Vanderbilt launches NIL marketplace for student-athletes

I’ve made my thoughts on the NCAA’s Name, Image, and Likeness policy pretty clear by now — basically, that it’s a really bad joke — but a lot of the reason for that is that most of the so-called NIL collectives are really just the old bagmen those schools used to have, only operating above board, and not actually having anything to do with name, image, and likeness, also known as that thing the kind of people who are fans of college sports but also hate NCAA rules told us totally wouldn’t just be what we all knew it would be.

In other words, NIL was supposed to look like this:

And I have to admit, this is pretty cool. Vanderbilt has partnered with Opendorse to set up a system where you can pay Vanderbilt student-athletes for their actual name, image, and likeness, whether in the form of a “shoutout,” a social media post, an appearance, or an autograph. Most of them seem to start at $11 for a shoutout, though some (particularly some of the former student-athletes) are more than that; Walker Buehler, for one, will run you $2,181 or more for an autograph.

Anyway, you can see it here. I await the commenters to tell us all what exactly they are going to do with this.