Justin King’s football journey took him from Gateway High School to Penn State, three NFL teams and into the XFL. It was a ride that included time as a player, major-college team staffer, league executive and, now, athlete advisory/development.
King, 37, has seen it all. His experiences as a highly-recruited, power-conference player in addition to being a recruiting coordinator at Penn State and manager of football operations for the XFL ultimately get applied on a daily basis in King’s current gig running the L.I.G. Sports Group.
King’s perspective on the world of sports is unique. So perhaps it’s not surprising that so, too, is his take on the covid-19 pandemic’s biggest impact on the industry.
“Covid, for me, highlighted the economic standpoint,” King said during a phone interview last month. “Now, we are looking at these players as assets. Now, we have to make moves as essentially asset managers instead of (through a lens of) amateurism of sports and the goal of everybody developing. That was the major transition that came out of covid.”
Forget the pandemic for a second. Ask yourself what has changed most in sports over the past half-decade. It’s difficult to argue that it’s come in major college athletics — notably, football (and to an extent, basketball).
Whereas for more than a century the concept of financially compensating players was frowned upon and outright illegal, beginning in 2021 the NCAA tacitly gave the idea its blessing via approval of the monetization of an athlete’s name, image and likeness (NIL).
This happened independent of covid, and the upcoming eventuality of outright paying players would have arrived at some point regardless of the pandemic, too. But it’s fair to say that the 2020 college football season was a tipping point in the reversal of attitudes regarding the issue, and it helped accelerate this era of pay-for-play’s arrival.
“It was a rose-colored glasses thing before,” said King, who founded L.I.G in 2021. “I don’t think most people realized that nothing (in a university athletics department) can operate without football.”
King in 2020 was working in the front office of the XFL, the spring pro league that was off to a successful start but was killed off by covid. King spent two years before the pandemic hit as recruiting coordinator at alma mater Penn State.
He saw how the budget for a big-time college football operation was running almost without regard to spending. And that was OK in the era when football was the proverbial cash cow that served as the benefactor for virtually every other college sport. But when NIL hit, suddenly more of that money had to stay in-house. The non-revenue sports, though, still needed their funding.
During the fall of 2020, most university classes were held remotely. The majority of college sports teams canceled or postponed their seasons.
The exception? Football. Billions of dollars in media-rights contracts were on the line, after all. Fans clamored to watch their favorite teams. And the already stretched-thin athletics departments at many colleges would have had an extremely difficult time making ends meet without the massive piles of revenue raked in by football.
Players and those who advocate for them saw this. It paved the way for the acceptance of the hundreds of millions in NIL dollars funneling toward the highest-profile players at the highest-profile football (and basketball) programs today. It also helped melt away decades-long resistance toward directly compensating athletes, something that is all but assured to begin soon in the biggest conferences.
“I absolutely think that (the covid season) was part of the changing of attitudes, in terms of realizing that college sports are not just entertainment,” said Ted Keith, assistant managing editor at Sports Business Journal. “They are economic engines that in some cases fuel entire university athletic departments and in some cases communities and even universities to a sense, and you can’t take that away.”