From NIL Dollars to Data: New High Stakes in College Sports! Simplifying Cyber with Matt Banker

Thanks for tuning in to Simplifying Cyber. I'm Aaron Pritz.

And I'm Cody Rivers.

And today we're happy to be here with Matt Banker, who's the founder of MB Sports and also a senior advisor for CCNA Sports Law. Matt, I won't, uh, steal your thunder in the intro, but the reason we wanted to talk to you was Cody and I are definitely both very interested in college sports and mostly IU football. Maybe Cody not so much, but also just understanding, like, as college players get now potential money and funding from the NIL, where there's money, there are scams. And we wanted to really kind of connect the dots between your world and like the legal side of NIL and college athletics with people get and take advantage of. And, and most importantly, if you're parents, if you're a student athlete, if you're a coach, um, how, how can you understand more about the, the threats that are gonna be coming at you when, when your, when your son or daughter has a million-dollar NIL contract and all of a sudden you come from no money and you have money, lots of risks that come with that. So Matt, if you want to give an intro, how do you, how did you find your way into this space? And, uh, then we'll start to unpack the cyber angles.

Fantastic. Thanks for having me and good to see all of you. So my background really has been in college athletics for almost 25 years. I spent several years at the NCAA national office in Indianapolis. I also spent a few years at a Division I conference office, as we like to say, kind of like mid-major schools in Division I, and then also spent several years on senior staff at University of Louisville in their athletics department. So definitely working in a higher profile environment with a variety of sports too. Of course, your higher profile football, basketball, but then also Olympic sports across the board. So in more recent years, I moved into consulting and I've really enjoyed that and work with a variety of institutions and their athletic departments across all three NCAA divisions. But as, as you all know, and as we've talked offline before, the landscape's changed so rapidly, so many new questions and opportunities are popping up. but with that comes some risks. So, yeah, there's a lot, lot to sort of unpack there. That's a little bit about my background.

Yeah. And right before we, we started recording, uh, I've known you for a number of years now, and I did not realize that you played college athletics and, and football, uh, kicking footballs after 4 years playing soccer in high school. So maybe tell us about that. Maybe tell us how that inspired you to focus on this from a law practice standpoint.

Yeah, for sure. So sometimes it's sort of happy accidents in life can prove pivotal in terms of what your journey looks like. And I never played organized football growing up, played many other sports. I definitely came from a family that grew up and played a lot of team sports and individual sports. But long and short, like you said, I played soccer for many years and then by senior year of high school had the opportunity to play football. It was just sort of a novelty and that worked out really well to the point I was starting to get recruited and had a bunch of walk-on offers and ended up walking on at University of Missouri my freshman year and then transferred to what is now a Division I school. At the time was Division III, University of St. Thomas in the Twin Cities. And playing football and kicking footballs up in the Twin Cities means you're kicking a lot of frozen footballs. Yeah.

I mean, St. Thomas could have gone two directions there. It could have been in the Caribbean or in the frozen tundra. But, you know, I was excited there for a second, man. You play football in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. That'd be the life.

I, at one point, I was stopped in an airport as I was wearing a sweatshirt that said University of St. Thomas football, and someone said, I didn't know they played football on the beach. I said, I wish that was the case. But, but, uh, nonetheless, it was a great experience. And, and to answer your question too, Aaron, you know, it— I ended up moving into law school right after undergrad, but in law school I went to Marquette, and they have, they have what is now really considered sort of top-shelf sports law program and have really been a feeder system both for college athletics, pro sports, and sports and entertainment. But I went to law school there having been a Milwaukee native, in fact, and the sports law sort of connection, it kind of found me. I wish I could sit here and say it was by grand design, but that definitely was not the case. But it turned out when you start to kind of reference your background and things you're passionate about with, with your study, your professional in this case, my professional education. I then had the opportunity to join the NCAA as the first law clerk they ever hired many years ago in what was a very small legal department at the time. That has grown significantly, which is probably indicative of so many things that have happened in college athletics in the last 20-plus years. So I was very grateful for that opportunity to kind of get into the door of college athletics. But that was kind of my pathway from college, law school to the industry itself.

