Most NIL coverage follows the same handful of names. The Heisman contender, the five star recruit, the quarterback with a million followers. That’s where the biggest checks go, and it’s where the luxury brands have started to look too.
Food is the exception. It’s the one category where the deals routinely skip past the stars entirely, and the numbers are not close.
Chipotle fed nearly 2,000 athletes at once
In August 2025, Chipotle expanded a program it had started the year before at Ohio State to include Florida and Georgia. Every athlete at all three schools got a customized card good for one free entrée a week for 15 weeks.
Not the football team. Not the starters. Every scholarship athlete and every walk on, across every sport, at three universities. That came to nearly 2,000 people. The company’s brand officer described the goal as democratizing NIL, and the structure matches it: a swimmer who has never been recognized on campus got the same card as the starting quarterback.
The selection process is worth understanding, because it says something about how these deals actually get made. Chipotle didn’t pick the schools for their trophy cases. It picked them off its own consumption data, having found that 98 percent of Ohio State athletes, 94 percent of Florida athletes and 80 percent of Georgia athletes were already regular customers. The partnerships were built through each school’s multimedia rights holder rather than negotiated athlete by athlete, which is what made the scale possible in the first place.
The campaign still had a marquee element. Ads that season featured Ohio State’s Caleb Downs, Sonny Styles and Carnell Tate, and a second spot with Florida quarterback DJ Lagway. But the ads were the visible part of a program whose real weight sat underneath, with hundreds of athletes nobody was making commercials about.
We went deeper on this one in Why Chipotle NIL Deals Are a Game Changer.
Popeyes went the other way on purpose
A few weeks later, Popeyes did something stranger and, in its own way, more interesting.
The chain built a roster of ten college football players and gave each one a personalized promo code. Fans used the codes, the athlete with the most redemptions won a catered tailgate on campus during rivalry week, and every player on the roster was paid to participate with additional rewards available for their schools.
The selection is the part worth sitting with. A company spokesperson said the ten were chosen specifically because they were expected to move from backup roles in 2024 into bigger ones in 2025. Social following was not a factor. Neither was talent ranking or the size of the school’s brand. The roster included players from Ohio State, LSU, Michigan and Clemson alongside athletes from Kennesaw State, Old Dominion, Boise State and Miami of Ohio.
That is a brand deliberately betting on athletes before the market notices them. It’s rare, and it’s the closest thing in corporate NIL to what fans do naturally.
The local version has been running the whole time
None of this started in 2025. Food has been the most democratic corner of NIL since the beginning, mostly because the businesses involved are small enough to say yes.
Offensive lines have signed with barbecue joints. Kickers and receivers have had burgers and pizzas named after them at campus bars. There was a run of deals built entirely on wordplay, including a candy brand that signed a dozen athletes for no reason other than sharing its name, and a mustard company that a running back turned into his own label. One receiver brought his dog into the deal and got them both sponsored by a pet retailer.
Most of those athletes were never national names. A few went on to the NFL, most didn’t, and the deals worked anyway, because a restaurant three blocks from campus doesn’t need a Heisman finalist. It needs the guy the students actually recognize.
Why food reaches where luxury doesn’t
The difference is inventory and margin.
A watch dealer moving pieces that run from several thousand dollars to well over thirty needs one athlete with enormous reach to justify the spend. The math only works at the top of the market. A restaurant is running the opposite equation. Its product costs a few dollars, its customers are students, and its best possible endorser is somebody those students see in class.
That’s why food NIL scales down and luxury NIL doesn’t, and it’s why the food category has quietly done more for the middle of the roster than any other kind of deal.
What it means for everyone else
Here’s the part that matters. Chipotle and Popeyes proved something useful: reaching past the stars is not charity and it isn’t bad business. It worked because those brands had a reason to care about ordinary athletes, and they went and found them.
Most companies don’t have that reason. A national brand has no way to identify the D2 volleyball player who is genuinely beloved on her campus, and no efficient way to reach her if it did.
Fans already know who she is.
That’s the whole idea behind RallyFuel. Fans help athletes directly. No brand has to notice first. No agency has to make a call. A restaurant found a way to feed 2,000 athletes at three schools, and there are roughly half a million college athletes in this country who could use somebody in their corner.
