To support off-season recruitment, LSU football receives $13 million in NIL subsidies.
Following a disappointing season for LSU football and losing top-quarterback recruit Bryce Underwood to Michigan, the Tigers stepped up their NIL game.
According to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, a group of donors made seven-figure contributions to raise $13 million in the weeks following the 2024 season. Among the group are private equity executive Holden Spaht, Pepper Rutland, Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves and Baton Rouge attorney Gordon McKernan.
Following a trend from other schools, LSU utilized funds from the group and an influx of individual contributions to the Tiger Athletic Foundation, the school’s fundraising arm, to haul in the top-rated transfer portal class and keep its high school signees together. The NIL collective, Bayou Traditions, plans to front load those payments before any revenue sharing legislation is put in place over the summer.
“We thought, ‘Let’s push all the chips in,'” Carlos Spaht, former co-manager of Bayou Traditions and Holden’s brother, said. “It’s not just because we want to perform better on the field and win a national championship, but the back-counting of these collective dollars will essentially allow revenue-share dollars to go further.”
Head coach Brian Kelly matched $1 million in contributions to the collective in an effort to encourage fans to make a difference following an 8-4 regular season. The response was over 4,000 individual NIL-specific donations to the Tiger Athletic Foundation. LSU raised more for NIL in the months following the season than the last three years combined.
Kelly spoke with the aforementioned high-level donors in December to be transparent about his team’s current state and what they need to make a postseason run. Spaht led the charge, driving involvement from Graves and others to set a new standard for NIL giving at LSU.
Per Carlos Spaht, Holden’s brother and the collective’s former co-manager, Spaht is a crazed LSU football fan who made multiple seven-figure contributions to fuel the team’s NIL efforts. Both grew up in Baton Rouge and witnessed their grandfather serve on the university’s board of supervisors.