Athlete-as-a-Brand: What Comes Back When the Money Flattens

Four years ago, athlete-as-a-brand was a phrase. Today it is the organizing principle of college athletics.

It is the first question in a recruiting conversation and the last question in a budget meeting. It has moved the money, the staff, the org charts, and the attention of nearly every athletic director in the country.

Right now, it is absorbing an entire industry.

That will not hold forever. Not because the athlete stops being a brand, but because the number stops being the difference. Markets find their level. Offers converge. And everything the money drowned out returns to the table.

Academics return. Amenities return. Everything a program was before the number started making the argument for it.

The question is not what you can afford in this moment. The question is what still works in the next one.

Every athletic department in the country is building something right now. They have to. The legislation is still moving, the revenue model is still settling, and no one gets to wait for clarity before acting.

That reality creates a risk that never shows up in a budget line.

An investment built for a single moment expires with that moment. An investment built to serve more than one purpose compounds. The difference is not the size of the check. It is the design of the thing itself.

The programs thinking clearly right now are not asking what wins this cycle. They are asking what still earns in ten years.

Three programs. The same problem. Three different structures, and each one reveals where that school decided the work should live.

This is not a ranking of who spent more. Every one of these schools is investing seriously in NIL infrastructure, and most are doing it on several fronts at once. What differs is placement. Where you put the function says what you believe it is.

Florida put part of it in the classroom. Two Bits Creative operates as a student-led agency inside the university, working real client accounts for credit. It is one of several moves Florida has made, and its distinguishing bet is that the same work can develop athletes’ brands and train the next generation of creatives at the same time.

LSU built it into the department. The Brand runs roughly 60 full-time staff and another 90 part-time interns and graduate assistants across photo, video, podcasts, graphics, broadcast, and NIL services. Their deputy AD for external engagement describes it as a hybrid of a front office and a marketing agency.

Clemson gave it a business. Clemson Ventures operates as an affiliated entity with a private-sector structure, its own CEO, and its own board. It holds the multimedia rights, the content operation, the sales function, and an in-house NIL agency, and it can produce an athlete’s brand deal end to end, on site.

An educational engine. A department function. A standalone business.

Here is what they share. Not one of them is only about NIL.

Two Bits teaches. The Brand produces. Ventures runs multimedia rights that existed long before name, image, and likeness and will outlast whatever the rules become.

Every one of them was built to do more than one job. That is not a coincidence. That is the reason they will still be standing.

Robert Judin built the Florida version from a place most people skip.

He did not start with athletes. He started with his own exit.

The advice he received graduating from UF more than a decade ago was disconnected from the industry he was walking into. His first stops in sports paid close to nothing, and he watched friends take $19,000 jobs in the northernmost corner of Michigan just to earn the experience.

It is a trap that never resolves on its own. You cannot get the job without the experience, and you cannot get the experience without the job.

That is not an NIL problem. That is a school problem, and it was a school problem long before anyone was paid for their name.

NIL simply gave him the budget to solve it.

His pitch to Florida Victorious was direct. Video is expensive. Graphics are expensive. Athletes need both. And there is a building full of students who need to have done the work.

The output is real. When the Lunchbox series shot, students lit it, shot it, cut it, built the social promos, and designed the thumbnails.

The talent does not come from where you would expect. The photographer is a biomedical neuroscience master’s student. One of the strongest performers came out of the College of Business.

In under a year, the model went from pitch to operating agency:

That is not a pilot program. That is an institution taking shape.

Two Bits met a constraint early that reshaped the model.

The students cannot source deals. That was not the original design. Sponsorships was one of the five original departments, and the intended arc was obvious. Build the collateral, pitch it, close the brand, activate it.

The rules did not allow it.

So the department pivoted to ideation and activation, and then went a step further, folding in client acquisition so students could still get the same sales reps the original design would have given them. At the Orange and Blue game, the group worked the floor, handling signage, member signups, and live activation. The constraint did not remove the lesson. It rerouted it.

Ask Judin whether the rules ever change and the answer is honest. That decision sits above his level, and above everyone else’s.

This is the condition every athletic department is working in. Every structure being built today is being built to survive rules that have not been written.

No one knows how the legislation breaks. No one knows where the revenue settles. Which is exactly why the durable move is to build something worth having under either outcome.

Student-Created Work / Two Bits Creative, University Of Florida

The most valuable part of Two Bits has almost nothing to do with athletes.

That is not a flaw in the model. That is the model.

Judin is watching a generation that started developing as creatives far earlier than his did. Kids who were running Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects in high school, building portfolios in public on social media years before they set foot on a campus. He wants those students to choose Florida because Two Bits exists. His target is not the athletes. It is the creatives.

He is careful about the recruiting framing, and the caution is worth more than a pitch would be. Two Bits is not there to recruit student-athletes. It is a resource for all students, athletes included. No scholarship athlete has applied yet, and the schedule explains why. A few club athletes have.

The larger opportunity sits on the other side of graduation.

