By: Robert Craft

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

College athletes across the country began raking in money for their name, image and likeness (NIL) July 1st.

Who’s set to earn the most money? We may never know as some players are keeping the details of their deals with companies entirely private.

Most fans assume the biggest earners will be college football players, but that may not be the case. Social media outlets like TikTok and Instagram may be a determining factor in the marketability of a player in other college sports.

Local businesses in sports-crazy college towns will contribute heavily and if a player secures multiple deals from companies big and small, they will become a presence in their city, and still scrape in some decent royalty cash. Let’s take a look at some of the early winners in NIL.

1. Olivia Dunne, LSU Gymnast: Dunne, an All-American gymnast is a social media BEAST. She has 5.1 million Twitter followers, 400,000 TikTok followers and 1.2 Instagram followers. Dunne is projected to make over one million dollars a year off NIL.
2. Hanna and Haley Cavinder (twins) Fresno State Basketball: The Cavinders have over four million followers on TikTok and Instagram. The estimated annual gross income for social media influencers is about 80 cents per follower, you do the math, this is a sports magazine.
3. D’Eriq King, Miami Football: King signed a couple deals with College Hunks Hauling Junk and Murphy Auto Group that total around $200,000. King and McKenzie Milton partnered on a NIL platform called Dreamfield as well, whose contributions are unknown.
4. Hercy Miller, Tennessee State, Basketball:  Miller is the son of rapper Master P. Hercy Miller signed a two-million-dollar deal with Web Apps America, and that’s just for right now.
5. Brock Vandagriff, Georgia Football:  Vandagriff signed a big money deal with Onward Reserve, a men’s apparel company. Vandagriff was one of five players to sign with Onward Reserve, the identities of the other four are yet to be known.
6. Spencer Rattler, Oklahoma Football: Rattler signed a deal with Raising Cane’s, a Louisiana based restaurant franchise with locations across the country. Rattler promised to share his NIL profits with underprivileged communities this season.
7. Lexi Sun, Nebraska Volleyball: Sun signed an undisclosed deal with Ren, a volleyball apparel company.
8. Trey Knox and Blue, Arkansas, Football: Knox and Blue (a Siberian Husky) signed a deal with PetSmart, which operates 1,650 stores in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Also, notably, more than 4,000 college athletes have partnered with Yoke Gaming, an app that allows fans to pay to play video games with them on stream.

Welcome to the new world of college athletics. It’s going to be hard (actually impossible) to enforce NIL violations, but it is about time that young athletes get the chance to earn money for themselves and their families!

Another interesting benefit to explore is that college athletes will be granted direct work experience in the line of a professional athlete, and isn’t that a great reason to go to college?

This will avoid athletes from signing predatory marketing deals their first year in the bigs and allow them to strategize marketing platforms for their NIL alongside their playmaker marketability.

In my opinion, it’s going to be crazy unsettling and it will take a couple years to get a handle on all this in the leagues. I wonder why this step in the right direction took so long for the NCAA to make.