Players Health
Players Health, a firm specializing in sports risk management and insurance, today is set to unveil a handful of offerings and an artificial intelligence platform that could fill major needs for NIL collectives -- most notably, a policy that will help collectives cover their losses when players leave the programs they represent. As part of the rollout, it is also expected to announce a multi-year partnership with NIL platform Opendorse (exact financial details of the deal were not disclosed).
“If you're gonna ride a motorcycle without a helmet, that’s one thing. If you’re going to ride a motorcycle without insurance, that’s another,” said Blake Lawrence, Opendorse CEO and co-founder. “If you think about it, getting into the NIL business is a risk-reward [proposition]. We're trying to de-risk a little bit of it.”
The details of Players Health's new offerings center on two differing plans and an AI technology platform. Those include:
- PH Portal.AI: An AI-powered predictive analytics platform offering predictive analytics related to player movement and the transfer portal
- NIL Contract Protection: An insurance policy tailored for NIL Collectives and designed to limit their exposure when players leave for another school
- Critical Injury Protection: An insurance policy that will help cover tuition and NIL contract income in the event of season-ending or catastrophic injury to an athlete
NIL contract protection is the headliner of the bunch. NIL collectives’ investments can vary significantly from year-to-year, or even semester-to-semester, depending on which players choose to stick at certain programs given transfers are no longer being curbed by the NCAA. The idea with the policy offered by Players Health is if a player were to transfer, the collectives could file a claim with Players Health and be functionally reimbursed for the money paid to that athlete over their time with the program. Under the format that will be rolled out, collectives would pay somewhere between 4-10% of its total contracts in order to be insured, said Players Health CEO Tyrre Burks.
“Say a kid is making a half a million dollars and [a collective] really wants to get this kid, so they front-load the cash and then there's a set of deliverables that they have as the season gets closer,” Burks explained. “[The player] could transfer before the season ends and because they haven't violated any of the contractual obligations in the contract, there's nothing stopping them from being able to go. Now the collective is out of this cash. So we would insure that and make the collective whole, so that they can use the capital that they were going to deploy to go get another [athlete].”
The AI platform will help create valuations and premiums for collectives looking to use these policies. Data -- such as NIL deals, valuations, players' positions, transfer portal statistics and more -- can be married with AI technology to help value the risk of a given investment. Those scores can then be used to help look at a collective’s client base and, thus, determine how volatile or reliable that collective might be to insure.
Burks projected as the technology improves its accuracy it could also eventually be used in recruiting to help schools grappling with year-over-year roster retention, especially in college football, to project coming changes.
“We have every athlete specifically within football and men's and women's basketball in our database.” Burks said. “And then there's a set of data that we're also aggregating that's our own proprietary data that's making up what that transfer probability is. Right now, our model is at a 0.74 confidence rate and, hopefully by the end of this week, we'll be at a 0.80 -- so an 80% likelihood of who's going to transfer from one season to the next.”
The critical injury protection is the most athlete-facing of the three products. Insurance policies regarding athletes are not novel in the college space. However, they have largely revolved around the top 1% of athletes looking to protect their potential draft value.
The critical injury protection in this package, Burks noted, is designed to be affordable for all college athletes, projecting the costs associated with these policies between 1-4% of an athlete’s combined contract earnings and scholarship.
“This industry, they need something like [this]," Lawrence said of the NIL contract protection. "We're bringing it to market."