A student spends two years building a receiver’s content. That receiver gets drafted. He needs a brand team, and he already knows one.

Most college athletes will never be paid to play again. The ones who are will have to hire somebody. Both ends of that are careers.

A university that produces employable graduates holds an argument that does not expire when a collective’s math changes. Remove NIL from Two Bits entirely and you still have a school teaching students to do work that people pay for.

That is what a lasting investment looks like. It is not the one with the largest budget. It is the one that would survive losing it.

The blue-chip athletes at the top will continue to be paid like blue-chip athletes. Below that line, and it is a wide line, the offers begin to converge.

Consider a recruit holding five offers with five similar numbers attached.

The number has cancelled itself out. And the moment it does, the two things it was drowning out return immediately.

Academics and amenities.

That is not nostalgia for a purer era. It is what remains when you remove the variable everyone was optimizing for. The degree still has to be worth something in four years. The environment still has to be a place worth spending every day of those four years.

And this is not a forecast. It is already visible at the very top of the market.

When a recruiting analyst surveyed a dozen anonymous Power Four commits in the 2026 cycle about their offers, only two said they chose the school that put the most money in front of them. One turned down a package approaching a million dollars with a six-figure starting bonus attached. The reasons the others gave were development, coaching, and longevity.

Even now, at the loudest possible moment, the largest number is not winning most of the time.

Which is why the Florida bet reads differently than it did eighteen months ago. Two Bits is an academic experience and an amenity at the same time. It is already load-bearing in both of the categories that return.

For twenty years, the amenity conversation was about the barrier. We cannot recruit because we cannot show them anything.

That era is over at the top, and that does not mean the work is finished. It means the standard moved. What a program builds for the athlete now sits on the table beside what it built for the team.

What form that takes remains an open question.

It could be new construction. It could just as easily be the refresh, the space that is fifteen years old and reads that way the moment a seventeen-year-old walks in. No one can say yet whether this cycle is answered with ground-up builds or with a decade of programs reworking what they already have. Both are live, and most schools will do some of each.

The demand is the part we would bet on.

An athlete treated as a brand since high school will not stop expecting the environment to match. That expectation does not flatten with the money. It arrives with a standard already set.

At Florida State, the Dunlap Football Center answers that expectation without saying a word.

The lobby places national championship trophies and Heisman recognition in front of you the moment you arrive. The Walk of Champions runs the length of the practice field, surrounding recruits with the Hall of Famers and the NFL careers that came out of the same building they are standing in.

Unconquered starts here.

That is not decoration. It is a recruiting argument, built. And it is a high-performance operations hub at the same time, which is precisely why it holds. A facility that does one job is an expense. A facility that does several is an asset.

Florida State can make that argument from the top of the market. But the schools that need it most are not at the top.

Florida State University | Albert J. and Judith A. Dunlap Football Center

Most programs will never put the biggest number on the table. They will have to answer with something else.

At Kansas, that something else was coherence.

When Lance Leipold took over, the Anderson Family Football Complex read like a building that needed a plan. It was not a money problem, but rather an identity problem, and identity is the thing a challenger program has to get right when it cannot win a bidding war.

We partnered with HNTB and Multistudio to rebuild the complex around a single idea, executed the same way in every room. Player spaces that carry the energy of the program. An NFL hall and position-group corridors that show a recruit the careers this building has produced. A hype tunnel that turns the walk to the field into a moment. Team gear displays that make the identity physical.

Every surface now says the same thing, which is the whole point. A recruit walking through does not need to be told what Kansas Football is about. The building already told him, before anyone opened their mouth.

University of Kansas | Anderson Family Football Complex

That is the version of this that scales. The principle does not change with the budget, only the scale. Not every school can put a number on the table that ends the conversation. Every school can build an environment that makes an argument the number cannot.

College athletics is loud right now. That is a phase, not a destination. What comes after the noise is the part a program can actually control.

The best thing Judin said had nothing to do with NIL.

He said the hardest part of running Two Bits is staying in the director’s chair. The moment he picks up the tools and does the work himself, the students stop learning. So he sets the standard and gets out of the way. Culture starts with him. It gets built by them.

That is not modesty. It is how he made it last. Anything that only works when the founder is in the room does not outlive the founder.

We know that discipline, because it is the same one we hold.

At Jack Porter, our role is not to be the hero of the story. That belongs to our clients. Our job is to be the guide who turns a vision into something built, and then protects the intent through leadership changes, shifting priorities, and the compromises that arrive between the first sketch and opening day.

That protection is what separates a space that still performs in ten years from one that only performed on opening day.

The money is going to find its level. Academics and amenities are going to return to the table. And when they do, no one is going to ask what your NIL number was in 2026.

They are going to walk through what you built.

When environments are designed to do more than one job, they recruit longer. They earn longer. They stay relevant through every cycle that follows.

So the question is not what you can afford right now. It is what still argues for you after the noise settles.

Let’s build that.

We make where matter.