Nice. Well, let's dive into, you mentioned incidents happen in cyber, and I know we were chatting a couple weeks ago about the University of Michigan, Matt Weiss incident. Let's start with that. And then I just want to, you know, explore, there's probably all sorts of scams within athletics from coaches obtaining access to data they shouldn't, scams on the parents on accepting deals, predatory agents that are repping these kids and, you know, bilking them out of dollars without value. But let's start with the one you mentioned with Michigan and kind of what happened.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's a case of unauthorized access into a platform. And to be fair, I don't know all the details of the particular case, but certainly it's been in the news a fair amount as it relates to and probably reflective of the amount of information that is flowing through. And you referenced, like, as we talk about helping inform parents and athletes that are going you know, from high school and playing into college and other stakeholders kind of trying to step back and go, what's this really look like from the inside out? And I think that's one example of the type of access and information that is flowing through college athletics. We know that's happening in higher education in general, but college athletics is probably even double that because of the amount of analytics and data collection that is imperative to sports, especially in the hypercompetitive environment that college athletics has become over the years. So, you know, those types of risks are out there. You mentioned NIL too, Aaron. You know, the magic word— and I was speaking with several schools out west in Division I last week, in fact— and the word that came up a lot was transactional. The experience for athletes these days, really, even before you step on campus, is so transactional— filling out forms, doing things electronically. Signing your scholarship agreement, signing your NIL agreement, and all this, all this information flows back and forth and it's done electronically. Again, that's probably not shocking to anyone listening to our conversation today, but there are more layers of that, including with NIL itself and the agreements and the back and forth and even picking an agent to represent you should you want someone to help you in that capacity. So the amount of information flowing from athletes to, to others, to third parties, to schools And then the schools and others just being in and around that is, is significant.

Yeah, that's crazy. So back to Matt Weiss in Michigan. I'm just reading the headline here. This has been a bit ago, but it said Matt Weiss was indicted for hacking. I'm going to double, double. Did he really hack? In a student athlete medical database is used by more than 100 college, roughly 100,000, 150,000 people using stolen or cracked passwords to access athlete's social media, email, and cloud accounts. So like, so this is a, an assistant coach that acquired hacking skills to get into all this data. So like, how did this ripple in the industry from a legal standpoint? Like, are colleges doing anything to, to monitor for or surface some of those things?

You know, it's, it's interesting and it, that shows you, and of course when someone has the ability to, you know, that, that, that's another layer there of intentional access, et cetera. But there are, there's a lot of appetite in college athletics to utilize a variety of sometimes external softwares. And so in terms of your question about what are schools doing about that today and the importance of IT, sometimes IT is the group that certainly comes in on campus to kind of serve as quality control, security, that, that whole conversation and the apparatus of going before we say yes to allowing a third-party software as a service type thing come in. And of course, with medical, you're talking about significantly protected and private information by definition. But think about it as athletes get monitored for heart rate and for work rate and sleep. The amount of information that coaches and support staff around sports want to collect even goes beyond even just your traditional physician-patient, you know, student-school dynamic of other things that are protected— medical, academic, and other information. And athletics is just pouring into and collecting more and more of that. And NIL is part of that too. The financial side, for example, certainly is at the center of NIL in so many ways. I think schools trying to navigate a very, I'll say, rapidly changing environment how they go about being mindful of the privacy protections and data protection considerations that they should be when they're kind of leaning into bringing in more people with access into their environment is almost incongruent in some ways. So it's a good question. I don't know, you know, to what extent that that's happening at the level it should, but we'll be, it'll be interesting to see if we have more headlines of just privacy and data protection compromises coming out of athletics for sure. Yeah.

You know, I think a lot too, because I think of tying it back to like cybersecurity, GRC, and kind of that same core problem is like the rules are changing faster than organizations can absorb them. And often the people making decisions are furthest from the actual risk. And so is that a fair comparison or how does that break down in your world?

