A lot of people on this board like to talk about and complain about recruiting. Well, I think it's time for W&M basketball supporters to take some action on this front. As I'm sure many of you know, with the change in NIL rules college athletes are now able to monetize their NILs. This means that college athletes can be paid for a wide range of activities, including endorsing products, making appearances, signing autographs, appearing on podcasts, and many other things.

In order to help athletes at a school obtain these types of deals, new entities called collectives are being formed for most Division I schools. They are not technically affiliated with the school, but they are formed by alumni and boosters who want to support their school's athletes. Collectives perform two functions. One, they go out into the business community and find businesses that want to do deals with athletes. Two, they actually sign athletes to NIL deals themselves. They do this by pooling donor funds, either through big donations from a few boosters or by crowdsourcing money from fans all over the country/world through monthly subscriptions.

W&M needs an NIL collective if it wants to have any hope of remaining competitive in recruiting and keeping guys at W&M. In fact, I think W&M could have an advantage over many other mid-major schools based on the financial resources that alumni have. I'm an attorney and work in the college athletics space and have represented a number of collectives and other related organizations. I want to get a W&M collective formed and operating. Who wants to be part of this? Send me a private message if you're interested.