Inside Tennessee's NIL 'Carwash' Day for College Athletes

Five years into the name, image and likeness (NIL) era, the business of college athletics bears little resemblance to the ad-and-tickets deals of the past. At the University of Tennessee in late July, Learfield, a multimedia and sponsorships company that works with hundreds of schools, hosted the first of many NIL media "carwash" days this fall, bringing together 29 brands and roughly 50 football players.

The event functioned like a rotating open house. Players in uniform moved between photo shoots on the indoor practice field — complete with props like a bag of potato chips — and curtained pop-up rooms for recording game-day content. In the Peyton Manning room, players recorded promotions for companies including Uber Eats, Pilot, Food City, a bank and a roofing company. In the Virtual Reality Lab, athletes read ad scripts in front of a green screen, teleprompter and lights.

Brandon Parks, the Learfield representative at Tennessee, said the company had an 11-person team working the two-day event, complete with radio and TV scripts and props supplied by partner companies. Content from the sessions typically starts appearing in August.

The Tennessee event was the first of 58 such NIL media days planned this fall for Learfield partner schools, involving about 1,500 athletes. Across the full academic year and all sports, the company expects to hold up to 200 such days.

Grant Jones, Learfield's director of content, said the company launched its first media day two years ago at Ohio State and now sees even smaller schools adopting similar setups. He predicted the model would expand to 300 to 400 days a year within two to three years, modeled partly on the media days he saw at the NFL Players Association.

Athletes elsewhere describe similar routines. Louisville quarterback Lincoln Kienholz, who reportedly has a six-figure deal with Adidas, said his NIL obligations include appearances at a construction company, the Louisville Thoroughbred Society and card signings.

Opendorse, a NIL monetization platform, projects that NIL spending will reach $4.5 billion in the 2026-27 academic year, with "media creation" deals — athletes producing branded video content — the most common arrangement.