Ohio State football, basketball players to launch NIL nonprofit
A nonprofit organization set up to pay Ohio State football and men’s basketball players in exchange for working with local charities is launching on Thursday.
THE Foundation, which is co-founded by Columbus real estate developer and Buckeyes booster Brian Schottenstein and former national championship-winning quarterback Cardale Jones, will begin soliciting donations online.
Nine months after the NCAA first permitted college athletes to profit from the use of their name, image and likeness, such groups have popped up across the country.
Known as collectives, they pool money from boosters and businesses to fund NIL deals for athletes at specific schools. The entities operate independently of the universities.
THE Foundation is the first known collective created to assist athletes at Ohio State.
Since planning for a launch began in January, Schottenstein has said he aims for the nonprofit to become the largest NIL fund benefiting a particular school by capitalizing on the Buckeyes’ large fanbase.
“The beauty of THE Foundation is we’re going to bring in the fanbase and boosters and alumni,” Schottenstein said. “Right now, NIL is so much around businesses working with student-athletes, but anybody can be involved in THE Foundation.”
Urban Meyer, Steve Stivers to serve as THE Foundation board members
The money raised will be given to athletes as they make a specified number of public appearances at events held by charitable organizations. Ahead of THE Foundation’s launch this week, it announced partnerships with Buckeye Cruise for Cancer, LifeTown Columbus and A Kid Again.
A board of more than a dozen members, including former Buckeyes coach Urban Meyer and Ohio Chamber of Commerce chief executive Steve Stivers, will determine which athletes are offered deals.
They will look at character and interest in community involvement in addition to athletic performance.
Jones said they want to consider more than just standout players, or the top 3% of athletes at Ohio State, as he called them.
“It may be a lineman who’s not scoring touchdowns on Saturdays, where everyone’s cheering and screaming his name,” Jones said, “or it might be that defensive player who is a hustle player on the basketball court who is not making all the big-time shots and plays and stuff like that. Our criteria is going to give us an opportunity to work with more athletes.”
They will start by focusing on football and men’s basketball players.
“We wanted to get everything up and running and get all of our programming together,” Schottenstein said. “And it’s been a lot of work for us. So we really just had to focus on those two teams for now. Once we get everything up and running, then we’ll move to others.”
Schottenstein said they expect it will take one or two months before they start working with any Ohio State athletes.
Events planned for Ohio State spring football game, fall tailgates
Their priorities in the coming weeks largely involve fundraising and setting up a launch party to follow the spring football game on April 16.
To help raise money, Schottenstein said they will hold various giveaways of signed memorabilia and host pregame tailgates at games at Ohio Stadium next fall.
He said it as a way to be “interactive” for those who donate to THE Foundation so “they’re not only supporting student athletes, but they’re having fun while they do it.”
But Jones also anticipates that many prospective boosters will be motivated by the chance to help athletes.
He sees it as a reason they’ve long donated to athletic departments for facilities upgrades and other areas.
“When you have these major boosters and these donors of these schools, they donate X amount of dollars to these schools,” he said, “but they want most of that to go toward the benefit of the student athletes or the student-athlete body as a whole. Donating to us, you know that all these funds are going to be allocated to the beginning of the football and basketball players.”
Joey Kaufman covers Ohio State football for The Columbus Dispatch. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter @joeyrkaufman.
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