An NIL collective is set to launch for Montana State football, organizers informed HERO Sports earlier this month. The website is ready to go live in the coming days.
Called Bobcat Collective Inc., lead organizer/founder Brandon Vancleeve said every MSU football player, from walk-on to full scholarship, will get a share of the collective. The goal is to grow the collective every year and support athletes on other teams as well.
Vancleeve played football at MSU for 2.5 years, beginning in 1999 before having to medically retire. He is currently an IT business owner in Bozeman and is on the board of the Bobcat Quarterback Club.
“A group of us were talking about this essentially right after the [national championship] game in Frisco,” Vancleeve told HERO Sports. “There was so much momentum and excitement for that game. And it obviously didn’t go how we wanted it to. We started thinking about what do we need to do to take the next step. And we just saw NIL as a potential to do that. When NIL first came about, we were all skeptical. There were a lot of questions and still are a lot of questions. But I started talking to members of the Quarterback Club group about this idea. I started doing some research and reached out to some sports lawyers and NIL lawyers.”
NIL collectives are relatively new to the college sports landscape after the NCAA began to allow college student-athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness last year. Typically created by alumni/donors/supporters, NIL collectives are independent of a university and athletic department. They pool funds from donors to help create paid NIL opportunities for players. They are viewed as potential game-changers for college football programs. While the NCAA issued guidance that the third-party NIL collectives cannot use NIL deals to persuade or coax recruits, the general knowledge that a program has an NIL collective from supporters is a huge advantage in teams landing big-time recruits.
With most of them at the Power Five level, NIL collectives have started to trickle down to the Group of Five. There was uncertainty on if NIL collectives would reach the FCS, considering the smaller fan bases and the less overall money in the subdivision compared to the top level of D1 football.
But the launch for MSU, a top FCS team, makes a statement. It’s likely other fan bases will want to follow so they don’t fall behind in an era where off-the-field factors play a large role in the success of programs. The Bobcats have already elevated themselves off the field and on the field as an FCS national title contender, reaching the championship game last season. They recently opened a new facility attached to their stadium, called the Bobcat Athletic Complex.
How many FCS teams have NIL collectives?
When HERO Sports broke the news of this NIL collective for MSU on Aug. 18, there was only one other collective in the FCS widely known by the public and with online information. The Icon1901 Collective was the first for Grambling State, which started in February 2022.
Since the MSU collective news dropped, we have been informed and have been able to verify a few other collectives, either launched or ready to launch.
An NIL collective was started for Montana in April with limited public knowledge or online information. A source at the university confirmed the third-party collective. It is run by IVOVI Sports and has been doing fundraising stops throughout the summer.
Another FCS collective that hasn’t been widely publicized is for Tarleton State, called Bleed Purple. It began taking deposits in early July and has already reached a fundraising amount in the seven figures.
The Maroon Fund is an NIL collective Eastern Kentucky.
And an NIL collective for Chattanooga is also in the final stages of prep and ready to become official soon.
Bobcat Collective Inc.
Vancleeve said the process of learning about NIL collectives and doing research took about six months before he and his partner, Tom White, signed a contract with a Las Vegas-based company called Blueprint Sports, which manages NIL collectives for Arizona football, Gonzaga basketball, Tennessee baseball, and several others. Vancleeve’s role is to raise awareness and help fundraise. Blueprint Sports does the management side of the collective, such as doing the contracts and working with the players on things like taxes and the compliance components.
Vancleeve said they also met with MSU administration to let them know what they were doing, to make sure they were doing it the right way under NCAA compliance and regulation, and to be clear on their objectives.
“I think because of them knowing us, they were excited because they can trust that we’re going to do it right,” Vancleeve said. “Obviously, they can’t be involved. But I think they feel a lot of trust that we have the best interest for the program and the kids. And it’ll show that that’s exactly what we’re after. So we met with them. We let coach [Brent] Vigen know what we’re doing. We also met with other sports, because our goal eventually is to pull in other sports at Montana State that want to be a part of the collective. So then our contributors in the community have one place to go if they want to do NIL for any sport. They can go to our collective and pick their own path for the sport or sports that is most dear to their hearts.”
“We also met with the football players,” Vancleeve continued. “I introduced what we were doing to the team. It was extremely well-received. They had phenomenal questions. They are super excited to know that this is coming. We did all of that a couple of months ago, and we’ve since been getting all of our ducks in a row.”
How does this work for the players?
Vancleeve declined to publically disclose the initial funds for the collective.
To start, he reached out to a group of 40 people he knows who already contribute to MSU football. Within two weeks, the collective doubled Vancleeve’s initial fundraising goal he wanted to hit before officially launching. The collective has yet to do a public campaign for funds as the website gets ready to go live. But Vancleeve said now that the collective is known by the wider public, he believes what was once a lofty goal for annual contributions is looking more realistic.
Vancleeve has Zoom group calls lined up with more than 400 people interested in the collective but who have more questions.
“The buzz is growing,” Vancleeve said. “I think when people hear how we’re going to leverage NIL, I think many will get a different taste in their mouths that this could be a really positive thing for the players and community. That’s the big spin for us. People give to the collective and with these contracts, most of the time what these kids will do as part of their contracts is do community work. Go to non-profits, attend them, be a part of them. And now everyone is winning. The collective isn’t a business. We don’t need to see a return on our investment. We want to see them impact the community.”
Vancleeve said along with one-time donations, donors will have a choice for a subscription model to donate X dollars per month. That allows the collective to forecast what they can offer for player contracts.
Contracts will be short-term, such as two- or three-month contracts throughout the year that will pay players X amount of money and the players will do X duties as part of their contract, whether it’s something in the community or for a business. Every MSU football player will have a contract, from walk-ons to scholarship players. But it will be “different levels of contracts” AKA different amounts of money per player. The reason for shorter contracts is to not burden players or have a complicated scenario in case they choose to leave the team.
The timeline is to get the first contracts to players within the first month of the season. The short-term goal is to help with cost of living expenses. But Vancleeve believes they can soon get to a point where it extends beyond those expenses for some players.
