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Five linemen, a star QB, a silver suitcase and a lawyer-turned-billionaire. How Miami’s biggest NIL deals operate
Manny Navarro
CORAL GABLES, Fla. — Tyler Van Dyke is standing in the pocket — only this time he’s not on the field holding a football.
The ACC’s Rookie of the Year is on the 10th floor of a pristine office building with a silver suitcase in his right hand.
Five University of Miami offensive linemen outfitted in black shirts, black pants and black aviator sunglasses are surrounding the Canes’ star quarterback as they walk down a hallway with a camera crew in front of them.
“We all have makeup on. It’s not my favorite thing to wear, I guess,” Van Dyke tells The Athletic with a grin.
He and his teammates spend four hours on a Friday afternoon — three days before the start of spring practice — taking direction from former Hurricanes shortstop Johnny Ruiz to film a 60- to 90-second commercial for LifeWallet, a company owned by locally based lawyer-turned-billionaire John H. Ruiz.
“I think we’re doing the Ole Miss video from five years ago,” Van Dyke continued. “The linemen follow the quarterback around to make sure he’s safe or whatever. It’ll be cool to replicate that video.”
All six college athletes in the commercial are getting paid good money to work for Ruiz, a Miami-born son of Cuban immigrants who attended classes at UM with Melvin Bratton, Alonzo Highsmith, Vinny Testaverde and other Canes greats in the mid-1980s.
Since December, Ruiz said he’s signed dozens of college athletes in different sports (swimming, baseball and golf) from Miami and FIU to name, image and likeness deals totaling more than $2 million.
Ruiz’s ex-wife is related to Mario Cristobal, but he keeps his distance from Miami’s coach and school administrators so as not to break any NCAA rules. Florida’s NIL laws – more stringent than other states – prohibit school employees at Miami from arranging NIL deals for athletes.
Ruiz, who filed a class-action lawsuit in January against the Florida High School Athletic Association to allow high school athletes to sign NIL deals, wants to help his alma mater get back to winning championships. He has plans to build the Hurricanes a 65,000-seat stadium at Tropical Park if voters and county commissioners allow him. But right now, with regard to NIL deals, he’s at the forefront of getting Miami’s football players paid.
Ruiz said he isn’t cutting corners, either. He makes the athletes he signs to NIL deals work for their pay — mostly by being actors in videos and using their social media accounts to promote his businesses. Not everyone makes the same amount. Ruiz staggers the contracts based on each player’s endorsement value.
The NCAA, which adopted bare-bone NIL laws on June 30, 2021, has yet to come down on any program for its NIL dealings but did ask Miami, BYU and Oregon for additional information related to previous team-wide NIL offers.
“My background is being an attorney and introducing evidence in court,” Ruiz said. “So I’m already thinking of what the evidence is that we’re putting together in case somebody asks a question as it relates to the rules. I’m not criticizing any other program, but I’ve not seen any other program in the country that can (compare to) how we do it. We provide everything that’s going on behind the scenes. I invite anybody and everybody that wants to come see what we do because I think they leave here learning, ‘Hey, this is the real deal. This is not something that they’re not putting resources into.’ We as a company are putting a ton of resources in it.
“In addition to the actual money being paid to the players, we’re spending millions behind the scenes to make it work with the commercials, the dissemination and the staff. I mean, we have probably about 25 to 30 people working in production, just for the NIL aspect of it. So there’s a lot that goes into it.”
Miami doesn’t have a collective putting six-figure packages together like Tennessee — not yet anyway. But the Canes do have more than a handful of local businessmen like Ruiz interested in helping the cause. Last year, Dan Lambert, a longtime Hurricanes booster who owns dozens of MMA gyms, signed all 85 of Miami’s scholarship players to NIL deals worth more than $540,000 to promote his business (the team-wide deal the NCAA was looking into).
