The Name, Image and Likeness era has had different ways of showing itself over its one year of existence. Donors at SMU have shown a willingness to engage with each of them. The latest engagement might be the biggest.
Boulevard Collective, a NIL collective with alumni and donors but not associated directly with SMU, launched over the weekend. The group, operated by longtime compliance expert Chris Schoemann, expects to pay football and men’s basketball players $3,000 per month and $36,000 per year — according to three school representatives with knowledge of the deal — amounting to a total commitment of roughly $3.5 million per year.
Schoemann didn’t go into details on the financial agreement, but he did say, “with what we have looked at in terms of a budget for Boulevard, I feel comfortable saying this puts SMU student-athletes on par or exceeding their Power Five contemporaries.”
On3 was first to report the financial details.
Schoemann also added that the Boulevard Collective doesn’t plan on stopping with football and men’s basketball.
“Our plans here are more expansive than that,” he said.
Dallas businessmen and SMU alumni Chris Kleinert and Kyle Miller were credited with leading the efforts to create Boulevard Collective, according to a release.
“This is just the beginning,” Kleinert wrote in a statement. “The purpose of the Boulevard Collective is to create opportunities for SMU athletes that enhance their athletic career, while preparing them for wherever their professional aspirations might take them at SMU and beyond. Our goal is to ensure this Collective becomes the gold standard for NIL efforts across the country.”
Boulevard Collective will be the second NIL collective working with SMU student-athletes. Pony Sports DTX has already dished out over $1 million in NIL deals since its inception.
Boulevard Collective will be operated through Opendorse, a popular NIL marketplace that works with 20 NIL collectives across the country. The Boulevard Collective is set to be one of the “largest” entities in the NIL marketplace, per a release.
“The Boulevard Collective will be in elite company in terms of its commitment to student- athletes,” Opendorse CEO Blake Lawrence said in a statement. “With our unrivaled insight into NIL transactions and the industry at large, it’s clear the Boulevard Collective is initiating one of the most substantive, sustainable efforts nationwide.”
SMU isn’t the first athletics program to have a NIL deal with consistent pay for its student-athletes. Last month, the Matador Program — a collective at Texas Tech — set a new standard with NIL deals by offering over 100 football players $25,000 per year.
“This serves as sort of a base salary for the whole locker room,” Cody Campbell, a founding member of the Matador Club, told The Athletic back in July, “and that should add a lot of stability and continuity to the program.”
The Boulevard Collective is set to work in a similar way.
Student-athletes were first told about the news at a launch party on Saturday. There, they helped assemble 400 backpacks filled with school supplies for Dallas ISD student-athletes. That’s one way the new NIL collective worked, but there will be other “activations,” Schoemann said.
“There will be a menu of offerings for SMU student-athletes that will be varied,” Schoemann said. “We’ll have other activations that will be similar, and we’ll try and involve the Dallas community here. That was important to both [Kleinert and Miller] in terms of our discussions about inception and the first activity itself, but we’ll have others that will be content related and more individual student-athlete-related details.”
The latest step into the NIL space comes at an important time for SMU. Money is being raised for a $100 million Ford Stadium expansion. Realignment is ongoing and SMU, like it has in other realignment cycles, has plenty of interest in moving up to a Power Five conference.
“I think you’re seeing that the institution is trying to position itself in this ever-changing landscape of what Division I athletics looks like — that SMU is trying to position itself to be a part of the upper-echelon moving forward,” Schoemann said, “and I think this effort ducktails right into that.”
