DawgmanRadio: A chat with Dawgs Unleashed's Joe Knight

Dawgman Radio: A Washington Huskies athletics podcast

Dawgman.com's Kim Grinolds took some time this week to catch up with Joe Knight, Executive Director of Dawgs Unleashed, the internal arm of the Washington Athletic Department that serves as an influencer marketing and NIL agency to increase revenue opportunities and business partnerships within the shifting landscape of collegiate athletics.

In short? They act as the matchmaker between Washington's student-athletes and opportunities to help maximize their NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) rights.

With the House settlement being signed off and agreed to as of June 6th, it means schools will now be able to pay their student-athletes directly. So now the UW student-athletes have two ways to make money; through the school's revenue sharing (which will be done for players playing football, basketball, softball and volleyball per UW AD Pat Chun) and through their NIL opportunities.

And that's where Knight and his staff step in to help navigate the UW student-athletes through this new landscape.

To start the podcast, Kim asked Joe to broadly define what Dawgs Unleashed will be doing, how they will work with UW's main donor collective - Montlake Futures - and what UW fans who are currently donating to Montlake Futures should expect moving forward as the collective's role is reduced and the role of creating NIL opportunities moves in-house. Joe also talks about what fans and donors can do if they want to get UW student-athletes involved with personal or corporate NIL opportunities.

And how is UW uniquely positioned to take advantage of their potential NIL marketplace within Seattle? Joe talks about that, as well as how important the new media marketing right deal struck with Learfield will help UW student-athletes in terms of generating additional NIL opportunities, and also clears up any confusion about what UW can do for true freshmen enrolling now and how the revenue sharing will look going forward. Is it true that a quarterback could make more than a kicker? It's clear that Jedd Fisch's 'Be A Pro' mantra extends into the realm of revenue share, but what will that mean in terms of dollars and cents for the players involved?

There is a lot to chew on here and Kim offers up some real-world examples that Joe expands on and offers clarity on. There's still so much that is brand-new in this post-House world regarding revenue sharing, NIL opportunities, and what will be kosher in terms of contracts that have to now go through the NIL Go clearinghouse. Are there multi-year NIL deals that have already been signed? For example, if they signed a two-year deal last year, does the second year of the deal now have to go through the NIL Go clearinghouse?

As we're already seeing and as should have been expected, legal challenges are already taking place.

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