By Nolan Livsey
When I grew up playing baseball, almost everyone I knew who got recruited had an “advisor,” not an agent. Usually someone MLBPA-certified, who wasn't putting anything into legal or contract terms until the player actually declared for the draft. The advisor's job was to make sure the player ended up making the most money possible, and that's a harder question than it sounds, because timing decides most of it.
Injuries happen. COVID happened and reshuffled entire draft classes. A kid who looks draft-ready in April can look completely different by June. An advisor might just as easily tell a player to go to college first, then help them navigate playing well enough to get there, or help with the transfer portal along the way. The job isn't to get a deal signed. It's to get the right decision made, whenever that turns out to be.
That distinction isn't just a baseball tradition. It's written into the rules. Under NCAA guidelines, an advisor can legally give a player advice on their market value, evaluate a proposed contract, and provide research on the draft process. What an advisor cannot do is contact or negotiate with a professional club on the player's behalf.
The moment someone crosses that line (reaching out to a team, arranging a workout, accepting anything of value tied to a future pro deal), they've stopped being an advisor and become an agent, and the player's NCAA eligibility is the thing at risk. It's a real, enforced line, not a technicality.
NIL runs into the same distinction, just under different labels. A sports agent is transaction-focused: negotiating deal terms, handling the legal and financial mechanics of a specific contract. A brand manager or NIL consultant plays the longer game: building a consistent presence, a message, and a strategy that holds up whether or not there's a deal in motion this week, without locking an athlete into an exclusive long-term agreement before anyone knows what their brand is even worth yet. Most young athletes are better served starting there, the same way most drafted high schoolers are better served by an advisor than an agent before they've even decided whether they're turning pro.
Is having an agent a bad thing? No. For the right athlete at the right time, it's exactly the right move. But it's worth understanding how that job actually gets paid, because it explains where an agent's attention naturally goes. Agent commissions on a playing contract are capped by most leagues: 3% in the NFL and NBA, with MLB and the NHL leaving it uncapped but still in a similar range by convention. Commissions on endorsement and marketing deals run higher, typically 10 to 20%, and aren't capped at all. Put those two facts together and the math is straightforward: the biggest, most reliable payday in that business is still the next playing contract for an athlete who already has real market value.
That's not a knock on any individual agent. It's just where the leverage and the incentive naturally sit.
It's also exactly why the biggest agencies, the CAAs and Excel Sports Managements of the world, build out separate in-house marketing divisions to handle the endorsement side at all, because the core agent function was never built around the slow, ongoing work of building a smaller or younger athlete's brand from scratch.
That's the gap. Most NIL activity isn't a career-making number. It's small and it's steady, the kind of thing that only turns into something real if someone's actually paying attention to it week after week, not just when there's a contract to close.
That's the role I sit in at Nolan Shaw Athlete Consulting. We handle the recruiting, the NIL strategy, and the sponsorships: the ongoing, whole-picture work. And when it's actually time for a contract, we outsource the agent for that specific piece, the same way a good baseball advisor hands things off the moment a player declares. We're an advisory firm built around everything outside the contract, because that's the part of an athlete's career that needs someone paying attention the other 51 weeks of the year, not just the one where a deal gets signed.
Former collegiate pitcher, coach, and now a recruiter and advisor. Nolan founded NSAC to make sure athletes have someone thinking about the whole career, not just the next deal.