Earlier this month, LSU athletes Angel Reese and Olivia Dunne were featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s Money Issue. The women are two of the biggest earners in the NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) era of collegiate athletics. David Grubb was able to talk one-on-one with Stephanie Apstein, who wrote the cover story; they discussed what makes LSU so successful at capitalizing on NIL and what could be next on the economic horizon.
Edited for clarity
David Grubb: “Stephanie, the world of NIL is the Wild, Wild West as has been described by a lot of people, but LSU has found a way and a place to kind of set itself apart in this landscape. How have they been so successful in the NIL arena and in particularly with their female athletes?”
Stephanie Apstein: “I think, I think it starts with the LSU name to be honest…you know you start with this brand that people have already heard of. So that certainly helps. But there are also a lot of other schools who have big names who are not having success. And so I think the second part of it is that LSU really decided early that this mattered to them. They have a bigger staff that handles NIL than other schools. They sort of immediately were like ‘we are going to be a leader in this space.’ And then I think that the student athletes there have also done a very good job of becoming…I mean they talk about themselves as sort of pioneers. They take a lot of pride in the idea that they are the ones figuring this out. And so I think that when you have that, that combination of factors that you end up kind of with what we’re seeing, which is the school is sort of far, far ahead of many others.
DG: “Yeah, LSU has always been a very unique brand.”
SA: “Mmhmm.”
DG: ” Because unlike a lot of schools, as a state institution, it doesn’t really have a counterpart. There’s no Auburn to its Alabama. There’s no Florida State to its Florida. But at the same time, it’s a national brand, but it’s extremely regional.
Like LSU holds a very weird place in the marketing landscape. And yet, no matter what the era, it seems that there’s always been these figures. Whether it’s Angel Reese and Olivia Dunne now, or you could go back to the Shaquille O’Neal’s…There’s always been these large personalities from LSU, even when the teams themselves were not national teams.
It’s a very unique place.”
SA: “Yeah. It seems to attract a kind of person who is interested in, you know, being a personality like that and who can handle that kind of attention.”
DG: “When we talk about a player like an Angel Reese, who didn’t grow up wanting to be at LSU, but comes along at the really the perfect time for a female basketball player at a time when the eyes on women’s basketball are exploding. And then for her to be this figure that kind of merges multiple worlds with her sense of fashion, with her sense of sport, with her authenticity, she’s kind of like the perfect figure for this time, isn’t she?”
SA: “Yeah. And I think that it’s that it’s useful here to mention that she’s also very good at basketball and the team is very good. And that I think matters. Angel Reese would not be here if the team were not good because she didn’t really consider LSU initially, you know, that that was not a school that she thought was a place for her to be good at playing basketball. So the Kim Mulkey Effect, it matters that the team is good.
Obviously the fact that they won the title matters. And so that I think is part of what is why LSU has the success that the teams are successful. And so you can be as big a personality, as interesting a person and you know you can have, you can have the sort of star power, you can do as much of that as you want. But if you’re sort of not making the NCAA tournament, there’s not as much interest I think nationally. And so these athletes have managed to marry success on the field, on the court, with the kind of personality and the kind of drive to be big brands. That works, but it starts with you have to be good at your sport or else there’s nothing there.”
DG: “That was a major concern when women started making NIL money, that the focus would not be on their athletic abilities, that would be about their appearance or things like that. And yes, we live in a society where that’s always going to be a factor in those things, whether you’re male or female. But certainly as evidenced by the representation of the LSU players, whether it’s in basketball, or whether it’s Olivia Dunn in gymnastics, or you could talk about Sha’Carri Richardson in track and field, those names before, even before she left LSU.
Those names have come with great athletic performances. And now you add, you know, even more star power to that, to that LSU basketball team. As you said, the athletic performance is backing up the reputations of these women who are earning high numbers.”
SA: “In a lot of cases, the looks matter or the personality matters, or there’s some additional component beyond just being excellent at sports. But Olivia Dunne was telling me she feels like a lot of people sort of denigrate what she does, as if you just sort of have to look cute and wear a bathing suit and that’s it. But there’s a lot more that goes into it. There’s a lot of, like, I think she’s a branding marketing genius.
You have to identify what people want you know there any because looks are a part of it. You have to you have to identify what that is and you have to play that up. There’s it’s a you know it’s a job like any other. And I think that this one thing I noticed is that I think that a lot of older people maybe are the ones who are more skeptical of what these athletes are doing. Whereas their peers seem to understand exactly how much work this is and exactly how good at it you have to be to make it work. Because everybody’s on TikTok and not everybody is doing this.”
DG: “There seems to be a really great understanding of not only how to capitalize, but how short the time is to capitalize, particularly with female athletes knowing that there aren’t those pro opportunities with the lucrative contracts awaiting them, that they’ve got to squeeze every opportunity that they can. That’s a pressure, but it’s also, like you said, it makes them more focused and strategic.”
