A famous Raleigh restaurant searches for the right NIL recipe with NC State athletes
With its walls upon walls of N.C. State memorabilia and roots deep in the university, Amedeo’s Italian Restaurant was exactly the kind of campus-adjacent business that could open direct relationships with Wolfpack athletes when they were finally allowed to capitalize on their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights a year ago.
The institution was already a frequent dining spot for generations of State fans, athletes and notables, founded by a former football player and a home away from home for paisans like Jim Valvano and Chuck Amato. Last July, it was free to formalize that relationship. And so it did, but not at all with the results anyone expected.
Amedeo’s experience in the brave new world of NIL is probably typical of most small businesses and certainly representative of the general arc of the NIL experience: from small self-negotiated deals with a handful of current athletes to a contract with a big agency to, now, potentially a pivot toward collectives that pool resources of several businesses and can also aid with recruiting.
For Amedeo’s, as closely connected to N.C. State as any business and any school anywhere, it was a year of fits and starts, trying to find the right way to partner with Wolfpack athletes in a way that made sense for both them and the historic restaurant. Through it all, managing partner David Harris said, Amedeo’s never could find the right return on its investment.
“Unless you really have the big money,” Harris said, “it’s almost like a donation to me, in my opinion.”
A year into the NIL era, most of the attention has been focused on edge cases, the seven-figure deals for elite recruits, the school-specific collectives that funnel money from boosters to recruits — and in some cases, compete with other collectives at the same school — but there’s a more mundane NIL world for athletes in Olympic sports and small campus businesses that aren’t exactly Coke or Pepsi, and it’s no easier to navigate.
‘Halfway expected us to do something’
Dave Parker, the son-in-law of the late Amedeo “Dick” DeAngelis who founded the beloved restaurant on Western Boulevard in 1963, is a partner and self-described curator of its collection of Wolfpack memorabilia. Even before the NCAA threw up its hands and let state laws allowing college athletes to capitalize on their NIL rights last summer, he was thinking about what it might mean for Amedeo’s.
He watched Bojangles sign 75 different college athletes across the Carolinas over the summer to deals worth $4,000 or more to promote that chain’s new chicken sandwich, and knew that was out of Amedeo’s league, but there had to be something. Parker ended up reaching out to several N.C. State athletes on social media; in August, the restaurant announced that it had signed NIL deals with seven of them.
It wasn’t much — in exchange for 10 social-media posts mentioning Amedeo’s in a two-month period, the restaurant would load $200 onto an Amedeo’s gift card — but it was something. The publicity at launch alone was worth it, Parker said.
“We’re just a one-shop, small mom-and-pop,” Parker said. “But at the same time I felt like we needed to do something. The N.C. State fan base and the folks that love Amedeo’s halfway expected us to do something, just because of our relationship with the athletic department. Also I wanted to do it because I felt like it would be really beneficial to the business.”
Amedeo’s had one event with its athletes at the restaurant. They charged a cover and gave that money to the athletes. It sold out. A few of the athletes, like women’s basketball players Elissa Cunane and Kai Crutchfield and baseball player Sam Highfill embraced the challenge. Others, as college students are wont to do, quickly found themselves with other priorities. Even so, they never really had the chance to dig into it. As with NIL elsewhere, a new trend was emerging.
Enter an agency
A few months in, Harris got an offer he thought could supercharge the restaurant’s NIL efforts.
Ed Wasielewski, the agent for former Wolfpack running back Nyheim Hines, suggested his agency, EMG, take over. It was a tantalizing offer: a professionally run NIL campaign with star power behind it. That wrapped up the original plan before it really got started; Hayden Hidlay, a wrestler, said through a school spokesman he never got much out of it to speak of, just some free food.
It was a time when the NIL space was rife with agents looking to carve out a niche. While Wasielewski was a licensed NFLPA agent with an established agency, the NIL world was flooded with others, unlicensed and unscrupulous, looking to shave a few bucks off the edges of NIL deals. In the end, Amedeo’s didn’t get taken for a ride, but it didn’t get much out of it, either.
