NIL is new. The Gator Collective was formed in 2021 by Eddie Rojas a former UF baseball player who happens to have a financial brokerage firm as his primary career. He formed the Gator Collective to assist UF players in all sports to find NIL deals and in some cases to act as a 3rd party. The Collective ... according to what I read on the Gator site ... relies on different primary boosters for financial funding support for each sport. For football there is a booster, Hugh Hathcock, that is the main backer along with a group of 'million dollar donor buddies". The collective acts as an agent, draws up contracts, negotiates deals, and gets booster pledges to fund the NIL deals. They do have "subscribers" that pay a monthly fee and that provides some revenue that the Collective uses either as donations to UF, to fund NIL deals, and cover "operating costs". The collective itself does not have significant assets and the way it theoretically operates to fund a big NIL deal is a). A booster or booster group agrees that they will fund up to X amount to cover an NIL then b). the GC acting as an agent negotiates the deal and executes a BINDING contract.
What apparently happened here is that the Gator Collective either had the pledge from the booster(s) to cover the Rashada NIL deal or Rojas THOUGHT he would get the pledge and went ahead on his own and executed the contract. No idea what actually happened. But in December the GC sent a Termination letter ... as an attempt to back out of the executed agreement ... and the stipulated initial "up front payment" was not made. The Collective failed to pay and is in default. Not a good look for the Gators. In Gainesville everybody is pointing fingers and Hugh Hathcock, the 'reported' donor who allegedly backed out, will not take phone calls (He owns Velocity Automotive a large car dealer service company).
) But the turds want everyone to believe they aren’t paying anyone .