Yeah, that's a great— it is. Happening so quickly in terms of the pace of change. You know, there's the old saying, water finds its level. What we see also is that outside groups with solutions are coming to schools and going, hey, we know that's a new problem. We can fix that. Or wait, you're in the transfer portal. We can provide you new data resources through our platform about all the athletes you're thinking about recruiting, you know about, but we can get you more information about them. Those kinds of things are happening so quickly, purely to satiate the recruiting appetite and the roster building needs and aspirations in the athletics department. But the data protection is really not much of a conversation piece about this until someone across campus comes in and says, oh wait, we got to make sure IT clears this and our API is set up appropriately. All these things that as an administrator who's been through that with some vendors who want to have access and we've got to certainly go through our process as an institution. That should still be happening. But I think the amount of third-party engagement with athletics is probably a lot higher than others on campus even realize.

Yeah. Well, and I think too, like in IT and cyber, there's a thing called shadow IT and it's, you know, like software as a service or things that exist in the organization that the IT may not know about. So I think of like NIL compliance is kind of like shadow IT where like everyone's doing deals in the organization that, you know, that they don't know about until something breaks. And so is that a fair comparison or how do you build programs that like get ahead of that?

It's interesting that the shadow piece you compare it to. I mean, I think about the roles of the individuals in athletics traditionally also Athletics probably needs its own security and IT people because of this. And you're relying not all the time because like there are some that may have like an IT person embedded within athletics, but that's probably a luxury if I'm being honest, because of staffing and the financial pressures on athletics. So they're going to rely more on other campus departments, including IT, including on something like this at this level. You know, just speaking from my own experience. Even though we might have had someone who can help set up your computer, they're probably doing that out of the kindness of their heart in athletics as sort of one of many things, many hats they're wearing, right? But for IT to come in, talk about, you know, and obviously areas that you guys are the experts in, in terms of cybersecurity and protocols and expectations for the university when it is partnering with an outside entity. The other thing I wanted to add, and curious what your reactions are to, is the dynamic of the relationship between the school and the athlete because of these transactions, it's changing in a way where is it, you know, there's certainly legal obligations for sure about data protection, privacy, full stop, but also the amount of like education, life skills training when athletes and students in general on college campuses have a bunch of apps they're using, like they're bombarded by this type of approach to managing their lives through their phone and through technology. But at what level is that the school's responsibility even to equip them to make good decisions or to look out for phishing or social engineering or things like that? So in an already very busy environment, where does that fall under the priority line?

I think it's a mix. And you think about, there's a couple recent, I've got some additional data points up here, but for school platforms. So there was a case with Prep Hero, which was a sports recruiting platform. Platform, 3.1 million records of student athletes. And that system got hacked. There was another recent one, Arbiter Sports, which manages the referees for game officials in school leagues. And they had a ransomware, which impacted a bunch of like referees and kind of adjacent to athletes. But then when you double-click, so yeah, that's, those are tools and services that the school acquires, they're accountable. But then the risks go on. So you look at the whole category of NIL athlete-focused scams, and there's some of it's not cyber, but just general scams in general. But examples of fake endorsement offers, fraudulent checks, contracts with abusive fee schedules, 30 to 40% rake, and then locking them into long-term use of their name and likeness beyond what is typical expected. And then the last example that I see here is scammers that reach out by social media, text, represent themselves as a brand agent. And then they're collecting personal information, bank details, all that to kind of supposedly engage in the relationship to get them the money, but they're not legit. And the student didn't understand what they needed to check to make sure that it really was Nike or whoever's promising that endorsement or that fee.

Yeah, Matt, I also think I like your point that you brought back too about like the athlete's role in this because in organizations you think of like folks or functions that aren't in cyber or IT and there's this notion that like cybersecurity is someone else's problem, right? My job is to operate my function and cyber is just kind of covered. I think what you're trying to tie there to is the athlete at some point, the liability shares across that line. It's like, well, here's your responsibilities and your level of education to know what you're doing because they're handling school data, you know, knowledge, maybe some IP in there. You know, there's a lot of happening, a lot happening kind of, you know, under the, under the public eye. But I I think that's a great— I don't know the answer to it, but I think it's a great correlation of like, what is the school's education responsibility, the athlete, the person to know and how you're handling data as they uncover what is sensitive.

