Sunday Column: With The Right Spin, Success, Honor and NIL Don’t Have to be Mutually Exclusive Terms for Penn State

When Patrick Kraft was named the athletic director at Penn State just about a year ago, he inherited one of the nation’s largest and most accomplished collection of teams, led by a football program that has gone a few more years without a natty than most fans would like but still boasts a reputation few can match and backed by one of the officially largest and unofficially most fervent alumni bases in the world. It was an enviable gig, as far as AD gigs go.

Fast forward 12 months and Kraft and his team are trying to crack the same puzzle that is stumping many of his counterparts around the country: How do you leverage passionate fans who are ready to write checks to build an NIL surplus that directly allows you to assemble the teams they root for? And, in Penn State’s case in particular, how do you manage that without tripping the political land mines that are unique to (Usually) Happy Valley?

Look around the Nittany Lions and you can see examples of the public face of NIL everywhere: Nick Singleton’s deal with West Shore Homes. Drew Allar, Kalen King, Olu Fashanu and Abdul Carter driving Teslas. Students eating Roman Bravo Young pizzas. Name, image and likeness helping various brands and putting extra cash in the pockets of the student athletes. Smiles, handshakes, American capitalism at work.

And yet, we know that NIL has another face, a face that (Col. Nathan Jessup voice) people don’t like to talk about at (tailgate) parties. The behind-the-scenes funds, those that don’t have a sponsorship or influencer partnership or even a specific athlete or sport attached to them, are where the true NIL power lies. The war chests. The programs that are building the largest of them (Texas A&M, Michigan State, Illinois, Auburn) seem to have little in common other than deep-pocketed and highly motivated donors, while programs like Penn State are stuck bickering about what the color of the chest should look like.

The tricky part is that Kraft and the other ADs can’t directly oversee all this; they must instead rely upon collectives, of which Penn State has (at last count) three: We Are NIL, the football-specific Lions Legacy Club, and the big’n, Success With Honor. The last of which, if you have been in a coma for the last month, has caused some consternation within the Penn State hoops community after Micah Shrewsberry, who possibly left for Notre Dame because of a lack of sufficient NIL funding for his program, had revealed to On3’s Nate Bauer that the since-disintegrated recruiting class he built could have been even larger and greater if Penn State had … had sufficient NIL funding. This, and some terrific reporting by Bauer, thrust SWH into the spotlight, and let’s just say the organization was not ready for its closeup.

Success With Honor has been helping athletes from nearly every Penn State sport find NIL partnerships, and the funds have been growing. The rub is that not every sport is created equal. Penn State wrestling, kings of the mat for a decade plus, does arguably not need much of an NIL war chest to continue crushing its competition. Penn State men’s basketball, which just hit the reset button after finally reaching an NCAA Tournament, needs plenty of help competing in college athletics’ second-most lucrative swimming pool.

Football? Somewhere in the middle, for sure, but whether it’s closer to wrestling or hoops in that regard, and how much of the NIL pie should go to the program that essentially funds every other Penn State varsity sport are the issues here. On the one hand, Penn State has made those visible partnerships mentioned above, and there are undoubtedly more businesses, led by Penn State alumni, considering the idea. And James Franklin and his ever-revolving staff were pretty damn good at recruiting in the pre-NIL era and, with a 2024 class ranked in the nation’s top 12 and rising, seem to be handling the transition quite nicely, too.

Does football have the war chest it needs, though? There isn’t a dollar number out there, and that’s the way the football coaches want it, simply because its competitors’ numbers aren’t out there, either. In a perfect world, the coaches would not have to touch that war chest or even mention its existence during recruiting visits; they’d woo recruits based on how they could develop them as players and as students and, once they enrolled, help them land a sponsorship with their favorite sandwich shop or apparel brand. But, even in this perfect world, they would damn sure want to know that the chest was there.

The challenge Kraft faces isn’t convincing donors to help build football’s war chest, and perhaps a separate chest for basketball. It’s not hoping that Success With Honor will continue to build those public-facing sponsorships with athletes from every sport while delivering the not-so-subtle overtones of “We don’t love NIL, but if we have to do it, we’re going to do it the Penn State Way.” His challenge is helping his constituents, to the extent that the NCAA and Pennsylvania laws allow, do both of those things and to get Penn State’s old guard, which still looks at NIL the same way they’d view a dark alley, and the alums and donors who understand the importance and the purpose of the war chest, pulling in the same direction, while coaxing dollars out of whales and rank-and-file fans and alums in both groups all the while.

He may have an enviable job, but that’s a far from enviable task.