A Super Talk Mississippi Media Production.

This is a Thunder Enlightening exclusive here on Supertalk.com.com and SuperTalk Mississippi, Brian A'd out here.

NIL is the name of the game in college sports as we're speaking.

The game is changing.

It's evolving.

And a lot of things have come to pass in the past few months that are really putting college football and college athletics in a much different atmosphere than it's been before.

From the Mississippi State perspective, the Bulldog Initiative is the NIL collective of note for the Bulldogs.

And they are the ones trying to get Mississippi State into that

place and into that the race, basically, for college athletes. Charlie Winfield is here with me.

He is heading up the Bulldog initiative. You know, NIL started out. We thought it was going to be,

okay, these guys can get some endorsements, and, you know, they can give, you know, tennis players

can give lessons, and now it's turned into these collectives.

So my first question is more like, what exactly is a collective and how does it work?

Yeah, and I think to answer that, you kind of have to go back in time to talk a little bit about

what you just said, which is the way it started.

And you think back after Omaha last year, we came home and NIL was brand new.

And so what did you see? Hey, so-and-so is going to be at our restaurant today. And they get a few

hundred dollars to show up. We would see that, of course, the most notable earners in the NIL world

are people who are influencers, which is probably true whether

they were playing a sport or not. If you've got 5 million people following your TikTok channel,

hey, you reach an audience. It makes sense. But needless to say, being college athletics fans,

I started to say football, but it's much bigger than that,

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