Volume 32! The dog days of summer are here. Are you ready for some football?

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Back in Volume 30 I mentioned a show in the works. It’s coming to life now: The Colosseum launches this fall on YouTube with Joey Lindstrom as my co-host. Stay tuned.

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How I am seeing the field across sports, media, entertainment, wellness and CPG

Last week, I joined the guys over on the Clubhouse to talk all things No Huddle and sports business. One of the topics Brent, Dom, and I dove into was the domino effect of so many new millionaires being minted amidst this AI boom. SpaceX’s June IPO alone turned somewhere north of 4,400 employees into millionaires, and not just the executives - a welder who joined the company in 2015 at $28 an hour walked into that listing holding close to $880,000 worth of stock. Investors and early employees’ net worths skyrocketed right alongside them.

A group of newly minted millionaires we didn’t talk about? College athletes. Those SpaceX employees got their windfall with a comp team, a lockup schedule, a building full of people whose job was to explain it, and a rolodex of JPM private bankers eager for their business. College athletes get a direct deposit.

This season, a school can send $21.3 million directly to its athletes before a single outside NIL deal gets signed. College football players alone are projected to earn close to $2 billion this year. That is real, legal money landing in the accounts of 19-year-olds who may have never filed a tax return or taken a course on personal finance. Students are earning sums once reserved for trust-fund babies, college dropouts who started “The Facebook” and that guy down the hall who was “super early in a bunch of cryptos.” So what should a college athlete with a six-figure NIL check actually do with it? Schools have an obligation to make sure they know the answer.

I’ve written a version of this argument twice already. In Volume 25 with GameStock, the point was that financial literacy in this country is broken and that lower stakes competition could teach it better than any lecture ever has. In Volume 30 with LionStrike, it was that we legalized betting, monetized it, wired it into every screen we own, but never taught anybody how it actually works.

This time, the money is flowing directly to student-athletes - many of whom have never had to make high-stakes financial decisions. That is not a failure of character; it is a gap in the system.

It’s easy to look for a villain here and point fingers at the education system or the NCAA as an operation, but I don’t think there is one. The problem is not that universities lack finance courses or good intentions. It is that traditional education is not designed for a student receiving six-figure NIL payments, navigating 1099 income, and making consequential decisions while balancing a full athletic (and sometimes academic) schedule.

The mechanics don’t help either. These payments arrive as 1099s, not paychecks. Nothing gets withheld, nothing gets set aside, and no one sends a reminder in April. An athlete can do everything they were told to do and still be caught off guard by a bill nobody mentioned.

This isn’t only an athlete-specific issue, either. It’s the whole generation.

The creator economy is projected to reach $480 billion by 2027, nearly double its 2023 size. Its roughly 50 million creators are part of a market growing at a 10-20% annual clip, and while the money is unevenly distributed, there is little precedent for this much capital reaching young adults so quickly.

57% of Gen Z say they want to be influencers and Arizona State now has a Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation. As hilarious as it is as a sign of the times, I think it’s better to be early on this than late, and this news will be a huge draw for the Sun Devils admissions team.

On the flip side, college students have more ways to spend than ever: betting apps, trading platforms, buy now, pay later plans that split one purchase into four payments, and social media where an ad becomes an order in two clicks. Money may come in faster than ever, but it can go out just as fast. What has not gotten easier is knowing what to do with the money in the first place.

Athletes are the clearest version of the problem: young, suddenly liquid, publicly visible, and surrounded by people who want a piece of the upside. But they're really just the most known case of a generation-wide shift - every 19-year-old with a viral account and a 1099 is living some version of the same math, with money arriving faster than the knowledge to keep it. The difference is that athletes are concentrated inside institutions that already have the access, trust, and incentive to help them navigate it responsibly.

But the delivery is everything. It has to be practical, athlete-native, and available in a format they will actually choose to open - on their own time, from people who have lived the same NIL, tax, and financial decisions alongside their teammates.

Meet Final Whistle Wealth - a financial education and infrastructure platform built by two Wake Forest football players who lived this exact shift.

More below. 👇

A mini investment memo on the stars of tomorrow

The Company: Final Whistle Wealth

The Business in a tweet: Final Whistle Wealth is a financial education and infrastructure platform built for student-athletes navigating modern college athletics. Final Whistle Wealth combines short-form education, practical tools for irregular income, access to qualified financial professionals, and school-level engagement visibility - giving athletes ongoing financial support while helping athletic departments deliver it at scale.

