Penn men’s basketball is utilizing a “collective” that allows individuals to contribute funds to the program’s players through legitimate name, image, and likeness opportunities and encouraging alumni-driven “paid internships” to financially support athletes, coach Fran McCaffery said during an online question and answer session on Thursday night.
The Ivy League allows “legitimate NIL,” which is defined as direct payments from third-party businesses in exchange for advertisements or endorsements. But the conference opposes collectives, which typically involve direct payouts to players for their athletic participation without requiring endorsements in return. On the call, McCaffery described Penn’s collective as one that would disperse NIL deals at “fair market value.”
“There are a number of people on this phone call that have already stepped up in a big way to help me because we can make some noise in the NIL space through true NIL opportunities and paid internships,” McCaffery said.
He added that “we can raise money in the collective, but then it has to be dispersed … for true NIL opportunities where somebody is legitimately profiting from their name, image, and likeness and basically funneled through legitimate business opportunities.”
These individual deals would constitute legitimate NIL, which the Ivy League currently allows. The use of a collective to fund these deals, though, would mark the first official mechanism by which individuals can contribute monetarily to Ivy League players. McCaffery said that around 30 people are currently involved with Penn’s initiative.
McCaffery informed alumni on the call that they are able to support players through paid internships in addition to offering NIL deals.
“The paid internships … can be a little bit higher. You can pay [the players] whatever you want, but it’s more important and it’s better for me if I can [say], ‘these aren’t no show jobs,’” McCaffery said. “We never had those. These are show up, learn, and grow [jobs].”
McCaffery explained that the internships are meant to function as a learning opportunity for student-athletes, allowing them to try working in industries they are unsure about pursuing.
Players can say “you know what, this isn’t for me, but I learned, and I worked, and I made a difference, and a Penn alum stepped up to make that happen,” McCaffery said.
A source close to Ivy League basketball — who was already familiar with Penn’s encouragement of alumni-driven internships and was granted anonymity for fear of retaliation — felt that the initiative could violate existing NCAA rules.
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“I do think it can be [an] NCAA issue, because claiming it’s an internship and having it be an amount that is beyond the normal internship should be an issue,” they wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian.
According to McCaffery, 1983 Wharton graduate and program alumnus Jonathan Schwartz and 1995 College graduate Michael Weisser run the collective, which is just one of the ways alumni can help support NIL.
Schwartz is a member of the Penn Athletics Board of Advisors and a co-chair for basketball of the Penn Champions Club. Weisser is also a member of the Penn basketball sports board, according to Penn’s alumni database.
Requests for comment were left with Schwartz, Weisser, Penn Athletics, and the Ivy League.
The Q&A webinar was hosted by 1978 College graduate Stan Greene and open to the Penn community. Attendees were mainly Penn basketball alumni.
In April, the DP reported that Penn men’s basketball was in talks to form an NIL collective in the coming years. At the time, one source indicated that Penn’s efforts were driven by alumni in an effort to retain top talent and maintain national competitiveness. The DP could not confirm at the time of publication if the collective that McCaffery described on Thursday was the same one previously reported.
Along with a blanket ban on collectives, the Ivy League opted out of the House v. NCAA settlement in January, which established a university-funded revenue model for athletes at schools that opted in. The conference argued that the overall “pay-for-play” structure would be antithetical to the Ivy League’s academic mission. The decision garnered significant blowback from current Penn athletes.
The conference then took another significant step on Sept. 15 to further itself from the "pay to play" era of college sports. It was reported that the eight Ivy athletic departments would begin signing attestations of independence for NIL payments to athletes over $2,000, ensuring that NIL deals with outside donors were not brokered by the signing institution’s athletic department in any way.
Penn has suffered three major transfer portal losses over the past three years: Ivy League Player of the Year Jordan Dingle in 2023, then-freshman star Tyler Perkins in 2024, and All-Ivy second team guard Sam Brown this spring. All three players transferred to larger programs that have NIL collectives in place — Dingle to St. John’s, Perkins to Villanova, and Brown to Davidson.
