Texas Uses Signing Day Billboards as NIL Play
The Texas Longhorns football team took a unique approach to announcing their class of 2024 signings - and they hope that it helps when it comes to NIL.
As each of the Longhorns’ recruits signed their national letter of intent, Texas’ social media team posted a graphic of the player in a Longhorns uniform on a billboard. Accompanying that, the program took out a billboard with the same graphic near each recruit’s high school.
Trey Owens was one of the first recruits to sign with Texas and to post about the graphic on social media. The graphic came with a photo of Owens, a four-star quarterback, along with the location of the billboard, which in his case was in Brookshire, Texas.
Later, media members who found the billboard posted them to social media as well.
Texas has emerged with one of the most robust collectives and NIL apparatuses in college sports. Between its own brand and its partnerships, the Longhorns’ Top 5 recruiting class should have no trouble finding NIL opportunities once they hit campus in Austin.
The latest partnership was announced earlier this month. The Longhorns and their preferred NIL collective, the Texas One Fund, announced it had agreed to a deal with WME Sports, a deal that is expected to expand NIL opportunities for all Longhorn student-athletes.
WME Sports represents athletes, consults on sports media and other endeavors. The firm recently signed a similar deal with a Notre Dame collective.
WME is also owned by Endeavor, which owns one of the leading talent agencies in the world, which should help Texas student-athletes find better deals in the NIL space.
