Northwestern opens its 2025 season on Saturday at Tulane. It will be the first game that the Wildcats will play without Jacob Schmidt being integrally involved with the program since 2007. That was the year Schmidt, the former executive director of TrueNU, arrived from Rhinelander, Wis., as a walkon freshman running back. After five years […]
Northwestern opens its 2025 season on Saturday at Tulane. It will be the first game that the Wildcats will play without Jacob Schmidt being integrally involved with the program since 2007.
That was the year Schmidt, the former executive director of TrueNU, arrived from Rhinelander, Wis., as a walkon freshman running back. After five years as a player, he became the director of player development for the program, and then the director of football operations.
In 2022, Schmidt technically left the program but stayed heavily involved by launching TrueNU and becoming its executive director. That was the collective formed in response to the NCAA rule change allowing athletes to be paid for their name, image and likeness, or NIL.
Northwestern was the last school in the Big Ten to establish a collective, but under Schmidt’s leadership TrueNU raised about $25 million and invested in athletes across all 21 varsity sports in the university’s athletic department. He helped keep star point guard Boo Buie at Northwestern for his final season in 2023-24, and he enabled Northwestern’s football team to go out and land an unprecedented 15 transfers this year, including star quarterback Preston Stone.
Now, however, another seismic change in the college landscape has left Schmidt without a job – and separated from the Wildcat football program for the first time since he was 18 years old.
The decision to shut down TrueNU
On July 1, the NCAA officially adopted revenue sharing as a means to pay players, rather than solely depending on third-party NIL deals. With the implementation of the House settlement, athletes are now allowed to be compensated by the universities themselves. To compete in Power Four sports, Northwestern committed to distributing $20.5 million to its athletes this year, which is the maximum allowed per the settlement terms.
As a result, TrueNU closed its doors at the start of this month – though Schmidt is still working to “officially disband” the organization. There is a lot of red tape to cut through, and Schmidt is jumping through all of the legal and financial hoops to close down the 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.
(TrueNU smartly ended all of the contracts they had with players on June 30 to make a clean break when the sport made the switch over to the revenue-sharing model.)
The purple runs deep in Schmidt. After months of collaborating with the athletics department and deciding to ultimately close the doors on TrueNU, he has nothing but gratitude for the partnership with the administration, the coaches and athletes who helped TrueNU succeed.
“I give thanks to the fans, the donors and the trustees,” said Schmidt in an exclusive conversation with WildcatReport. “Their passion allowed Northwestern to compete in this crazy new world of college athletics.”
Schmidt doesn’t begrudge Northwestern for shutting down TrueNU. The rules of engagement have changed and he accepts it.
TrueNU was built as a charitable organization that partnered with local charities. Northwestern athletes performed services for charities and community partners – appearances, camps, signings, etc. – and TrueNU paid them for it.
NIL deals will be still be part of the new college landscape, but now those deals will be for commercial entities. Deals must have a real business purpose and will be reviewed by NIL Go, an NIL clearinghouse managed by Deloitte, to ensure they are legitimate.
Northwestern athletic director Mark Jackson explained his reasons for disbanding TrueNU in a recent story published by Matt Fortuna on The Inside Zone. Jackson praised Schmidt and TrueNU as “phenomenal”, but said that college athletics in general and Northwestern specifically are going down “a different path.”
“I can’t speak to anybody else’s collective, but our collective had been maxed out,” he said. “…And we were built on a charitable end. We weren’t trying to do business with outside entities and connecting it with a non-charitable vertical.
“So based on where we’re at, we know institutionally we’re committed to the rev-share bucket. But how do we go out and create real NIL opportunities in the city of Chicago or in Evanston? TrueNU wasn’t built that way. They were built to go out and raise money and find a way checking it through charity and community relations, things like that, to make it work.”
He went on to say that Northwestern is “exploring all those options right now to do it in-house. Tremendously grateful for TrueNU. But it’s just going down a different path.”
Handing off the baton
Based on what others across the country seem to be doing, there still might have been ways that Northwestern could have leveraged TrueNU in the new environment. TrueNU could have been converted from a non-profit to a for-profit agency and used their contacts to help broker deals for Wildcat athletes. As it stands, it appears Northwestern will use third-party multimedia rights partners, like Learfield, to help their athletes build their brands and find NIL deals.
Schmidt says it’s time to hand the baton to NU.
“I’m proud of what we built at TrueNU and the impact it had on our programs, our athletes and our community,” he said. “We stepped up when Northwestern needed us and embraced the changing landscape.”
What’s next for Schmidt? He is now looking for a job – and one that, for the first time, won’t be involved with Northwestern Athletics. He has experience in all phases of college sports, so he hopes it might be “college sports-adjacent.”
One thing he has in his favor is a sterling reputation. You won’t find anyone in the Northwestern community that will say a negative word about him. It probably won’t take him long to land on his feet.
Category: General Sports
