‘I’m a business:’ Alabama recruits entering NIL landscape face ‘education gap’

Kristy Hurts didn’t know much about football, though her son, Khurtiss Perry, was always a special talent. He steamrolled players in pee-wee. The kid who wasn’t a running back but got handoffs in high school because it took a few bodies to bring him down. Perry’s ability birthed opportunity in a way Hurts or Perry’s grandmother, Brenda Benton, never would have expected.

One day, Perry sat down with Hurts and Benton to detail the next steps of his recruitment. He had offers from every major SEC program, his four-star status eventually leading Perry to Alabama’s 2022 class. Though there was something new he had to explain, an acronym Hurts and many others didn’t know, but would soon learn: N-I-L, or Name, Image and Likeness.