Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about the Nebraska football team and its standing in the NIL community. For the most part, there’s quite a bit of worry that the Huskers were lagging too far behind the best teams in the conference.
As it turns out, those worries were well founded. While Nebraska’s 1890 Initiative was busy making enemies when it should have been making friends, the school started realizing it needed to become an ally in this area.
The allyship is getting even stronger under Troy Dannen and now, the NIL efforts that are tied directly to the Nebraska football team and other programs are getting better every day. In fact, according to On3, those efforts have seen the Huskers climb the ladder and become one of the best in the country.
Nebraska football rising to dominance quickly
Pete Nakos put together a ranking of what he believes to be the Top 15 NIL programs in the college sports world and the Huskers are quite a bit higher than most would expect. In fact, according to these numbers, NU is the No. 8 NIL program in the country.
It’s of course, worth pointing out that it’s always going to be hard to be precise about this kind of thing. There isn’t a real tracker of NIL dollars. Most of it is best guess based on certain factors.
However, based on Nako’s factors, it’s not just that Nebraska is inside the Top 10. It’s how quickly they got there.
NU’s 1890 Initiative was ranked 19th in the country just a year ago. Now, as Nakos reports, other Big Ten NIL operates are calling what the Cornhuskers have the “gold standard.”
With NU being ranked No. 8, there are few teams in the conference that are better. In fact, according to these rankings only Ohio State (No. 1) and Oregon (No. 4) are better in the Big Ten.
That bodes well for Nebraska football. Now the program just needs to start winning to pair with its NIL rise to really get things cooking. That starts on Saturday against UTEP.