The 101:

If you’re interested in learning more or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].

Business Model:

Traction:

Deep Dive:

Comparables:

FWW Differentiator: Final Whistle Wealth differentiates itself by leading with education and treating professional representation as an option an athlete can graduate into, rather than the product being sold on day one. Scout leads with money movement, Locker Room Finance leads with the event, the RIAs lead with the relationship. Final Whistle is trying to own the first eighteen months of an athlete’s financial life, even before there is anything to manage.

📶The Signal (No Huddle’s Take):

Almost everyone circling a college athlete’s money right now leads with the transaction. Sign here, we’ll represent you. Take this cash advance against your NIL earnings. Let us manage the account. The documented cases are ugly and only getting uglier. The proposed Protect College Sports Act of 2026 would cap agent fees at 5% and create a private right of action against fraudulent agents, which tells you roughly how bad the current state of play is.

Final Whistle inverts that. It shows up as a curriculum: lessons taught in a gamified but educational way, plus budgeting tools built for income that arrives in lumps. After that, a bench of vetted professionals the athlete can choose to reach out to and work with as their net worth, brand and tax liability grow.

Education first, options second. We can all agree that is the correct sequence morally, but I think it can also be the correct sequence commercially too because the athlete who understands what a fee is becomes a better client for everyone downstream. A 19-year-old who has been taught what 20% of a deal actually costs him is much harder to fleece, and Final Whistle is betting there is a business in being the company that taught them.

Financial literacy content for athletes is a topic that has been failing for thirty years, mostly because it is delivered by a stranger in a suit in a mandatory ninety-minute session between two-a-days at training camp or in the middle of a season when the team is squarely focused on the next game.

Athletes tune those sessions out because they are cookie-cutter and presented as something that is being forced upon them, not something they can learn about and choose to engage with. These conversations about money are happening across college campuses every day - in locker rooms, dorms, dining halls - but the students are not given proper resources they feel comfortable turning to. Final Whistle Wealth is here to change that.

And that’s where Quincy and Trent, having lived the issue themselves, come in. Both played Power Four football at Wake Forest right as this shift hit. They saw the need firsthand - not consultants who read about this problem in a deck, nor financial advisors chasing the next big whale. Getting a college kid to care about any of this is the hardest part of the whole category, but they know how to do it. And the message is already starting to resonate with schools - three are live on the platform today, with 20+ more athletic departments working through the pipeline behind them.

Now, there is competition out there. Scout and Teamworks both have systems that mimic aspects of what FWW does, and work with thousands of athletes already. Teamworks already has a deep footprint across college athletics and offers NIL-payment tools, tax-reserve accounts, and statements. However, where FWW can come in is with school-level engagement data. FWW’s school-level engagement dashboard could give athletic directors a clearer view of which athletes are engaging with financial education and where additional support is needed.

I’m also curious to see how they handle turnover that has become the new normal for college sports - whether that is from the open transfer portal, graduation, or coaches/admins jumping ship. Turnover could be a blessing in disguise for FWW, since champions of the platform may land at new schools every year and spread the word from the inside out.

The other thing I am closely watching is school budgets. In an era of revenue share, transfers and coaching buyouts, athletic department expenses have never been higher - and more scrutinized. The pitch to schools is similar to, but different from, that of athletes - it’s risk: an athlete who blows up financially, misses a tax bill, or signs with a bad-acting agent or financial advisor is a compliance problem, a retention problem, and increasingly a liability problem for the school. If you are interested in the finance side of college sports in today’s day and age, I highly recommend checking out Greg Chick’s platform and content - NILnomics.

I look forward to seeing the growth FWW has over the next school year. These issues will only become more apparent and critical for schools to figure out. FWW’s underlying bet is compelling: more legal money is moving through college athletics than ever before, much of it to student-athletes with little experience managing taxes, irregular income, contracts, or financial risk. That opportunity has also attracted an outsized share of bad actors.

As NIL earnings reshape the college experience, the question is not whether athletes need more financial support - it is whether schools will build it into the athlete experience early enough. Final Whistle Wealth is betting it can become the education and engagement layer that helps them do exactly that.

If you’re interested in learning more, or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].

If Final Whistle Wealth’s education-first approach caught your attention, revisit Volume 25 on GameStock. That issue examined how competition can turn financial concepts into active practice; Final Whistle applies the same behavior-first principle through athlete-specific lessons, practical tools, and continued engagement.

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