What former Notre Dame running back Mick Assaf’s latest swath of entrepreneurship isn’t carries as much significance as what it is.

Especially for those who want to reduce the vast reach and complexity of college football’s name, image and likeness (NIL) movement to whether Notre Dame is moving toward a competitive disadvantage in football recruiting.

The Irish Players Club (irishplayersclub.com) isn’t constructed to change the NIL world — or save it. It’s more of a feel-good story in the NIL space about a former Irish player helping the current ones within the scope of what name, image and likeness was meant to be.

“To me what we’re really focused on doing is helping people get paid for their accomplishments and what they’re actually doing,” said Assaf, a December 2019 ND Mendoza College of Business grad and co-founder of IPC.

“So I understand where there is some criticism in this space for people who are getting paid for existing, because it’s not really in the spirit of NIL. The marketing world is about paying people so that they can do X, Y and Z for your brand or for your business to help you grow.

“So if there's no underlying business, it makes sense that people can be a little bit skeptical of NIL. But what we’ve been focused on doing is creating the infrastructure, so that college athletes can easily help businesses and help brands.”

Irish Players Club launches March 1, though it’s been active in some pre-launch activity to build momentum.

Here’s a quick thumbnail of how it will work.

• It starts with a collection of 5,555 unique leprechaun artwork NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that will be sold to the public. Current players will receive 75% of those profits. IPC has signed up more than 70% of the current ND football roster with a goal of reaching near 100%.

Those NFTs will enable fans to gain access to the current roster in various ways, outlined in the IPC’s road map. Those include raffles and giveaways, opportunities to connect digitally with players and former players, and in-person postgame tailgates and meet-and-greets.

• Why NFTs over simply charging cash for access?

“I think the reasons that NFTs are so great with what we’re doing with IPC is there’s proof of ownership in NFTs,” Assaf said. “And that allows that there’s a sense of community. And community is the most important piece of IPC — building community around the players.

“I think our team felt that if you make a donation or do other things of that nature, it doesn’t necessarily build a sense of community versus that ownership of an NFT, which really serves as an access pass to that community, so you can attend those events.”

Also invested in IPC are Bailey O’Sullivan and former Irish tight end Nic Weishar, co-founders with Assaf. Assaf’s brother, Hank Assaf, is also a key part of the team, while Richard Zheng leads the engineering team.

All of them are involved in the YOKE app, Mick Assaf’s initial venture into NIL, which he co-founded a month after graduation.

Its identity early on was a way for people to play video games with a celebrity or an athlete.

“As a whole our focus is to build technology that enables athletes to monetize their name, image and likeness. That’s kind of the one-sentence description of what we do at YOKE. And monetization comes in a few different ways.

“The inspiration of it comes mostly from personal experiences and talking to a lot of players I had played with at Notre Dame and understanding what their journey had been like in the marketing world.

What I saw was that outside of the top 5% most popular NFL players, there weren’t many opportunities available. So I thought about the landscape of college athletes and realized that if only the most popular NFL guys were getting significant deal flow, then for college athletes it’s probably going to be even more challenging.”

So passionate about creating technology to address it, Assaf — a walk-on from Atlanta who had earned a scholarship — turned down an opportunity to return for a fifth season in 2020. He rushed for 34 yards on nine carries in 2019.

Had NIL not been gaining momentum through court cases the NCAA continued to lose, Assaf very well could have gone into NFL scouting and player personnel. And he had an internship during college with the Rams to explore that.

“That would have been really cool,” he said. “But by my junior year, you could see NIL coming, and I was really excited about working with and helping college athletes. It drew me in and I continue to be excited about that. And to help Notre Dame athletes makes it even more special.”

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