BeaversEdge Senior Writer Ryan Harlan caught up with Oregon State Executive Deputy Athletic Director Brent Blaylock to talk NIL, Blueprint, and much more!
Note – Questions and responses have been edited for clarity –
First things first, could you walk me through, kind of step by step, the breakdown of the contract itself?
Brent Baylock: “So the agreement is broken down. There’s essentially three different tiers. The first tier is the guarantee that goes directly to the student-athletes. That’s the first $750,000. So 100% of those of the first $750,000 that is earned in this goes directly to the student athletes. From there, the revenue sharing portion starts from $750,001 up to $1.15 million. That is where Blueprint will take 75% of that amount. Again, that’s being done to help them recoup the costs that they need to help drive other revenue streams. And then once the net revenue clears $1.15 million, then it is a 50-50 split from there. That’s being done so that there’s a lot of motivation on all sides to grow the pie to be as big as we can get it.”
So, from that $750,000, how does that go back to them? Because from the way that I kind of understand it, that number also increases by 3% each year as well. How does, at least from what you’re saying about that number going back into student athletes’ pockets, how does that go back in there in terms of the mechanism of the contract itself?
BB: “Well, there’s really a limitless amount of ways that Dam Nation can help support our student athletes with those funds. I mean, that can be done through event appearances, that can be done through promotional activities, that can be done, you know, maybe they do some signings, and that can be done through, you know, some merchandise. So there’s really about any way that you can think of to create revenue. Dam Nation can then do that with the student athletes. So they may sign a student athlete on so that they help promote Dam Nation online in general, or help promote an event or maybe Dam Nation gives them a separate appearance fee to come to an event or whatever it may be. It all comes from those different ways. Okay. And that’s really why we’ve partnered with them, because they’re the experts in that space.”
Why Blueprint for Oregon State? The partnership there, my follow-up to that was, were there any other options that you guys looked at outside of Blueprint? Or was Blueprint and what they could offer really kind of the selling point for this partnership?
BB: “Yeah. So, you know, the value that Blueprint provides is that they’ve been in the space from the beginning. They’ve been on partnerships, you know, with 60-plus different campuses across the country. They’ve been at extremely high resource. They’ve been at, you know, some places that are resource-challenged.
So they’ve seen how to make this work across that spectrum and know what those best practices are. How we got to this with Blueprint, there was some due diligence that was done within the athletic department. Not only myself, but a handful of colleagues as well, just reaching out into the marketplace, talking to other partners that they had had…