Missouri’s high school athletes can make money. It’s paying off for Mizzou.

COLUMBIA, Mo. — In his four-year career as Missouri’s starting quarterback, Brady Cook has thrown for 7,603 yards and 43 touchdowns. He led the Tigers to a victory in last year’s Cotton Bowl. And even after an upset loss to Texas A&M last weekend, his team is in a position to compete for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

Perhaps even more impressive is Cook’s real estate portfolio, which stretches from Missouri to Georgia to Texas and includes interests in a half-dozen apartment complexes, a medical building and a retirement home. He chose his assets using the business acumen he developed at the University of Missouri, where he will receive a master’s degree in business administration in December. But the financing was thanks to his right arm.

“I am not going to tell you what I make,” said Cook, whose name, image and likeness, or NIL, deals are estimated to be worth $1.2 million annually, according to several databases. “But I will say that I have learned more about the business of business in the last year than any other time in my life.”

It is the early days of the NIL era, which allows college athletes to earn money from their athletic talents. But more than $1.7 billion is already flooding through this burgeoning economy — 80% of it via collectives, which funnel booster money to players.

The University of Missouri has created one of the most transparent mechanisms to make sure its student-athletes get paid and paid well, with the help of the state Legislature. Most donor-funded collectives raise a majority of their dollars from boosters, but in Missouri, a state law has allowed the university to create and fund a marketing agency, called Every True Tiger, that distributes money to its athletes.

The law also allows in-state athletes to begin profiting from endorsement deals while in high school, as long as they sign a letter of intent to attend a public university in Missouri, and it prohibits the NCAA from investigating signees over their NIL benefits.

The Mizzou Model, as it is known, has paid immediate dividends.

Last year, the Tigers won 11 games for the first time since 2014 in the highly competitive (and funded) Southeastern Conference and defeated perennial Big Ten power Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl.

Flush with cash, Missouri was able to recruit receiver Luther Burden III, a likely top-10 pick in next year’s NFL draft; attract blue-chip players in the transfer portal; and sign and pay Williams Nwaneri, one of the best defensive prospects in the nation, while he was still in high school in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

“I mean, if it’s not for NIL, obviously we wouldn’t have gotten some elite players out of the portal and to have kept others in school,” Missouri’s head coach, Eliah Drinkwitz, said. “I would just say that we embraced new realities of college football and understood that it could be a competitive advantage for us to be aggressive in that space. It absolutely has contributed to our success.”

Kurtis Gregory, a state representative who helped write the law, is a former offensive lineman for Missouri and understands the time and physical commitment that college football demands. He is also aware of the billions of dollars that players have generated for Missouri and other universities with big-time football programs.

“If I had gone to the University of Missouri to play piano, I could still do concerts and get paid, or record and get paid,” Gregory said. “But I had a teammate who was a pretty good rapper, and he couldn’t put a song out on Spotify and get paid for it, even though it had nothing to do with his athletic ability. That never was fair.”

Gregory and his colleagues decided to write a law that was as good for the Tigers’ athletic program as it was for its players.

“Everything about recruiting is an inducement,” he said. “Telling a kid we’re going to have a nice, new locker room next year, or a new weight room. Now, they can make money. We want them to make the most they can. We want our school to win. So we put in the framework that would accomplish both goals.”

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” ethos that existed before NIL deals, which led to recruiting scandals involving deep-pocketed boosters who paid players under the table, is over. This brave new college sports era has put a price tag on team building and already altered the way coaches speak.

Last month, Oklahoma State’s head coach, Mike Gundy, was asked how linebacker Obi Ezeigbo had transferred from Gannon University, which plays in a lower division of college football, to his program. He cited the bottom line.

“He was a good buy and a really quality young man that had had success and has physical characteristics we can work with and develop,” Gundy told reporters. “We saw some things we felt like we could develop into a good player at this level, and it wasn’t going to cost us the money we didn’t have.”

In the Mizzou Model, Drinkwitz, the head coach, is the clear chief executive of Tiger Football Inc. He has a budget and knows the going rate for each position in the SEC: $1 million for a quarterback and $710,000 for a receiver. With the help of his staff, he identifies who might fill those spots.

By law, he is able to make a financial offer, and with the transient nature of members of a coaching staff, it behooves Drinkwitz to keep those exact numbers close to the vest so they don’t end up in the hands of a rival and eliminate Missouri’s leverage. The state law, along with the Every True Tiger agency, ensures that Drinkwitz will follow up on his promises.

The complexities of the era played out recently at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where quarterback Matthew Sluka quit over what had essentially been a salary dispute after leading the Runnin’ Rebels to a 3-0 start. Sluka, who had transferred from Holy Cross, said he never had received a $100,000 NIL payment that an assistant coach had promised. By leaving the school, Sluka preserved a year of eligibility and was free to find a better deal.

“This absolutely changes the player-coach relationship because there is a business negotiation that has to occur in order for a deal or a commitment to happen,” Drinkwitz said. “A negotiation is going to affect the personal relationship that you have. But I think that families and players are smart enough to realize that there is still a developmental piece and still a relationship piece.”

In fact, it was the relationship with Drinkwitz that kept Cook, Missouri’s quarterback, on campus after battling a shoulder injury and a tough 6-7 season in 2022.

“It can’t be all about the money,” Cook said. “You have to like the people you are competing for and competing with.”

Last year, Cook was the SEC football scholar-athlete of the year; this year he is putting the lessons of brand building and time management that he is learning in business school to work.

He is a pitchman for a national supplement company as well as a bank, a pizza chain and a real estate company in his hometown, St. Louis. Still, he made sure to create and produce all his content before the season started.

Cook’s biggest takeaway is the one that he hopes to apply next year and beyond in the NFL: Football is a business with a single currency that matters.

“You win games,” he said, “and you make more money.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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