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.
No agency identified Tommy Hamann. A fan did, with a phone.
Sometimes the qualification is just the name
Two September deals had nothing to do with stats. Penn State linebacker Caleb Bacon signed with the Pennsylvania Pork Producers Council, his second pork deal after Iowa State’s “Purchase Moore Hamann Bacon” campaign. Louisiana quarterback Lunch Winfield signed with Lunchables.
The Bacon deal is the one worth studying. A fan posted a photo on X of two Cyclones standing next to each other, Hamann and Bacon, and tagged the pork association. Its communications director texted his promotions staffer that night. Inside a month there was a deal: a thousand dollars each, plus a thousand dollars of pork donated in their names.
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. 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. Casey’s just put a number on that equation. The chain sold more than 32 million breakfast pizza slices before noon last fiscal year, which is the kind of volume that makes it cheap to be generous with a lot of people at once. We covered its Saturday deal separately in Casey’s Kickoff Deal Runs Through January.
Follow that math to its end and you reach the campus dining hall. In March, Chartwells, the contractor that runs Pitt Eats, announced what it billed as the foodservice industry’s first NIL pilot. Three women’s volleyball players were among the first in, and one designed the poke bowl now on the menu as the TT Bowl. Not the quarterback. A volleyball player, in a building she eats in anyway.
Volume makes generosity cheap, not inevitable. Go-Mart, a West Virginia convenience chain running on the same economics as Casey’s, extended its Marshall deal this month and spent all of it on a logo painted on the field, a tailgate lot, LED boards and next year’s baseball season. Both deals ran through the same multimedia rights machinery. Same category, same math, opposite choice.
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.
Almost nobody else has 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. Pitt’s vendor only found its volleyball players because it was already standing in their dining hall.
Everything from Fans already know who she is. onward stays as is.
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.
