Utah’s first officially endorsed NIL collective, the Crimson Collective, named its CEO this week: former Utah deputy athletic director Kyle Brennan.
Brennan, a former assistant athletics director at the U., will now oversee the football program’s main name, image, and likeness fundraising arm — an operation that could be crucial to the Utes’ future recruiting efforts.
But first, he will have to answer questions about his past as the athletics director at Illinois State, particularly as it relates to how he handled donor money.
In April, Brennan abruptly resigned as the AD, a position he’d held since 2021. The resignation came amid reports that Brennan misused funds during a donor trip to Indianapolis in 2021 for the Big Ten championship.
According to The Pentagraph, Brennan reportedly spent $23,000 on the trip as he and a top donor went to a football game, a strip club and stayed at a hotel overnight. Brennan filed the expense under “donor stewardship,” according to the report. The trip was called into question for potential violations of policies that prohibited “lavish” or “extravagant” spending on donor trips.
“That was part of [why I resigned],” Brennan told The Salt Lake Tribune. “I mean, it’s a full-scope decision. So I mean, that was part of it. Having different leadership was the biggest part of it for me.” ISU had three university presidents during Brennan’s time there.
“You know, it’s been hard,” he continued. “A lot of things have been written and said that aren’t accurate. And it’s hard. We don’t have an opportunity in the moment to fight back. That has been very trying for me and my family, but we’ve learned some valuable lessons.”
Brennan declined to get into specifics about what he believes has been reported inaccurately. But he admitted there could be some questions from Utah donors about the situation, especially as he steps into a role that directly deals with allocating funds.
“We will find out,” Brennan said. “Yeah, I don’t know how that’s going to go. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll have an open and honest conversation with donors about anything [they] want to talk about. But I feel strongly that the people in the state, people in the athletic department, they know what I’m about. I spent 14 years here” before going to Illinois State.
Brennan said the collective did a full review of what happened at ISU. Still, Brennan admitted he might have pushed too hard for donations and change at ISU.
“You know, I think that a lot of times in fundraising you just get so driven by wanting that end result that you push maybe more than you should to try and get there,” he said. “And I really learned that from my time [there]. That if it’s meant to be, it will come if you do things the right way. And so I really have taken that from that experience, and we will apply it here.”
How much money will it take to compete in the football NIL space?
The Crimson Collective is centered on the football program right now. That scope could eventually expand to include other sports at the university, Brennan said, but there are no concrete plans yet. He will talk to other coaches in the next few weeks.
For now, Brennan’s attention will be on keeping pace in the college football NIL space. Brennan declined to say how much money it would take for Utah to remain competitive with the other top teams in the country. Generally speaking, he said the value would have to be “substantial.”
“It’s going to have to be substantial and we have to be cognizant of that fact,” he said. “Because money that goes to NIL or the collective, means it’s not going to something else. For example, [Utah AD Mark] Harlan wants to build a baseball stadium, right? So we’ve got to balance those needs with this as well. So I don’t have a number for [how much money the collective needs to raise]. I will say that it’s going to take a lot of cooperation between athletics and the collective in order to make it happen. We all have the same goal, but we have different agendas sometimes on things we need to get done.”
Brennan has spoken with Utah football coach Kyle Whittingham about NIL. Whittingham was the one who suggested Brennan apply to be the CEO of the collective, Brennan said.
“I probably talked to Kyle about four or five times, and I could tell from him how important this is,” Brennan said. “I remember earlier this year, there was an article where he said the top 25 teams are soon going to be the top 25 NIL producers. That’s how you’re going to be successful. And I think he’s right. So he’s very passionate about this and wants to do everything he can to put his best foot forward with his potential players and his current team. So our job is to put him in a position to be successful.”
He said the goal of the collective will be to put Utah at the top of the Pac-12 in terms of NIL money. He declined to say where Utah currently stood in the conference.
“I don’t have a great sense of that yet. But that’s one of my things I need to do,” he said. “But in talking to people, in particular [Whittingham], he feels we’re doing a really good job. He bases that on how we’ve had no transfers recently, or a slight, very small number. … So we feel really good, that good structures in place, we’ve been competitive within the Pac-12.”