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In the ever-changing world of collegiate athletics, it was a very busy summer for Indiana University and the Big Ten conference. Indiana Athletic director Scott Dolson addressed the media on Monday afternoon before the commencement of the 2022 football season. With a few sports already underway and students back in town, Dolson took time to talk about the state of Indiana athletics including NIL.
NIL has been a priority for Dolson and his staff revealing that his team started working a year before the NIL regulations were put in place by the NCAA. Dolson also mentioned that focusing on the football program is a priority while also giving the needed attention to other sports when it comes to NIL deals.
“Let me first just say we've been working on NIL, it was a little over a year ago when NIL started, and we were working on it the year before. I'm really proud of our team internally that has done everything we can to put our student-athletes in a position for success and to maximize that opportunity.” Dolson said. “As it relates to specifically to football, it's certainly important from a competitive standpoint that our student-athletes have success here in all our sports, but certainly football is a priority. We can only control what we can control.”
With the current state of college sports, it seems that the NIL rules and regulations are always fluctuating and still in a youthful position. Dolson stated that while working with his staff and others around the Big Ten he would like to eventually see how rules will be set in place.
“I do think there needs to be just personally some guardrails put on NIL so there is fair competition and it really is set up so it's not an inducement and it's not a pay for play. It'll be interesting to see where all that goes in terms of what the future will hold.” Dolson said.
Taking on NIL deals is something brand new to college and to many departments across the country. An internal department group has been made since the start of NIL to meet and help student athletes across campus. Dolson mentions the likes of several names and how they have now been the NIL “task force” here at Indiana.
“We actually already have NIL-specific positions that we just kind of reassigned and worked within our current staff. On our senior team, for example, Becky Pany, who's a senior associate AD over at sports management, she really has been the quarterback of our NIL efforts and really for the past two years I guess you could say has really been working as that central person really coordinating everything. Jeremy Gray, another senior associate AD, is really working closely with her on the brand side of things, building brands for our student-athletes so they can maximize the opportunity.” Dolson said. “We have various other people. We formed an NIL task force. We bring in departmental staff and also people from across campus, Dr. Galen Clavio at the media school, Ash Soni, who's the interim dean of the Kelley School of Business, to really work on what is our vision for NIL efforts.”
Although Indiana has taken a different approach with the structure of their NIL staff Dolson said that he is more than confident that the people on the staff and on campus will be able to help achieve great things for the athletes.
“I think at other schools they've chosen to do it a little differently maybe and hire a specific position that's not someone within their team, but for us we just had the capacity and I felt like the talent that we really could do it internally and not have to bring in someone from the outside. I feel like we've got probably as many if not more resources working towards NIL than anyone else and feel comfortable where we are from a staff standpoint.” Dolson said.
When diving into the legal matters of NIL, Dolson took some time to mention that he believes that at the end of the day he believes that working from within is the best option in order to help out the student athletes as much as possible.
“I think it's much easier and much more conducive for success and for consistency without a state law. I think there was sort of a panic when there wasn't a state law that we're going to be left behind, but actually being able to just follow the NCAA rules and then develop our own internal policy was a much better path for us.”
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