Editor’s Note
Welcome to Volume 26. Thanks to all of the new subscribers for joining us. No Huddle has a lot of really cool stuff in the works - stay tuned 👀.
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⚡The Highlight
Athlete's Thread Hiring Director of Sales with path to GM of College
Reach out if interested (more below)
🎙 In the Pocket
How I am seeing the field across sports, media, entertainment, wellness and CPG
Growing up outside of Boston and going to a NESCAC, I never had a big-time college team to root for (although Matt Ryan and Jared Dudley’s BC Eagles squads hold a special place in my heart). Because of that, I typically pick a few college QBs every year to watch closely and “root” for. As the last two decades have unfolded, I’ve watched many of those athletes - QBs most notably - morph from campus legends to full-blown brands of their own… sometimes even bigger than the school logo on the front of their jersey - shoutout to Tebow and Manziel.
What used to be a cult following built in a college town has become something else entirely: national audiences, social media empires, and (legal) commercial operations generating real money before they are even eligible to play at the next level. We are watching something unprecedented play out in real time. The dawn of a new era.
For deep dives into the college sports industry, history, and finances, I highly recommend subscribing to both At the Center and NIL Economics - two friends of the No Huddle program putting out some of the sharpest analysis on where college sports stands today and where it’s heading.
My take? The rules will keep changing, and it may be some time until we have a “new normal” in college sports. But the one variable that isn’t going anywhere is the audience and cultural power that these athletes have built - and their ability to monetize it.
Let’s think back to how we got here: No Huddle Vol. 2 broke down the NIL market when it felt like things were just getting off the ground. Since then, Opendorse's latest data projects the NIL market will exceed $2.75 billion in total spend (+22% YoY), with nearly $2 billion flowing directly to athletes. When you look deeper though, the disparity is jarring. Football commands 66% of the NIL market, 80% of deals go to male athletes, and most of the commercial spend still flows to the top 1% of players at the biggest programs. The infrastructure to help the rest is still being built, and that gap is where opportunity lives.
In No Huddle Vol. 10, we took a close look at Article 41, a company training student athletes to be brand-ready creators and execute campaigns with Fortune 500 companies. A41 athletes consistently generate engagement rates far above industry average, which says something important: athletes have built trust with their audiences in a way that paid ad campaigns and commercials can’t manufacture. The line between athlete and influencer is much thinner than most people realize, and it's tightening every year.
Few understood the athlete-as-creator thesis earlier than Overtime. Long before NIL was legal and streaming + short-form content were the norm, Overtime was building audiences around high school and college athletes on Instagram and YouTube - treating student athletes as the emerging media properties they were. Their model was simple and so far ahead of its time: athlete content performs, fans follow players not just teams, and attention compounds. When NIL became legal, Overtime doubled down by launching a dedicated College Athlete Creator Studio and committing over $1mm to NIL content partnerships to build a scalable athlete-as-creator model.
Let’s add one more dimension to the athlete branding landscape: collectibles.
No Huddle Vol. 5 covered the collectibles market when it was already surging - $30bn+ in sports collectibles alone, with projections north of $270bn by 2035. Since then, the market has only accelerated. Back in July 2025, I wrote: “the next hotbed in the collectibles space will be college sports. Buzz (and money) continues to pour in, and companies like NIL FANBOX offer unique ways for college athletes and athletic departments to connect with and monetize their devout fanbases.”
That prediction is playing out now.
The same athlete who has 200,000 TikTok followers, an NIL deal with a regional brand, and upside is also someone fans want a piece of. Something tangible. Something that says: I was watching before everyone else. And that doesn’t have to be a football or basketball player.
The convergence of NIL, the creator economy, and the collectibles boom isn't a coincidence. It's the same consumer behavior expressing itself in different formats. Fans want to be close to athletes. Platforms that connect all three threads - content, commerce, and community - are in a uniquely powerful position to define what this new era looks like.
And that’s exactly what Athlete’s Thread is building.
📺 The Watch List
A mini investment memo on the stars of tomorrow
The Company: Athlete's Thread
The Business in a tweet: Athlete's Thread is the officially licensed NIL platform for athletes across their entire career. Think Fanatics, but built around the athlete - not the fan - from high school through alumni.
The 101:
Industry: Sports Technology / NIL Commerce & Licensing / Athlete Lifecycle Platform
Headquarters: New York, NY
Year Founded: 2013
Founding Team/Current Leadership:
Luke McGurrin (Co-Founder & CMO) — Leads marketing and growth, finance, and athlete relations
Karthik Shanadi (Co-Founder & CEO) — Leads Sales, product, engineering, and business architecture.
Luke and Karthik founded the company as Greek House in 2013 while at the University of Florida and built it from a dorm-room idea into a nationally licensed platform serving 55,000+ athletes across 400+ universities. They have 13 years of operating history and numerous business accolades.