SA: “Yeah, that’s what some of the officials at LSU were telling me that they that they found the female athletes to be very quick to take advantage of the sort of classes that they offer and the workshops that are designed to teach them how to pursue partnerships and then also how to manage the money that comes from that. That they seem to really understand that the time is now. And I think that that is in large part because the earning opportunities certainly change and I think probably diminish after in college, which is a weird position to be in, right? That means that 19 year olds have to have to figure out right now how to market themselves, have to become stars in anticipation of probably not being so.
It’s a weird thing to ask a teenager to do, but I think that’s part of why Olivia Dunne specifically started the Livy Fund. She wants female athletes to capitalize on this now because we don’t know what comes after this. You know, even in the WNBA, they do get paid and maybe some of these deals, maybe they can continue to have some of these deals. But certainly the viewership on women’s college basketball is much higher and so and there’s you know a team of people at the school whose job it is to help you capitalize on this sort of thing. So I think they’re all very aware that the shelf life could be quite limited and that’s a tough position to be in.”
DG: “What are the concerns for the athletes on their end? Because certainly the school wants to do its job as far as pointing an athletes in the direction of these opportunities. But ultimately the athlete has to take care of the athlete and the school is taking care of the school. How do the athletes have enough representation or knowledge on their side to feel comfortable in knowing exactly what they’re getting themselves into?
SA: “I think that’s an important point and I’m not sure it’s one that every athlete fully understands to be honest, because their interests are aligned like 98% of the time. And so I’m not sure that they’re thinking too much about the but I think the ones who are stars are, and almost all of them have their own representation, their own management.
In a lot of cases, it’s family, which can be fraught, but also can be an opportunity to, you know, kind of give back to the people who helped you get where you are. And so I think in basically every case, the major stars have somebody who is looking at specifically for them. But at LSU, they do have a lot of classes, you know, that I think mirror what pro athletes get, which is sort of ‘Okay. Now what? Now you have all this money.’ Like one thing that the athletes were talking to me about was like, ‘how do I file my taxes?’ These are questions that they would not have been thinking about, and they do need someone to explain it to them.
DG: “What do you see as some of the potential gains in the short term and the potential you know dangers that may be on the horizon?”
SA: “I mean, it’s a it’s a multibillion dollar industry, so the obvious gain is that they have a piece of it now and they should. And maybe this is not the exact blueprint for what it should look like or what it’s going to look like in the future. But there’s no reason that these athletes, whose name, image and likeness are worth so much, should see none of that money. So it seems just sort of on a base moral fairness level that this seems reasonable to me. You know, a flute player could get a marketing contract if he or she wanted. And so it certainly seems to make sense the basketball player can too.
The drawbacks…I think until we have some sort of federal legislation, there’s a lot of, there are a lot of moving parts, and I think even the schools will admit they’re not totally sure what the rules are. They’re not really sure who is abiding by them. I think that we need some kind of either federal or the NCAA needs to do a better job of making some rules on this. Right now, a lot of it is state by state, which is challenging, and I think it’s just changing every day. And so it’s hard to know. As you said, the interests of the athletes are not perfectly aligned with the interests of the schools. It feels like there’s a little bit of room for some something sort of unfair, untoward to happen to athletes occasionally.”
DG: “Do you think this is pushing us more rapidly towards what I think is an eventuality that that we will have student athletes declared as employees?
SA: “Yeah, I mean, we see the Dartmouth men’s basketball team. Yeah, I think that we are on the precipice of that. I actually just got an e-mail from Tony Clark, the director of the baseball players union, who said, you know, athletes are starting to realize that they deserve a seat at the table. And I think that’s true that a lot of decisions, you look at the way realignment is happening, a lot of decisions are being made about them without their input. And I think these are smart people and I think that they’re starting to see this doesn’t have to be this way.”
DG: “You know this is kind of a microcosm of what’s going on in the country today. By and large with our labor whether we’re talking about the actors unions or the Teamsters or these various things where labor is asking for much more of a partnership arrangement rather than simply ‘we work and you get you give us what you see fit.’ These student athletes though are in a lot of cases where they would probably be in the in the backseat of these kinds of conversations. They’re very public and helping to lead these conversations for their generation. And I think that’s an exceptional position for them to be put in. And do they all understand maybe the historical impact of what they’re doing now is going to have?
SA: “I think that’s a really good point. And I think that a lot of them probably don’t. Some of them do, but a lot of them don’t. And you have to remember to how new this is that for most of these athletes when they were in high school, this was not even something they imagined. So we are these athletes sort of are adapting as it’s happening to them but most of them did not dream of being on the front lines of this. And so they are sort of handling things as they come at them. But I do think some of them understand the historic nature and the parallels for the rest of society. Because I think you’re right. There’s a lot of money out there and a lot of people are be a lot of people who create that value were being told that there’s not enough for them for some reason. And that I think people are starting to see that, you know, maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe. I think these athletes can be really an inspiration for a lot of other people. And I think that’s really cool. You know, they talk about inspiring on the court, but a lot of them can inspire off the court, too.”
DG: “I think that’s a great place to end. Is there anything else that you’d like to add?”
SA: “No, I think this was great. Thank you so much for having me.”
DG: “Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, Stephanie.”