Peter Iwuh

For a hundred years, college athletes generated billions of dollars and were forbidden from earning a cent of it. That rule ended. What replaced it is a market, and a market rewards whoever understands it first.

NIL stands for name, image and likeness. It is the legal right to be paid when somebody uses your name, your face or your reputation to sell something. College athletes now have it, which means an eighteen-year-old can sign brand deals while she is still in a dorm room.

That sounds like pure good news and it is not, quite. A right you do not know how to use is a right somebody else uses on you. The athletes with agents, lawyers and family connections moved first. Everybody else got the announcement.

Peter Iwuh founded Tykoon Sports, recognized as the first Black-owned NIL marketing agency, to put that infrastructure around athletes who did not inherit it. The firm handles AI-driven marketing, brand deals and apparel distribution, and it has partnered with brands including Ruffles and NBC Sports.

Read that as the same move Ray Charles made in 1959, one industry over. The talent was never the scarce part. Representation that works for you rather than around you is the scarce part.

NIL is the first time most young Black Americans encounter a contract that is genuinely about them. What they learn in that deal, about ownership, about percentages, about what a term sheet is, is what they carry into everything after. An agency that teaches while it represents is building something bigger than a client roster.

Ask three questions before anybody signs anything. Who owns the content after the campaign ends. What percentage is the agency taking and of what. And is this deal exclusive, meaning does it block every other offer this season. Credit, explained plainly is the other half of that education, because the first real money is where the first real mistakes happen.