Jacobs' small team includes Katie Darby, an employee of consulting firm Altius, who will be embedded with the athletic department as a "general manager" focused on finding and arranging endorsement deals for LSU athletes among other duties. "I anticipated things going a little bit more slowly," Jacobs said. The school also plans to facilitate those deals when possible - an idea that was antithetical to the NCAA's amateurism principles little more than a year ago. She is overseeing an NIL team that will expand its purview from education into building tools to make it easy for fans and brands to connect with their athletes.
Jacobs, a former tennis player at Auburn, was promoted last month from her compliance staff position to assistant athletic director of NIL and strategic initiatives. LSU is among the most progressive of many schools that are getting more involved with helping their athletes manage and maximize the opportunities for name, image and likeness endorsement deals. Her job - the overly-simplified description, at least - is to help them make money. Jacobs doesn't yet have a nameplate outside the door of her new office, but in the space of 90 minutes on a rainy Tuesday afternoon she has bounced from one locker room to the next to introduce herself to members of the volleyball and basketball teams to make sure they know who she is and what she does. She holds another in her hands, thumbing through emails and responding to text messages as she navigates her first week in a brand new role for the LSU athletic department. Taylor Jacobs is hustling down one of the many purple-and-gold lined hallways inside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in early August with a cell phone pinned between her ear and shoulder.