After numerous fits and starts, the NCAA announced Thursday that it had selected sports software company Teamworks to run a central repository of voluntary NIL disclosure data that will be made accessible to its Division I members and athletes.
In a press release, the NCAA said that Teamworks would provide a “mobile-friendly, web-based solution” to gather the information about all NIL payments of at least $600 and then compile the anonymized information into a registry by Aug. 1.
The announcement comes nearly four years after the NCAA put out its original Request For Proposal for a third-party database administrator—and five years since an NCAA working group hatched the idea. By 2022, the RFP process had effectively gone dormant until it was revived earlier this year following the NCAA Division I Council’s approval of new NIL consumer protection measures.
The initial group of finalists to run the NIL registry—which included INFLCR, Learfield’s CLC and Opendorse—were originally told to expect a decision by November 2020, before a series of delays. INFLCR, which Teamworks acquired in 2019, later withdrew as a finalist citing the “ethical pitfalls” of trying to serve as both the third party administrator while also working with individual college athletic departments.
An NCAA spokesperson declined to confirm who else was under consideration, or what comprised the financial terms of the Teamworks deal. Opendorse CEO Blake Lawrence and a representative from Learfield confirmed their companies remained in the running. A joint bid by Student Athlete NIL (SANIL) and Advance NIL was also a finalist, according to SANIL CEO Jason Belzer.
“The COMPASS platform will continue to serve a critical role in facilitating NIL opportunities at scale for student-athletes and provide an important tracking solution for our university and business partners,” said Cory Moss, Learfield president of brand management and marketing.
In September 2020, former NCAA administrator Oliver Luck and longtime sports and media executive Bill Squadron, an assistant professor at Elon University, formed the nonprofit NIL Education and Information Center. The initiative, which was designed to be a collaboration between Elon and Arizona State’s journalism school, was pitched to the NCAA as a neutral body that could oversee its NIL registry without commercial entanglements in college sports. (This, despite the fact that Luck is currently the chairman of NIL consulting firm Altius and has done a number of paid advisory projects for schools and conferences.)
Big East commissioner Val Ackerman, a co-chair of the NCAA’s NIL working group, told Sportico in May 2021 that it was important for the NIL registry administrator to “be seen as separate and apart from anybody who’s looking to profit in this space.”
It’d be difficult to argue that Teamworks fits that bill: The SaaS company, by its own count, partners with 6,000 sports clients, including 232 college sports institutions that pay thousands—and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars—to use its platform. For example, Purdue paid Teamworks $72,000 for its services last year, according to a copy of their agreement obtained through a public records request.
“The company already has a broad presence beyond NIL within the NCAA membership, and we will capitalize on that presence to help student-athletes better navigate and make informed decisions in the NIL environment,” said Dave Schnase, the NCAA’s vice president of academic and membership affairs, in a statement.
Teamworks founder and CEO Zach Maurides, a former Duke football player, framed the deal in altruistic terms.
“With this partnership, we are able to provide every NCAA student-athlete and their families with the education and tools they need to navigate their NIL journeys successfully,” Maurides said in a statement.
The NCAA and Teamworks have a history dating back to at least 2015, when the association contracted Maurides’ company to serve as its collaboration software provider for the D-I men’s basketball championship.
Neither Maurides nor a Teamworks spokesperson responded by publication time to a question about why it no longer inhabited the same conflict-of-interest concerns that were expressed by INFLCR three years earlier.
(This story has been updated with information on the bidding companies in the fifth paragraph.)