Miami also has two locally based agencies, one led by Drew Rosenahus (Rosenhaus Sports) and the other by Malki Kawa (First Round Management), helping a large number of Hurricanes players in securing deals with butcher shops, restaurants and other South Florida businesses. Last week, second-year defensive lineman Leonard Taylor signed what Kawa said was the first car deal for a college athlete in the state.
Ruiz’s company, which also includes Cigarette Racing, has the most Miami players signed to NIL deals. There are at least 45 Hurricanes football players on the LifeWallet roster — from Van Dyke, who is making close to $1 million with more than 10 NIL deals — to long snapper Clay James. Records provided by MSP Recovery, LifeWallet’s parent company, show 55 athletes currently signed to NIL deals, but Ruiz said the number is closer to 80.
Lights, camera, action
Ruiz’s eldest son, Johnny, also a lawyer, is the chief operating officer of the family-owned Cigarette boat racing team, which also has NIL deals with a few other Hurricanes, including Van Dyke. Ruiz didn’t study film at Miami, but he watched his father produce his own local TV shows for 15 years.On this day, Johnny creates a mini-movie, from filming Van Dyke and his security team getting out of a large SUV to walking in and out of elevators and board rooms in an office building. His father owns two floors in the building and has more than 60,000 square feet of office space to use.
“The concept is to highlight a life data security team, a HIPAA compliant platform, which LifeWallet is,” explains Ruiz, 27. “Obviously, the offensive line’s job is to protect the quarterback. Similarly, with LifeWallet, our data security system is intended to protect people’s information from the public. That’s the idea or pun within the commercial.
“These guys are awesome to work with, love doing it. It’s been a blast.”
The commercial begins with Van Dyke and his security team — which includes 6-7, 300-pound second-year freshman Michael McLaughlin, 6-3, 310-pound fourth-year junior Ousman Traore, and 6-5, 325-pound third-year freshman Jalen Rivers — picking up a suitcase from LifeWallet’s headquarters.
DJ Scaife, a 6-3, 310-pound All-ACC second-team guard with 40 career starts and 2,943 snaps played in his four seasons at Miami, walks into an elevator to Van Dyke’s right. Cleveland Reed, a 6-3, 334-pound fifth-year junior, who has played only 78 snaps in his college career, stands at Van Dyke’s left.
In real life, only Rivers, Scaife and Traore have started a game for Miami. But in this LifeWallet commercial, nobody knows that. The security guards all look tough to get past.
“It’s a great experience, a blessing,” said Reed, a former four-star recruit who has no other NIL deals yet according to his rep, Bruce Johnson, a former defensive back at Oregon. “I’m happy to be here. Being a security guard in a commercial isn’t hard. I get to protect guys like Tyler in real life.”
Johnny Ruiz was Miami’s starting shortstop his senior year in 2017. He batted .342 with four homers and 57 RBIs as a second baseman his junior year and helped two Hurricanes teams to the College World Series.
In Division 1 baseball, as many as 32 players can split 11.7 worth of scholarships. Ruiz never struggled financially but remembers the days when some of his less fortunate teammates would go to McDonald’s to eat off the dollar menu. LifeWallet has four Canes baseball players signed to deals: pitchers Carson Palmquist and Jake Garland; catcher Maxwell Romero and infielder Yohandy Morales.
“These commercials are fun because you get to see these kids enjoy it. They see the product afterward, see themselves,” Johnny Ruiz said. “It’s cool to give these kids something that will help their family. When you ask them what they’re using their money for, a lot of it is going to their families, parents, to help buy stuff they couldn’t afford before. Now they’re able to get better stuff. It enhances quality of life.”
Van Dyke, whose girlfriend, Miami golfer Morgan Pankow also has a deal with LifeWallet, said he’s invested most of his NIL money into stocks. He might use some of it for his golf outings.
Scaife said he puts his NIL earnings into savings “for the most part.”
“At least when I get to the league it won’t be the first time I have that much cash,” Scaife said. “NIL hasn’t changed me at all. I’ve been surviving without it. Having this kind of money now teaches me how to be more responsible.