Right. And it's interesting, obviously the traditional recruiting and if you're fortunate to get a scholarship offer, that's sort of the sequence of events we're familiar with from over the years, but now it's negotiating and we're across the table from you, school to athlete or school to athlete and agent and family. And it's become more of a, we're on this side, you're on that side, at least to start. It has created other interesting dynamics which aren't specific to security, although some are, which I wanted to come back to. But even keeping like coaches out of that because the coaches are having like a mentoring, literally by definition, coach relationship with their athlete. Do you want them even involved with like trying to go, no, you're not worth that much, we're going to offer you this. And suddenly that's got to be a trusted relationship out of the gate. So you can see even the interpersonal dynamics along with the technology of how the transactions are working is one piece. Aaron referenced something even with like referees, but it does bring us to another hot topic around just information protection, which includes technology but also in-person. But the vast increase of sports wagering in and around college athletics and the legalization of that has also created a hyper-interest in getting as much information to have an edge when you're making bets, because now it's what, nearly 40+ states have legalized sports gambling. So it's pretty much here as we know it as a country. And that's changed, also changed the landscape of, of kind of how the dynamics work. So like protecting injury information, we have some leagues having to produce player availability like they do in pro sports. So that's sort of an evil like trying to like almost mitigate any type of things about who's injured or who's available to play or not and just making it public. So everyone's at least theoretically playing off of the same information, but that it gets into other things about, yeah, if I could break into a system with medical records, I'd have a better idea whether that star point guard is going to play next week or not. And before that line on the game moves, like you can kind of see a couple steps removed, the incentive to try to attack and compromise systems, including medical records, for example. So that, and even the NIL agreements themselves have confidentiality clauses in them to say like, hey, no parties are supposed to share this information. Now how that gets monitored and enforced, it's tricky, especially when some parties to those, you know, may have incentive to share. Like if you're repping this athlete, you obviously know what they're making. and you're trying to negotiate for other athletes, how does that come into play? So there's just some interesting dynamics about the type of information, financial, medical, academic/admission. And then of course we haven't mentioned it yet, but probably your favorite two-letter word, AI, is starting to creep into college athletics too. Yeah. And with everything from fake recruiting videos that people have to say, this isn't even real to say like, this kid looks like should be a 5-star recruit. We're starting to certainly seeing that, but one of you had mentioned earlier about representatives or third parties kind of conning athletes. And we're seeing that a little bit, both through just technology, but even telling coaches that they represent certain players that they've actually never interacted with before. And the point is that there are third parties out there saying, I represent this athlete, that quarterback, this point guard. And then they go, really, you do? Well, we'd be willing to offer X and Y. And then they go, great, let me call you back. Then they go back to the family and the athlete and say, Hey, I can help you get deals. I already have conversations with coaches going on. I never asked for your permission to do that, but like the incentive to sort of maybe compromise or play with people's trust is swimming back and forth in a more prominent way right now.

So there's a parallel between in cybersecurity workforce awareness and getting people to understand technical topics and understand how to encrypt data and all that stuff. Probably similarly, there's complexity in understanding NIL, both for coaches and parents and athletes. How have you and the industry approached making complex laws and rules approachable so people aren't accidentally doing something that they would regret?

