Penn State NIL Collective Success With Honor Reaches Milestone
Success With Honor, the Penn State all-sports NIL collective, reached a milestone in January, securing contracts with athletes from all 31 varsity sports teams. Ultimately, one of its founders said, the collective's goal would be to sign every athlete on every team to an NIL contract while also supporting football, the athletic department's chief economic driver.
But, as Jay Paterno added, the collective concept might be short-lived.
"If you look at what's coming to the future of college athletics, revenue sharing is coming, which is going to make a lot of this moot anyway," Paterno said in an interview. "So realistically, the best thing for college athletics is for revenue sharing to come and for collectives to go away. And I say that as somebody who started one."
Success With Honor, founded in 2022 to support Penn State athletes in pursuing Name, Image and Likeness opportunities, refers to itself as the program's "preferred" collective. Its fundraising supports athletes in Penn State's 31 varsity sports, and donors can contribute to specific teams. This week, the collective said in a news release that it has contracts with athletes from every Penn State team, including "numerous" football players.
"One of the reasons that Success With Honor was founded as Penn State’s first NIL collective is to create NIL opportunities for all 31 sports," CEO Mark Toniatti said in a statement. "The support we’ve already built at Success With Honor reflects the efforts of a broad number of Penn State alumni and friends. We are just beginning to build on our first year’s momentum..."
Paterno, among the Success With Honor founders, called this important because NIL has revived the "pay-for-play" concept in college sports. However, as Paterno noted, athletes in sports outside football and basketball invert "pay-for-play."
Penn State teams, for example, roster about 850 athletes, 603 of whom received scholarships, according to the athletic department's most recent financial report. Penn State awarded 368 "equivalencies," or full scholarships, meaning most of those athletes received partial aid.
For example, 29 baseball players shared 11.7 scholarship equivalencies, 17 wrestlers shared 9.9 scholarships and 28 field hockey players shared 12 scholarships.
"Essentially, they're paying to play for Penn State," Paterno said. "So we wanted to have the ability to close those gaps for them as well as throw our support behind football, because that's going to be very very competitive environment. For what we've been asked to do, we've made a total commitment to football and we've been doing it with the other sports as well, and we think that's a pretty big deal."
READ MORE: How Penn State's NIL collectives are addressing the NCAA Transfer Portal
By brokering deals for Olympic sports athletes, notably in wrestling and women's volleyball, Success With Honor has made it possible for many to compete into their fifth years, Paterno said.
"It has had a lot of impact on them, and a lot of the coaches in the Olympic sports have said it's really starting to make a difference for them," Paterno said.
Paterno said that approach will work for football players who are projected as later-round draft picks as well. By returning for NIL opportunities, those players could earn money and improve their draft stock.
Paterno added that Success With Honor managed several NIL initiatives at the Rose Bowl, including a fan meet-and-greet and a charity engagement that proved popular.
In December, Penn State Athletic Director Patrick Kraft called Success With Honor's fundraising efforts, which included a $1 million donation, "really, really strong." He added that Success With Honor and Penn State's other collectives, including the football-only Lions Legacy Club, are staying out of recruiting.
"That's not what they're there for. They know that," Kraft said. "They're not doing it, and they're doing it what I believe what we would always say is the Penn State way."
As Paterno said, NIL was bound to infiltrate recruiting. For example, a Florida collective reportedly terminated a $13 million contract with quarterback recruit Jaden Rashada, leaving his future uncertain. But Paterno also said that collectives, agents and others are inflating NIL numbers and pushing incentives, making it difficult to know what's true.
"When the California law passed [in 2019], I was approached by a group to consult, so I was one of the first NIL consultants in the country," Paterno said. "And one of the things that you find is, a lot of the stories you're reading are people shooting their mouths off, and the numbers aren't as real as you think.
"Some of them say, 'We'll give you a million dollars to win the Heisman Trophy, a million dollars to win the national championship, $500,000 for winning your conference," but the number pretty quickly becomes $50,000 per year as opposed to $8 million. So some of the numbers you're seeing are really exaggerated."
This week, a California assemblyman took another potentially game-changing step, introducing a bill that would require state universities to share revenue with athletes. If passed, the law would require colleges essentially to pay athletes without considering them employees.
Paterno believes that time is coming, once leadership gathers the stomach for it.
"The reality is, that world [of NIL] is not going to be sustainable," Paterno said. "... The question is, where does this plane land? Does it end with collective bargaining? Right now it does not appear that there's anybody really taking that bull by the horns."
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