Suspension of statewide NIL law means quite a shift for Gamecock athletics. Here’s how

Name, image and likeness changes are coming to the state of South Carolina as soon as this week.

The state Legislature voted in March to suspend a law passed last summer that largely limited in-state institutions like USC, Clemson and others from having a more hands-on approach in helping their athletes with NIL deals. The law’s suspension goes into effect Friday.

South Carolina senior deputy athletic director Chance Miller, who has overseen the bulk of NIL-related changes within the USC athletic department, spoke with The State for a look at what to expect from the school’s approach to NIL and how the suspension of the state law affects those dealings moving forward.

Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Ben Portnoy: In layman’s terms, why is July 1 and the suspension of the state law important?

Chance Miller: “It allows us to be more hands on with our student-athletes. It allows us to start helping to facilitate those deals help guide them.

I think what we’re finding is we’ve had a lot of student-athletes this year use a lot of the educational resources and platforms that we provided them, and they’ve done well. You’ve had a handful of them that have done some really good deals, not only for themselves, but for their communities and helping set up nonprofits and be able to give back.

But this (suspension) would help us be able to reach more of our student-athletes that don’t have that initial guidance of ‘Where do we go for this? How do we negotiate a deal?’ And we’re going to be able to surround them with the resources that they need to be able to take it to another level.”

BP: You kind of touched on it, but how does that compare to what’s allowed under the current NIL law in South Carolina?

CM: “We were appreciative of the State House really helping us get that state law put in place, because we didn’t know what was coming. You had a bunch of other states that had laws on the books that were going to allow student-athletes to capitalize off their name, image and likeness. So we wanted our student-athletes to have the same ability, but it still prevented us from really taking a hands-on approach.

Let me give you an example: If a business called us — we received multiple calls from businesses or donors, supporters of our program that wanted to do something with our student-athletes — we couldn’t put them in touch with our student-athletes. We would just have to say (you) have to contact the student-athlete directly. That was hard, because they didn’t know how to contact them, or who was representing them, or if they had a representative.

This allows us to go straight to them, and say, ‘Hey, we have a partner with our multimedia rights partner, like a Prisma Health, or someone else, that wants to do business with five of our student-athletes, or a whole team — our women’s basketball team, our football team.’ This allows us to help set that up and facilitate that for our athletes to give them more resources and more opportunities.”

BP: NIL legislation, rules and regulations are changing seemingly every day. How would you describe the last 12 months trying to manage all the constant adjusting and shifting?

CM: “It is difficult. College athletics is completely changing. It’s drastically different than what we did a couple of years ago and I feel like every month something else changes.

Everyone in the industry, especially at this level, is trying to find a way to help your student-athletes, but also get a leg up when it comes to the competition. There’s just not really a guidepost, so to speak, where you’re like, that’s where we need to get to. So (you’re) just trying to do a mind shift in college athletics, which everybody across the country is struggling with.

It’s getting everybody internally on the same page and making sure that we all know where we’re going, and that we’re partnering with the right people. In this industry, we’re going to have to get some people that have expertise that we don’t have, just because we’ve not operated in that (NIL) world.

I think so many times in this industry people are so quick to try to jump on something to say, ‘This is what we have.’ And then six months later it’s not the right thing to do, or they find that there’s something better. It’s trying to really caution everybody. Let’s not run out in front and jump into the wrong thing. Let’s vet this. Let’s put a plan together. And let’s put the right thing in front of our student-athletes where we’re building a long term foundation that’s going to be successful.”

BP: NIL is something that can be a bit hard to tangibly explain to a lot of people. How have you all attacked that in terms of communicating this new way of thinking with boosters, people within the department, etc.?

CM: “It is a shift. Myself and (USC athletic director Ray Tanner) just met with three of our more prominent donors. And we met with them not to pitch them on, ‘This is what we need,’ or ‘This is the number for name image likeness.’ We sat them down and said, ‘OK, this is the shifting landscape. This is what we are trying to build for our student-athletes. These are the avenues that we can proceed through. What is your interest in these?’ Because you’ve also got find out are these donors interested. Some of them that you talk to, they don’t want to play in this game. Some of them do want to play in this game.

But what we have been telling everybody — and I don’t think this changes with name, image and likeness — is we’ve always been student-athletes centric, student-athletes first. It’s (about) the student-athlete experience, the student-athlete well-being.

We always invested in student-athlete development, mentorship, and we would bring people in guest speakers or full-time people that would work with them on branding, career planning, what taxes were going to look like, what a contract was going to look like — and it was all hypothetical. It’s not hypothetical anymore. They are really dealing with it in real time.

Our mission is, ultimately, we’re in higher education. We’re trying to better prepare young men and women to go out after college and be better individuals, both with themselves professionally and in the communities. And this is a way for us to do that — that doesn’t change. The way you go about doing it and the conduit through it changes, but the mission doesn’t and that’s what we’re trying to explain to donors that.

It used to be that this student-athlete wanted to see a great facility. Well, we have great facilities now. But it might not be that they want the facility. They (the student-athlete) want to know how you’re going to prepare them so that when they walk out the door, they’ve got a pretty good nest egg, or they’ve got a pretty good brand that they can build upon.

It is a little difficult for some to grasp onto. For others, I think they like it. You’ve just got to put a plan in front of people that they can see the vision and they trust that.”

BP: Collectives have become a buzzword in the NIL space. Is that something folks can expect to see in-house in some form or fashion post-July 1?

CM: “Never say never in a changing college athletics landscape. We do have two collectives here in town — we have Garnet Trust and Carolina Rise. Myself and (associate AD/administration) Hilary Cox, who oversees a lot of our name and likeness day-to-day activities, we met with them this week actually and talked to them about this changing landscape and how we can partner.

That’s not the first meeting we’ve had with them either. We are in contact with them, but trying to maybe change some of the things that we’re doing and that they are doing so that it helps all of us. I think that’s part of what we will start rolling out in the future.”

BP: Are there any projects or ideas folks can expect in this space from South Carolina in the near future that you can tease now?

CM: “The one that we just put out is our Gamecock Exchange through INFLCR. I’m really excited about that.

It’s an avenue to where businesses and individuals that want to do deals with their student-athletes can go directly into. We make sure we review the — it’s not an application, it’s more of a ‘Here’s the information’ — we review it to make sure it is a legitimate business or a legitimate request. And once we approve that, they go in and they have access to be able to reach our student-athletes directly.

What’s nice about it is the contract can be done through there. The payment can be done through it. And then the student-athlete also gets a tax form spit out from the platform that helps them know this is what you should set back for taxes. I think that’s going to be really good.

We’ve met with our multimedia rights partners, with our Learfield partners, and we’ve had a lot of businesses join it so far, a lot of our bigger businesses. And so you can see that people are interested in it and want to do it. I think that will be helpful.

We are revamping our website and our app to where with the student-athlete profiles, when you click on them, it will actually have links to their social media sites. It will have links to, if they do Cameo appearances, there will be a request link that if you want to request them for any type of function — a charitable function of birthday parties, what have you — it’ll kind of have that.

It’s up to the student-athlete to put the information in, but the student-athlete can say, ‘This is what I will do. And this is how much I’ll do it for.’ And they also have an area that once they do stuff — whether it be a sponsorship, or an advertisement, or an appearance — they can show those things that they have done so people can see. I think that’ll be, that’ll be really neat. That’s gonna go out soon. We’re trying to get the website and get all the kinks out of it.”