Employees: 70
Fundraising Status:
Bootstrapped, scaled to eight-figure annual revenue across 400+ university partnerships without outside institutional capital
Growth has been funded through revenue reinvestment and operational efficiency. Seven consecutive years on the Inc. 5000 list
Business Model:
Product-sale revenue across four verticals:
Merchandise (custom apparel via DTC, wholesale through partners like Follett and Rally House, and dropship through Fanatics and Amazon)
Collectibles (Champion's Deck trading cards)
Brand Partnerships (brokered NIL activations)
Athlete Platform (personal CMS sites): an asset-light, print-on-demand model with no inventory risk that allows athletes to earn NIL payouts on every transaction
Traction:
Athletes on platform: 55,000+ opted in across 400+ universities - including 98% of Power 4 programs
Licensing footprint: NCAA officially licensed, Heisman Trophy Trust officially licensed, and 400+ universities.
Track record: Eight-figure annual revenue, 7x Inc. 5000, 8x Gator 100
Most notable recent partnership: Launched Trading Card Product Offering in January 2026 and they have since added 230 teams. During this time they also became officially licensed with the NCAA, creating many first-of-their-kind NCAA Championship event trading card sets including the Michigan Men’s Basketball National Champions (see photo)
Strategic Growth: Opened hiring for its first Director of College Sales, a clear sign the company is professionalizing its sales org and moving beyond the founder-led motion as it builds out dedicated leadership for each stage of the athlete lifecycle
If you are interested in learning more about the Director of College Sales opening or other opportunities at Athlete’s Thread, reach out to [email protected] or apply through LinkedIn.
Deep Dive:
Pros:
The lifecycle moat: Every competitor in this space is locked to one stage (see full comp set below):
NIL Store and Influxer = college merch
ONIT = college trading cards
Fanatics = fan commerce
Athlete's Thread is the only platform structurally built to follow an athlete from high school through college, pro, and alumni. The same account, same data, and a truly compounding relationship
Broadest licensing footprint in NIL: Athlete’s Thread is NCAA licensed, Heisman licensed, and licensed with 400+ schools. This is a structural advantage that late movers cannot easily replicate
13 years of operating history: 55,000+ athletes, 400+ schools, eight-figure revenue. No other NIL platform has been around that long. When NIL went live in 2021, Athlete's Thread already had the rails built and has simply executed on it
Asset-light and built for speed. AI-powered design plus print-on-demand means no inventory risk. A 70-person team is currently serving 55K+ athletes. When cultural moments like March Madness hit, they can activate in days rather than quarters. This is another competitive advantage that matters in a moment-driven business
Bootstrapped and profitable: Rare and beyond impressive to see. Scaling to eight figures without institutional capital in a complex space is a strong signal
Cons:
The full lifecycle vision is still being built. The founders' prior experience with expansion shaped the methodical sequencing they use today. College merch is the engine and each new stage (high school, pro) gets dedicated leadership before the next one opens. I really like that approach, but no matter what, scaling out and up is always a challenge
Regulatory volatility is an ongoing overhang. As we covered in The Highlight, the NIL landscape is in active flux. Athlete's Thread's licensing infrastructure is a hedge against some of this, but no operator in this space is immune to rule changes that could restructure how athletes get paid or how commerce is conducted through school-affiliated channels.
Comparables:
📶The Signal (No Huddle’s Take):
For me, the business case for Athlete's Thread starts with a simple observation: the NIL era created a massive new market, but the infrastructure to serve it was built in pieces and by companies trying to jump on a moving train one stage, one product, one partnership at a time. Athlete's Thread used their early days as a business to make a fundamentally different bet: build a lifecycle platform, get the licensing right from day one, and let the infrastructure compound across every stage an athlete moves through. Sign me up.
NIL changed everything in 2021. But I believe the companies that are actually positioned to win over the next decade will be the ones that had the plumbing in place, the relationships already built, and the operational discipline to execute a vision rather than sprint at all of it at once. Athlete's Thread does all that.
That bet is starting to pay off in ways that are hard to replicate. The licensing stack is now a structural moat. These relationships take years and operational trust to build, and new entrants cannot buy their way in (or if they do, they don’t have the trust). And the print-on-demand, asset-light model means Athlete's Thread can activate across thousands of athletes without the inventory exposure that would otherwise make the math difficult.
I am extra bullish on the lifecycle thesis. The sports industry talks a lot about owning the fan relationship, and Athlete's Thread is building the playbook for owning the athlete relationship. From the first piece of gear a high school recruit puts their name on, to the trading card a minor leaguer signs for collectors, to the alumni merch a retired star sells to the fans who still follow them. That’s a compounding asset and an LTV story unlike anything else in the space.
No Huddle sees hundreds of startups (many in the ideation stage) with roadmaps to success. Athlete's Thread is well past its first checkpoints, already having executed their core thesis and now expanding to new heights. They are hiring in critical functions to scale, and building infrastructure that gets harder to replicate every year they operate.
No Huddle fully expects Athlete’s Thread to be a name the sports business world is talking about for a long time.
If you’re interested in learning more or meeting the Athlete’s Thread team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].
From the archive
If this week’s Athlete's Thread issue caught your attention, it is worth revisiting our earlier No Huddle feature on Opendorse. That piece explored the first wave of athlete-rights and monetization infrastructure, and it offers a useful backdrop for understanding how the market is now expanding beyond headline NIL moments and toward longer-term athlete relationship ownership.
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