That's a great question. And there are a lot of good people both on campuses, but also as, as sort of educators and you know, people running businesses, as we call it, life skills. Financial literacy is definitely a topic that's even before NIL was already super important, right? And naturally for any college student, not just athletes, but as we mentioned at the top of our conversation, you know, for some the stakes are really big about their NIL opportunities and the type of income they're earning. But you allude to something super important here, and is, is ability to make it relatable, simple, and something that athletes and their families— because you're sometimes not just coaching up the athlete on some of these things, you're coaching up parents, you're coaching up even third parties, even their representatives. And one area is a good example is taxes. Is, you know, young people have never had any background in paying taxes and now earning income, um, and they're entering that world. So having good, reliant, um, and reliable counsel on that. And, and that's another example of like school wants to be helpful, but the school's not responsible for also filing and paying your taxes. And, um, and so those, you know, there's a number of those things, but there's definitely a heightened effort. And you see this in youth sports too, clubs, and, and those want to invest in it is to bring in people who can educate parents and even high school club athletes kind of what this process looks like. Some of the things they probably do need to bone up on, including on the financial side, even representation. Maybe get someone else to look at the representation agreement, the agent agreement, before you sign it. So you get like someone who's not have a vested interest in who you sign with to give you some, some honest and clear feedback and even some benchmarking. Like you said, you mentioned 30%, 40% in some cases. Athletes would have been getting the amount of money they're receiving without having an agent at all. And sometimes they're sort of giving a chunk of what they were— are going to get. And so just having others provide them a little bit more well-rounded perspective. And to be clear, there's a lot of really good agents out there and a lot of good work being done in that space. But that's where you need to do some important vetting. And it's a lot— there's a lot of— there's a lot of voices like athletes. Especially those being recruited really in most sports, but certainly your high-profile sports, their inner circles are being built when they're 13, 14, 15 years old. So decisions are made around that athlete by— and not always by parents either, by others who might have an interest in the long game financially with that athlete.

So spicy take here. You know, I want to get— I want to get your opinion on this. The transfer portal, NIL collectives, revenue sharing. All are happening at once with generally no master plan at this point because it's evolving so fast. Is there an endgame or is college athletics just permanently in incident response mode?

That's a great question too. Incident response mode. I'm going to use that because that feels like very much week to week what we're looking at. Yeah, there are a lot of different solutions that have both near and longer-term effect or possible effect. The issue is we haven't been able to get to a place where it's predictable, consistent, and organized. And it could be years, plural, not another year, but years before we get to that spot. There's a few things in play. There has been interest even at the federal level from Congress to try to legislate. You may have seen, you know, there was an executive order moved through by President Trump a week or two ago. But I think people are realizing executive orders only go so far in many cases, that that won't be necessarily the solution on a lot of fronts as it relates to the athletic— the challenges in college athletics. But I do think there's possible of some version of collective bargaining coming around the bend. You know, does football and basketball, men's and women's basketball, maybe do they get organized in a different way than the rest of the sports? There's some global questions like that. There are also— there's so many crosscurrents to Cody, to your question. A lot of people are looking at 5, 6 years from now, early 2030s. Gosh, I can't believe that might have been the first time I've ever said 2030s. The 2030s is, is when some of these media rights deal for conferences are renewed or the NCAA's media rights agreement, which is a little about 6, 7 years away, like, will that end up reorganizing or reshuffling the deck, if you will, in terms of which schools are going to do it this way, which schools are going to go over here, who has a lot of brand value. And that is why you're seeing some schools, including those who might not be your traditional blue bloods, really lean in and utilize money. I think Texas Tech and football is a good example where they've got boosters and board members who are also, you know, well-heeled thanks to what oil looks like. When you start doing commodities correlating to schools, it makes a difference in the NIL space. So suddenly they become a bigger voice, a bigger player. And a lot of schools are trying to figure out how are we going to do this? Where is the pipeline of money? Because now there's a new line item that didn't exist before, which is revenue share in NIL. Yeah, the athletes. So there is so much to unpack whether they should be considered employees. That gets a little bit to the collective bargaining piece. And having clear legal structure. Right now it's one-off court rulings that are— it's like just dots on the screen. And I am old enough to remember Atari games when Asteroids was a game you played and the asteroid fields would pop up out of nowhere. It's like, how are you supposed to navigate this? That's what college athletics feels like. And I don't think the game's going to move out of that sort of environment for a while because there's, there's several kind of significant issues to sort.

Yeah, well, I think too, if you're, you know, what's on the Mizzou, 3 seasons at St. Thomas, that means you personally experienced the transfer portal before it was a portal. There was, right?

Had NIL be in place, you were probably just making banker. Do you see what I did there?

