The Rutgers Athletic Department has launched RNIL, an in-house Name, Image, and Likeness organization dedicated to securing high-impact partnerships and maximizing opportunities for Scarlet Knight student-athletes through the Scarlet Assets Management Company. RNIL will have several activations at athletics events this weekend, including one at Rutgers Football’s homecoming game on Saturday vs Oregon, and one on Thursday, October 16th, at Rutgers Men’s Basketball’s meet the team event.
Rutgers Athletic
Director Kelli Zinn had a chance to speak to the media about RNIL and how it will work at Rutgers.
“Rutgers now has a robust NIL infrastructure, so this is a huge week for us. I think this is absolutely a turning point in what will now be everything that we need here in order to compete at the highest level. I’m not aware of any athletics department across the country that has had a significant amount of success or even sustained success over the past number of years since NIL became a focal point. So it feels good to now be there in a place where we have the infrastructure to support it and move it forward in a way that I know is going to be really successful.”
“We brought in-house our name, image, and likeness infrastructure. The Knights of the Raritan, you saw, are now sunsetting and will not function externally to us as they have before. And the next biggest piece is personnel, right? You’ll see as early as next week, two staff members in particular, one external hire, and an internal promotion that will support name, image, and likeness. Then in the coming months we will bring in-house an additional team of people, both internally supporting the day-to-day operations of NIL, but then externally sellers within SAMCO [Scarlet Asset Management Company] to actually go out and get those opportunities.”
In addition to all of this, Zinn added that they still need to expand their RNIL operation and that she would like to hire four more full-time staffers in addition to the two she already has. These staffers will have a sole purpose of helping RNIL through different avenues, including “sellers”, “day to day operations”, and “content and external digital, videography, graphics.”
Zinn continues to be very optimistic about the outlook of her efforts at Rutgers so far. “As early as week one, I started working in this space externally, and up to this point, there’s not one person who’s told me no.” She also believes that with the progress they are making, they are well on their way to getting into a situation where they can be aggressive in the upcoming transfer portal. According to Zinn, there are a few people who have already made significant commitments to RNIL.
This launch lines up well with what Rutgers Football Head Coach Greg Schiano said during his Monday press conference. On Monday, Schiano made the statement that their prior NIL efforts weren’t up to Division 1 standards, much less Big Ten standards. Now it seems Rutgers is ready to catapult itself into a major NIL operation. If they are successful, not only would that make Schiano’s job easier, but it would relieve pressure off all of Rutgers’ head coaches.
