Featured Image: Hardy M. Graham Stadium is pictured on Sept. 13, 2025 during the Skyhawks football home opener against the SIU Salukis. (Pacer Photo/Kayli Plotner)

On May 7, 2025, the final House v. NCAA settlement decided colleges could directly pay athletes as opposed to the outside collectives and deals needed previously–a decision set to change the outlook of collegiate athletics for at least the next 10 years that the agreement is in place. 

Major changes include scholarship-based roster limits and internal revenue sharing, two fronts that will have a large impact on how UT Martin athletics approach recruiting. 

Tasked with handling and ensuring that the Skyhawks are compliant with each new change on the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) front is Senior Associate Athletic Director for Internal Operations Ashley Bynum, who was hired in March of 2017. Bynum is a UTM alumnus as well as a licensed attorney after she earned her law degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2016. After graduation, Bynum was a private practice lawyer before she was approached by UTM about her current position. 

“A lot of the things that have to be done from the compliance aspect look very similar to what I was doing in private practice. Just instead of going before a judge, we’re talking to the NCAA,” said Bynum. “So, it really piqued my interest because I am a huge sports fan. I love watching sports. And I played sports growing up. I did not play in college, but I’ve just always loved athletics. And I’ve always loved school. So, to have the opportunity to be in an environment where I’m working directly with athletes, I’m in a school setting and I still get to, you know, exercise those legal skills that I have. It really felt like this job was kind of made for me.” 

A big win for schools like UTM at the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) level was the introduction of roster spots and a salary cap instead of scholarship limitations on athletics.  

Moving forward, the NCAA will determine a cap each year for the amount of revenue-share money universities can allocate to athletes—$22 million is where it will start with a number near $30 million being possible near the end of the 10-year agreement. 

Previously, a roster was limited by the number of scholarships and nearly unlimited in terms of salary allocated to the roster, meaning teams in the SEC could recruit players for walk-on spots but still pay them like a scholarship player through external NIL collectives. Now if a school opts into the rev-share agreement, their roster for a football team will be 105 spots and each player could receive a full scholarship or each player could be a walk-on, instead of the previous 85 spots with a limit of 63 scholarships. This means schools will have to allocate money throughout the roster and entire athletic departments more carefully.  

“So now, whether you’re at UTM, MTSU, the University of Tennessee, or wherever, you’ve got 105 football players on the team. So, we’ve limited schools’ ability to kind of hoard those players and give them money in ways that are not scholarship dollars. So, we can see that trickle down again, and we’ve got quality players that are getting opportunities across the board as opposed to everybody’s at Tennessee,” Bynum said. “So that really helps us, because that gives us the opportunity to get some of that higher talent because there’s [such] limited spots at the bigger schools.” 

The larger schools will be able to fund their programs and hit the cap pretty easily, but for FCS schools like UT Martin, the numbers won’t come close to the cap. UT Martin will instead go through donors, fundraisers and other revenue generating avenues to fund what they can spend on players. 

“What we don’t want to do is lose players to schools in the mid-major range that can give them a couple thousand dollars that we might not be able to give them,” Bynum said. “So we’ve got to find a way to give them that couple thousand dollars so that that UTM becomes a valid option for them as opposed to a Youngstown State or a Western Kentucky or something like that, where they’ve got a little more resources than us and could make a bigger offer than we could in most circumstances.” 

Before the most recent ruling, athletes were able to be paid through NIL, however, it had to be from outside of the school. This came in the form of either local/national sponsorships or through NIL collectives. UT Martin has only had six athletes receive payment from an external collective partnered with the school. Most other UTM athletes get paid by outside sponsors. 

An example of this is someone like men’s basketball guard Damien King, who has a NIL deal with Pepsi/Crush that he does signings, photoshoots and has posters for. It was an opportunity King is grateful for.

“I took the contract home and it took me two days because you have to read through it and go through it with your parents and stuff so everything can look right,” said King. “And we read through it thoroughly and everything looked good and I said, ‘Yes.’ And within a month or two they got back to me and we had a photoshoot.”

King is currently the only athlete at UTM with a national external NIL deal, but Bynum hopes it opens the door for more opportunities down the road.  King says his teammates are happy for him.

“They always call me ‘Crush’ or ‘Mr. Crush’ or–AJ [Hopkins] actually came up with ‘Crush man’ and it just followed throughout the team,” said King. “Some will call me ‘Mr. OC’ for Orange Crush. They crack jokes about it all the time, send little funny pictures, memes with like crush bottles or them by my poster in the chat so it’s pretty fun.”

However, for an athlete to be paid, they don’t need to have a corporate sponsor anymore. Instead, they can receive payments from the school on a contract. Contracts are currently being drafted by UT Martin with the intention of having them ready for execution by April. Athletes, such as basketball players who have said they will return, will be signed with a signing bonus and a plan for what their payments would look like with revenue sharing through the 26-27 academic year. 

Athletes on these contracts will be paid quarterly through direct deposit, and the athlete will register with the university as a contract employee. 

Through these revenue share agreements, the athletic department has the ability to adjust payments; similar to how a pro athlete can be fined for certain actions according to their contract. 

“In these revenue share agreements, what we’re doing is we’re identifying the values and standards that we want these athletes to uphold. If they don’t meet those values in standards, we are able to adjust the payments that they’re getting,” Bynum said. “So, somebody gets a DUI, you’re not getting your payment for this semester. Even something as little as late to practice. We could cut their money for that.” 

With an increased role in the revenue of the school also comes an increased responsibility for the athletes that most people might not think of like taxes and a transition from being paid to play a sport to the workforce. 

“When your career ends, that’s difficult. That’s very difficult for any athlete from a mental perspective. But now we’ve got athletes that are making, at big schools, millions of dollars, here at UTM, a reasonable salary. Some of them are making a reasonable salary doing it,” Bynum said. “And they go from that to not playing anymore to no income, and how do they transition, and how do they adapt to that? That’s my concern. And that’s why you’re seeing kids that are clinging to playing college ball for so long because they don’t know how to make that transition out of it or what’s next for them.”

Along with these massive changes in the NCAA landscape, the UTM athletic department faces an entirely different challenge. International students, such as the 13 international men’s basketball players, are limited on how much they can work in the U.S. This tasks Bynum with ensuring players are meeting visa requirements along with new NCAA rules. 

“It’s difficult based on our resource level. You know, you’ve got me trying to figure it out, you know, where other schools have you know, uh an entire office dedicated specifically to NIL, revenue share, contract drafting, things like that,” said Bynum. “I’ve got 17 other things I’m responsible for on top of that.” 

As the details of NIL continue to get worked out, it leaves smaller universities like UT Martin to sift through the details and learn what can and can’t be done despite not having the same resources of other larger schools. 

“The fact that it is something that we’re engaging with here at our level might be a surprise, but, you know, it’s what we have to do,” Bynum said. “We have to figure it out and we have to continue to stay on top of the trends and use it to our advantage as best as we can.”