That's pretty good. That's pretty good. They, they, they call it the athletes got to get their bag. Put me in the transfer portal and I need to get my bag, as, as a few colleagues have mentioned to me. And in some respects for athletes, for many athletes, and the NCAA has all the data on this, and it's not any secret, but the vast majority aren't going to make a living professionally. But when you can make significant money as a college athlete, now you understand why people are going to court to challenge, why are you only limiting how many seasons I can play? I want to stick around for 6, 7, 8, 9 years. I'll be a professional. College athlete because the pay is so good. And the reality— and I hear this from a lot of people too— is this— it's almost like you're in la-la land where once you get out of it and you go into the real world and playing sports is no longer really an option for you and you're walking away from significant NIL money and now you're trying to get a $50,000, $60,000 a year job like the general population, general. So that's its own tricky dynamic of how athletes are going to navigate that too. So we talk about the front end life skills. We also talk about, you know, what happens when the ball stops bouncing and you've got to move on in life.

Cody, you took a couple victory laps at Purdue, if I remember right. No, I'm just kidding. You were smart.

I did. Mine was because the first year was things you shouldn't do in college. So mine was a much different, different scenario. And Matthew, do you teach compliancy and compliance at a law school?

I teach actually an NIL workshop for Marquette, my alma mater. So it's a 2-credit class. We really focus on everything name, image, likeness, looking at drafting agreements, looking at sort of the ecosystem of NIL because there are a significant number of third-party groups that colleges sometimes partner with, bringing in agents to talk about their experience and also putting on, because I know I might be talking to future, you know, athletic directors or commissioners, but putting on different hats. As we go through the experience, learning certainly the legal principles, how licensing is central to name, image, likeness. Ostensibly, that's what they're being compensated for is the use of NIL. But that is something I do enjoy. I teach a course once a year and boy, I tell all my students every single year, here's the syllabus, but we're going to end up talking about a variety of things in real time. Yeah. That just came out in the news that isn't just sort of anecdotal. That might be significant. So like there are court cases that made multiple, multiple transfers permissible. Well, that's permanent free agency that affects NIL. So that would be a case we really dug into a few years ago when the NCAA transfer rules were upended through, through state courts.

Yeah, man, that's, that's pretty cool. So then do you think that the— I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure it does. Just the, the, the college AD resume or skill set 5 years ago, even to today, even looking forward 5 or 10 years, drastically different, right? With a lot of things that they need to be— I mean, how do they do it? Is it a new role that's beside them? Is it below them? Is it they should know these things? But kind of like how cyber's in corporate, you know, we always have this argument on the cyber side is like, how much cyber knowledge should the leadership be aware of? And I think maybe this is kind of relevant in AD of like, How much compliance and NIL stuff should ADs be aware of?

That's, that, that's a really, really good insight to ask about because it's, it is changing. Uh, some athletic departments I know are looking at sort of a two-headed monster model, as I call it. Your traditional athletics director hiring coaches, doing those sorts of things, and someone who's more of the CEO who's going to maximize our revenue.

That's crazy.

When the revenue needs are as high as they've ever been because of these additional costs. And like I said, the new NIL line item with the skill set, it's been said many times, certainly fundraising and development is a piece to that. But I think it's become far more complex, legal, transactional, understanding even, even if you're not an attorney, the principles around employment law. When you have coaches and programs trying to control every facet of a college athlete's life, is feeding right into the notion that you're controlling that person to the extent that that's an employer-employee relationship. Like having those types of appreciation, understanding certainly where technology and security and risk issues, you know, that was something I've worked with some athletic directors who did a really nice job of always— and it wasn't just NCAA compliance, it was sort of broader risk, you know, is it the sports medicine piece? And of course, all schools, all of us, went through COVID and the pandemic, there were brand new sorts of risks popped up literally overnight that you had to navigate in terms of how you were managing a college athletics department. So at its core, certainly good problem solvers, but having skill sets from a legal background, financial, technology, private equity. You see more interest in people bringing in outside parties to help fund the needs of today. And that's also an interesting topic because we're talking higher education, things that are tethered to the states in many ways, how they're funded. So you have interest in doing as much as we can for an athletics department, but how can you navigate the political waters is also a skill set I think athletic directors and certainly conference commissioners need to have today.

So, Matt, we, we, we have a number of listeners that are early career, and we always ask a few questions about kind of learnings that you've had to date. So if you had to call yourself 20 years ago and give yourself some coaching on what to do or do differently, what advice are you giving in, giving into young, young Matty Banker?

