adjustment Learfield’s sales staffers made in incorporating athlete NIL into their pitches.
He claimed that until three years ago, the entire sales and service force was barred from doing that. ” Now, there is a new value proposition that we can bring to our brand partners, and we have to get up to speed quickly. …We are all incorporating ( NIL ) into our job descriptions”.
As for Opendorse, Lawrence downplayed the lost opportunities from Learfield, saying that local sponsor deals represented only a “low, double- digit figure” of the total NIL money passing through its platform.
” In any emerging market, there is a lot of energy put into things that do not create the amount of value that is expected”, he said,” but you ca n’t predict a future that is ever- changing”.
One thing that Lawrence is confident in predicting is that NIL activities will only increase as the demand for them increases as the years go on.
” We’re three years into NIL”, he said. There will be additional efforts by everyone over the next three years to increase NIL sales because they will need to recoup some of the investments the schools are making into NIL services. The success we will experience over the course of the next three years through Opendorse, Compass, or any other marketplace, will be less dependent on the platform itself and more on the importance that athlete compensation will have in the minds of athletic directors and presidents attempting to give them a competitive advantage.