New NIL course will equip newsmakers, aspiring media professionals for a sports landscape undergoing seismic change
Coach Prime’s arrival at CU Boulder has brought new visibility to Buffs in every sport. A new CMCI course is drawing on Deion Sanders, other former pro athletes and sports media luminaries to illustrate the changing nature of athletics, journalism, celebrity and culture in the age of NIL. Photo of Sanders, above, by Nathan Thompson. Below photos are by Glenn Asakawa (left) and Kimberly Coffin (right).
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By Joe Arney
Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders saw the value of an athlete’s public persona long before his football or baseball contemporaries.Ěý
Now, as the University of Colorado Boulder takes the wraps off a NIL-themed course on sports media, management and culture, it’s hard to imagine a better model.Ěý
“Athletes are media celebrities whose identity gives them access to commerce, reputation, fame, all these kinds of things. But the person who puts on the helmet has to become anotherĚýperson in front of the cameras.”
Rick Stevens, associate dean
“Coach Prime recognized this model before there was a model,” said Rick Stevens, associate dean of undergraduate education and an associate professor of media studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information. “He understood how to perform an identity that allowed him to accomplish the business, social justice, performance and celebrity goals needed in our media system.”Ěý
College sports have undergone tremendous upheaval following the NCAA’s adoption of a “right to publicity” that gave athletes control over their name, image and likeness—NIL for short. But those changes have rippled throughout the landscape, meaning media professionals need a new set of skills and perspectives.
The new course—called, fittingly, Prime Time: Public Performance and Leadership—is about teaching student-athletes how to create those personas, while preparing aspiring media professionals to tell stories effectively in an age where what college athletes say as students can affect their potential earnings and influence.
“The course will teach student athletes to tell their stories strategically, in ways that help them be who they want to be, and will help journalists learn how to enable, challenge and help the stories they’re telling evolve,” Stevens said. “We have to rethink those relationships and dynamics between media icons and the media who cover them.”
A prime time to create impact
Few people anticipated the new age of college sports like Sanders, who demonstrated the value of an athlete’s personal brand as a two-sport phenom in the 1990s. As head coach of the Buffaloes football team, Sanders’ personality and social-media impact have driven incredible returns to the university and city.
Coach Prime has already delivered a lectureĚýon managing social media to the class, but Stevens said the name of the course is more about the prime time personas each athlete has the opportunity to create in a limited window.Ěý
“Athletes are media celebrities whose identity gives them access to commerce, reputation, fame, all these kinds of things,” Stevens said. “But the person who puts on the helmet has to become another person in front of the cameras. The class is trying to build a particular kind of media literacy, so that those who need to develop a prime-time narrative can think about what the pieces are and how they fit together, and make the right choices accordingly.”Ěý
A deep bench of experts
In addition to an ambitious set of topics—everything from athlete personas and sports betting to confronting racism and how to empower others—classroom lectures will be enhanced through regular appearances by athletes, sportswriters and other media professionals.
Confirmed guestĚýlecturers include Sanders; Kordell Stewart (Comm’18), former NFL star and media analyst; journalists Brent Schrotenboer (Jour’96) andĚýMichael Lyle; analyst Joel Klatt (Econ’05); Tom Garfinkel (Comm’91), president of the Miami Dolphins; and Abbey Shea, assistant athletic director for NIL at CU.Ěý
Those choices might include which products to endorse, what organizations to follow on social media and what causes to align with. Case studies that the students will examine will follow the career arcs of athletes like Colin Kaepernick, Ricky Williams and Richard Sherman, whose prime times coincided with controversy. The final project will ask teams of students to consider the best possible paths for athletes entering their prime times, both theoretical opportunities for historic cases as well as—especially as the course becomes established—CU athletes exploring their social media identities or what endorsements represent the brands they want to build.Ěý
A range of perspectives
Invited lectures, which will feature athletes, media personalities and experts from CU's athletics department, will take place one day each week. The other course day will feature a rotating cast of faculty representing CMCI’s thought leadership expertise in media studies, information science, journalism, communication, advertising and public relations.Ěý
One of those professors is Jamie Skerski, associate chair for undergraduate studies and an expert in communication and culture. She sees the course as an opportunity to look at the individual components that make up sports culture to better understand how it’s created.
“We have this opportunity to pull apart the different elements—the representation, the producers, the consumers, the regulations, the identities—that go into this new athletics landscape,” Skerski said. “When you do that, you get a more nuanced, leveled view of the way the pieces of the culture interact and become normalized.”Ěý
That is especially interesting to her from a gender standpoint. Could a more nuanced understanding of the way we consume sports change how NIL deals are executed—say, if a male athlete gets a certain amount of sponsorship, an equal amount must go to a woman?
“Because it’s basically the wild west right now, it’s a good time to question the status quo,” she said.Ěý
Stevens said the new perspectives of faculty invited to participate in the course have helped him think differently about pop culture, sports and media influence. It’s a feature of CMCI, which was formed about a decade ago to solve the kinds of complex, future-oriented problems coming out of media-related disciplines that are increasingly interconnected in the real world.Ěý
“This course is very in keeping with our college’s spirit,” Stevens said. “You have this new condition of NIL, resulting in a new arrangement among media, athletes, institutions and systems, and none of our departments are precisely positioned to answer the questions that are arising. But most of our departments have a piece of the puzzle, so by involving this many faculty, we’re able to get a more complete picture of all the dynamics involved.”
