How to Avoid the "Grift" of NIL

We live in the golden age of the grift — the small-scale con built on manufactured credibility.

The grifter asks for your money, attention, or trust in exchange for noise packaged as authority.

And NIL is not immune. Just the opposite. Without a barrier to entry, it's a breeding ground for those who want to capitalize on these uncertain times in college sports and for student-athletes specifically. 

I want to be clear: Providing a service or selling is not a grift. I sell. We all sell. My NIL Forum is a paid community — and I charge for consulting and courses. 

The 3-Filter test

I've avoided the grift of NIL and built a network of people I trust by considering the following:

1. The guru check. Anyone positioning themselves as a singular authority on NIL is a red flag. The space is too young, too fragmented, and too fluid for any one person to have mastered it.

Real experts say "I don't know" with some regularity. Certainty is almost always a sales pitch.

2. The lane test. The people I trust most have a lane.

Just to name a few here... Mit Winter focuses on the law. Sam Green focuses on social media. Jeff Hiser focuses on what NIL means for high school prospects. None of them pretend to know everything — and that's not a limitation. It's honesty.

3. The extremism index. Within one hour yesterday, I watched two TV basketball analysts offer opposite verdicts on NIL's impact on the NCAA Tournament. One called it the "worst" thing for college basketball — players show no loyalty and leave through the portal too easily. On a different network, another called it the "best" thing — players stay in college longer to earn NIL money, raising the overall talent level of the tournament.

Diametrically opposite conclusions of which both were ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN they were right.

Extreme positions are almost always wrong. The real answers require context, caveats, and data.

The bottom line

The NIL space has a grift problem, and it is not going away. The practitioners you can trust are the ones who resist the viral hot take, acknowledge the edges of their own expertise, and treat this space with the complexity it deserves.

Introducing the NIL Forum

Every month, the NIL Forum delivers a members-only live webinar from a leading NIL industry voice, a briefing from the country's largest ongoing NIL poll (5,000+ college student-athletes and 1,000 high school prospects), and a growing community of administrators, coaches, agents, attorneys, financial advisors, brands, and entrepreneurs. 

If you touch Name, Image, and Likeness — the NIL Forum community was made for you.

About Bill Carter

Bill has advised brands on Name, Image, Likeness for 25 years—first in pro sports, now at the college level. He was the Co-Founder of the Gen Z sports agency Fuse, which he sold in 2019. In 2020, he founded Student-Athlete Insights and consults on NIL strategy with Fortune 500 companies and 30+ DI universities.

Thanks for reading! Please invite your friends to subscribe to NIL/edu.