West Virginia football planning educational approach with NLI guidelines

Name, image and likeness issues have moved to the next step with the NCAA Board of Governors supporting rule changes to allow students to receive compensation for third-party endorsements.

Those will involve both those associated with and separate from athletics as well as compensation for opportunities such as social media and personal appearances.

Athletes would be given the ability to identify themselves by the sport and the school but the use of conference or school logos, trademarks or other involvement would not be permitted.

It also would preclude any university paying for a student athletes name, image or likeness activities.

The recommendations from the board will now move to the rules-making structure in each of the three divisions for further consideration with the expectation that those will be adopted by January to take effect at the start of the 2021-22 academic year.

There will be certain guardrails included in these activities which would prevent anything considered pay for play; no school or conference involvement; and no use for recruiting by schools or boosters as well as the regulation of agents and advisors.

So, what does that mean for West Virginia?

Well long story short, the Mountaineers have been preparing for such a decision within the program for probably around the last six months and have developed a good plan on how to deal with it. That means a partnership with the Jeremy Darlow Athlete Brand Development Program to help navigate the waters from an educational aspect.

“It’s about education and educating our players on how to take advantage of that. How to create a brand, what’s a brand look like? That’s something we got ahead of and feel really good about our plan doing that,” West Virginia head coach Neal Brown said.

"This is going to be a great educational tool for our student-athletes," Brown said. "Jeremy has created a game plan that will teach athletes how to manage, market and build their personal brands. "I look forward to incorporating his ideas into our player development program."

Student-athletes will build their own marketing plan and learn the same techniques used by Darlow. Each week, student-athletes will watch a short video lesson covering one of his philosophies on brand development. At the end of each video, student-athletes are then given the option to complete an assignment found in their copy of his book, The DARLOW Rules. Those homework assignments make up portions of the student-athlete's personal brand marketing plan.

"Today, more than at any other point in history, athletes have the opportunity to build personal brands that transcend the sports they play," Darlow said. "Thanks to the exposure and influence offered by social media, these young men and women can now control their own brand destiny."

The DARLOW Rules will feature short, easy-to-understand lessons that teach student-athletes from every sport the fundamentals of brand development and communication."My mission is to teach athletes how to create a personal brand and reputation that sets them up for life after sports," Darlow said. "I'm proud to work with West Virginia, which believes in preparing their student-athletes for life after college."

Darlow is a leading brand marketing consultant, former director of marketing for Adidas football and baseball, adjunct marketing professor and author of the best-selling books "Brands Wins Championships" and "Athletes are Brands Too".

That decision to partner with Darlow was made in large part because of the momentum growing with the conversations on the topic so the program wanted to get ahead of it as much as possible.

The Mountaineers are the only power five team in the state of West Virginia and Brown believes there are some things that they could use and are marketable, although he certainly doesn’t believe it’s going to be a windfall for everybody on the major sports team’s rosters.

Still a lot of currently left unknown and Brown is still in the process of trying to figure out exactly what the parameters are and once those are in place how will they be monitored?

“I have a lot more questions on it than answers,” he said.

It’s something that Brown will certainly be familiarizing himself with as time passes and the issues become more concrete, but for now the Mountaineers are prepared from an educational aspect.

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