Besides getting that bag.

Aside from that, for sure. You know, I would say it's a couple, some good advice is always be open to something new, especially in our industry, different projects. I can't tell you how often I go back on something I was fortunate enough to work on. I never thought would have been relevant. And boy, those types of things come back around. Plus, it shows that you're a team player, that you're open to just jumping in. Hey, we need to solve X, Y, and Z. There are a lot of people who said, I don't want anything to do with NIL. Well, you know, if you want to try to avoid it, at least especially at the Division I level, that's going to be hard to do. So just kind of being open to taking on different tasks, those experiences are going to add to your to your tool belt, so to speak. That's one for sure. And another piece of advice I always go back to, it was kind of what I was kind of set up when I moved into consulting. I had someone, you know, who's been in the consulting space a long time said, you know, think about bringing something of value to people, work hard and be nice, be kind. And I think those types of things are universal, whether you're in an athletics department or at a company or anywhere else.

It's a good, good point. No one wants to hire an asshole. Hat, you know, you should be nice at all times in all industries. It doesn't always happen, but it's a good rule to live by.

I think of like back in the day, like Blockbuster, like be kind, rewind. I mean, that, that obviously, that obviously dates me, but you know, like, hey, just, you know, pay it forward, you know, you're done with the video, be kind and rewind. Cool.

Bronwyn, do you want to, do you want to ask a question about deepfakes and kind of how that obviously that is likeness? Do you want to?

I really do. Okay, Matt, I don't know. We haven't prepared you for this question at all, but I want to get like a status check, I think, on I think the legality of licensing or like likeness licensing and like image licensing, because obviously to your earlier comment, AI specifically deepfakes, namely creating a likeness of someone, whether a celebrity or you yourself or whatever, that's super easy now. It's super easy. It's popular. You can do it in a couple of seconds. Have you, like, how is that impacting license? Licensing around someone's image? Because you can just create it now. What do you, what do you know?

Yeah, for sure. And these agreements between the schools and the athletes are functionally licensing agreements, right? And part of the grant of rights that the athlete's handing over to, to the schools are spelling out, I'm going to license my NIL and you can use it for all these variety of agreed upon uses. But within that, it's a definition of what is your NIL. And I've seen evolving language even in this past year. To reference AI, to reference deepfake, but at the end of the day, whether it's produced off of AI or however you categorize it, if it's still representative of that athlete, even if it's not an actual picture of them, but you developed it elsewhere and you're using it in a, in a permissible way per the licensing agreement, that would be, that would be encompassed within there. Now, if someone's putting, and I'm talking a third party is putting content out there, that's a deepfake of someone, that's where you get into having part of IP and licensing protection is monitoring misuse, sending cease and desist and trying to nip that in the bud. So that's the other side of the sort of mis— I don't wanna say mis— yeah, misuse. When I hear deepfake, that's an assumption that it's being used by a party that's not, doesn't have the appropriate authority to use it.

Is it similar, like obviously misuse can be everything from somebody selling jersey, fake jerseys out of a trunk at a football game. What is the level of policing with the NCAA on that when it comes to NIL?

NIL? Sure. A lot of this is going to come from the campus level, primarily when it has to do with use of marks and/or use of the athlete's NIL at this point, if it's obviously one they have an agreement to use their NIL. But I think about— and you mentioned, Aaron, sort of the classic case of IP misappropriation of selling t-shirts that aren't authorized. And even before NIL, I had to— good fortune working a lot of athletes, including some high-profile ones. You know, I had the chance to work with and support Lamar Jackson when he was at Louisville. And believe me, there were a lot of people interested in selling t-shirts and jerseys that had somehow affiliated with him even before NIL was permissible. And at that juncture when it actually could affect his eligibility. So we as a school would have to do sort of a cease and desist process and actually reach out to companies who were trying to to ultimately misuse that. But that same principle is still in play. Like, you're going to have to— and universities have licensing or trademark offices because they have all these marks. You can think of IU or Purdue in Indiana and all other schools. They're doing this in all directions, not just through athletics, although that's probably the most visible component of it. But anytime they're, you know, putting that on a sweatshirt or sweater, it's got to be an authorized manufacturer and producer and distributor, all those things. So that's become more prominent. And it's also become an area of how else can we leverage this? You know, hey, maybe we never put our athletes' faces on the Coca-Cola or Pepsi cups at the Games, but now we are because we have the right to do that. We would have never done that before because it was against NCAA rules. And in this interest of how do we leverage, you know, especially athletes that might help drive concession sales in that example, Those are the types of things athletic departments are also thinking about. Are we maximizing this asset in all directions is certainly a question probably coming up every single week.