Good representatives
As for the man bankrolling these NIL deals, that kind of attitude is what he wants to see from Miami’s players. Part of Ruiz’s thought process in signing athletes, he says, is getting them to respect a moral code. Ruiz said he doesn’t drink or do drugs and part of the contract the players sign is to be good representatives in their community.“What I want to see is how they evolve, how they mature, how they grow,” Ruiz said. “From my own personal connection with the kids, I want 10 years from now, 15 years from now to know that I had a very minute part in whatever it is that I could do for them. Because they’re going to grow up and they’re going to become either professional football players, or they’re going to be in the world of business or whatever it is. Then, maybe, they’ll be able to help me in the future. You just never know. Networking is very important.
“When we did our podcast (last month), one of them was actually crying, saying how he was able to get his mom transportation and make her life different. For somebody like that, who is now making $3,000, $4,000 a month, when they were counting their pennies, it’s a huge amount of money. One of them was telling us that he went to the gas station and had forgotten that he even had this money in his account. Before, he was measuring what he had just to put $10-$15 worth of gas into his car. Now, he has the money to fill the engine.”
Ruiz knows what that struggle was like for his parents, who fled Cuba for South Florida with his two older sisters in 1966. His father was a farmer. His mother was a beautician.
After Ruiz graduated from Miami, Ruiz earned his law degree from Nova Southeastern in 1991. He took cases involving insurance companies and pharmaceutical and medical devices, and then got into class action lawsuits. In the 1990s, he said he represented future NBA players Udonis Haslem and Steven Blake in their battle against the FHSAA when they were still in high school, and later fought for college athletes against the NCAA.
“I’ve always found those organizations to be monopolies and to simply kind of play by their own rules,” Ruiz said.
According to The Miami Herald, it was in 2009, while litigating large class action cases, that Ruiz figured out health insurers were using the wrong laws to try to recover money that was being lost through improper payments. That led to Ruiz establishing the MSP Recovery firm, which uses software to sift through claims and find instances where claims should have been paid by the responsible party instead of the government. Once those claims are identified, Ruiz and his team sue to pursue the recoveries, using the money to make clients whole and pay themselves.
The size of Ruiz’s fortune, though, increased considerably last year after his MSP Recovery group forged a reported $33 billion special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) deal, according to Bloomberg News.
Ruiz, who has given UM millions in the past and owns a $46 million mansion in Coral Gables, could soon become one of the wealthiest persons in the country. But he says he’s not ready to stop working. He said he goes to bed every night after 1 a.m. and is up four hours later.
“I’m happy with my kids. I’m happy about everything, but I’m not satisfied,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of mileage left and a lot of things that I will still want to accomplish and I have a lot of fight left in me, too. I’m not the type of guy that thinks like oh my god, all this has happened I’m stopping. There’s no way.”
Ruiz said he’s been doing it since he was 19. What keeps him up these days? Besides his work, being able to turn Tropical Park in southwest Miami into much more than the future home for the Hurricanes.
He sees space for UHealth buildings, an evacuation center, hotels, baseball fields, football fields, basketball courts, volleyball courts, swimming, rowing events, and even hockey.
“It’s a huge undertaking,” Ruiz said. “It’s a big property. It’s 265 acres. We want to make sure that we have all the right tools in there. People think of it as a stadium for the University of Miami. That’s probably about 10 percent of it.”
As for creating a collective, he said he’s had other business owners and organizations reach out to him to see about forming one, but he “probably won’t do it until next year at the earliest.”
“I don’t think the time is right yet,” Ruiz said. “This is uncharted territory for almost everybody in the country. I want to make sure we have everything in place and right and then I think next year, I can bring in tens of millions dollars from other organizations, too.”
… Miami taking care of the best players on the team only makes us look good in the eyes of recruits. Mario and Ruiz turned us into an elite program in one off-season 