Fascinating. I love how your career and this whole conversation is incredibly intersectional. We're talking about legal, we're talking about cyber, talking about risk, talking about athletics, PII. Like, there's so many big topics, all like you're at this sort of inflection point. And it makes me think of intersectionality in kind of a broader circumstance. Circumstance, namely gender and race and other things that impact surely recruiting, how we treat players, how contracts reflect these kind of things. Do you have any reflections on, or like big things that have changed in relation to those like other sort of social and political aspects of identity? Big question, sorry, but let me know your thoughts.

Yeah, no, a lot, a lot of important topics woven in there. You know, I, I think certainly some pieces to where I think we are today as to why rules have changed and things have been challenged in court you see also the demographics of some of the sports. Certainly there's a lot more African American athletes playing in some sports and some of the higher profile sports. And probably in many ways this was overdue to allow some middle ground, especially as it relates to use of NIL and kind of what this would look like. You know, also thinking about, and this includes across the board, how the dynamics of NIL and the new landscape of college athletics, even the last 2 to 3 years, what kind of impacts may that have on opportunities in general to play sports in college? One thing that doesn't get covered much, but it was a big piece of— we haven't talked about the House settlement in particular, but that's the class action lawsuit that at least created the framework in which we're working under, where schools can now directly provide NIL money in its simplest form is how I'm framing that. But one other key piece to that settlement is it created roster caps in Division I for all the schools who are participating in this new framework, which is the vast majority. There are some Division I schools choosing not to do this in terms of NIL rev share, but a lot are. Well, now that impacts sort of participation opportunities. And wait, our track and field team used to be 90 athletes. Now we have to whittle it back down. And that That had an impact here in the last couple years. So just in terms of other things that relate to college access to education, college athletics is a vehicle for that. And one thing that's probably under the radar a little bit are the roster cap dynamics. Again, not— it doesn't apply across the board. Division I and— or excuse me, DII and DIII do not have it. This does not apply to NAIA. But at the highest level, that, that has creeped into part of what they all agreed to through this settlement. And I think there's some some longer-term effects that people are going to monitor around that.

Well, last question for you, Matt. Um, we, we focused a lot on cyber here, you know, deception, fraud. What advice would you have for parents and athletes specifically of, you know, they may not get all the education from the school or from the people that are in and around them. What's, what's your best guidance to help sure they make sure they're, they're covering their bases and educating themselves?

Yeah, absolutely. Fortunately, we're in this information world, right, where you have a lot of good information that is out there. I would say asking around, ask, ask questions. If you think there's a question there, ask it. But I would go around and get different opinions and talk to people who have been in this industry or working in the environment, certainly folks that you trust, and do your diligence about those who you might be partnering with, whether it's an agent that you're hiring or someone else who's going to help manage your money, including as a college athlete. Those are big roles, important roles, and good to be exploring those who can handle those lanes for you. But you have to do some diligence before you sign on. Sometimes people forget, especially athletes and parents, whether it's agents or others, they work for you, not the other way around. And so there's some things to remember as you're navigating a new environment in college sports.

Awesome. And don't, and don't use your parent. Don't get Joe Jackson or Britney Spears, right? No, I'm just kidding. Your parent might be great. It's probably like any agent. You might have a parent that really has your best interest in mind and you might not. It just all comes down to your family quality. Yeah.

Well, Matt, thanks again. This has been phenomenal and I'm still intrigued, man. I could talk for another 2 hours, but we got to have some kind of wrap up here. So I appreciate it again and thanks you for the time today and I look forward to future conversations. Thanks.

Thank you so much.