The agency arranged one big event, with Hines and current Wolfpack football stars Devin Leary, Ben Finley and Thayer Thomas, to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. That was a success. But there wasn’t enough to make it worth Amedeo’s while; there may be more events this summer, but Harris said at this point the restaurant plans to let the contract lapse when it expires in two months.
Parker and Harris said the restaurant is considering joining with other businesses in supporting the new Pack of Wolves NIL collective spearheaded by former Wolfpack basketball player Scott Wood. While specific implementations can vary, most collectives have the dual goals of raising money to support current athletes and generating funds to bolster recruiting.
Miami collectives have made headlines with seven-figure offers to football players and basketball transfers; it’s yet another example of the college athletics arms race, and Amedeo’s isn’t sure what ammunition it really has to offer.
“I don’t know,” Harris said. “I just don’t think we can contribute a lot to get the kind of athletes State wants. We kind of get them once they get here. … We get the athletes anyway, because of where we are and who we are. We always want State to get the best athletes it can get. Ideally they’ll come through Amedeo’s when they come over to see the history.”
Shuckin’ Shack’s success story
Some of Amedeo’s issues may come down merely to scale, trying to navigate the NIL space as a small business. There are success stories not that much higher on the ladder.
The Wilmington-based oyster bar chain Shuckin’ Shack, with 16 locations in five states, worked with the agency Icon Source — which brokered some of the biggest Day 1 NIL deals last summer — to identify overlooked star athletes from non-revenue sports who might be of value to their franchises. These “Shackletes” are required to make one in-person appearance and one major social media post per quarter.
“We may be the only sponsor of these athletes, so we get a really good one-to-one relationship,” said Shuckin’ Shack CEO Jonathan Weathington, an N.C. State graduate. “It’s really cool know to get to know them little more and we don’t feel like we’re competing with some megabooster at some megauniversity who signed a million dollar deal. We’re a small company and we’re talking about gift cards, a few hundred bucks, appearances at our openings, Instagram posts.”
The initial cadre included N.C. State gymnasts Nicole Webb and Hailey Merchant, UNC golfer Peter Fountain, UNC women’s soccer player Libby Moore and N.C. State cheerleader Camille Weiss, along with athletes from Clemson, Western Carolina, Florida and Texas-Arlington. Clemson football players Kobe Pace and Malcolm Greene are the latest to join the group. Some are even former Shuckin’ Shack employees.
It’s worked well enough that Weathington said the chain decided Wednesday to add a new class of Olympic-sport Shackletes this year.
“You don’t have to have a million dollars in the bank or do a six-figure deal,” Weathington said. “There’s something that’s going to be affordable for you. You can pursue athletes for as little as $100, quite literally. If you’re a small business and you have a yearly marketing budget of $1,000, you can take half of that and pursue an athlete who’s local to your community to produce organic content for you that you can recycle over and over again.”
Still looking for the right recipe
In some ways, Amedeo’s was the kind of business the original conception of NIL was designed to benefit — formalizing informal relationships, legalizing long unspoken traditions of free meals or beers for star athletes in the kind of restaurants that become campus institutions. (Not to imply Amedeo’s was doing that before — it even ran its original NIL plan past N.C. State’s compliance department — but it certainly happens everywhere.) That’s not how it has worked out.
A year into NIL, Amedeo’s still hasn’t figured out the best way for the restaurant to interact with State athletes, but it knows it’s worth figuring out.
Amedeo’s tried going alone. It tried going with an agent. It may try signing up with the collective. It may go a different direction after that. Just as many athletes are still trying to figure out the best way to activate their rights, many small businesses are looking for the right answer, too.
“We got a lot of publicity out of it,” Parker said. “We did it to benefit the athletes because they were now able to benefit from their NIL. We also did it for selfish reasons. We knew that we weren’t Tony’s Pizza Shop starting some NIL stuff. No one’s going to notice that. We knew we were Amedeo’s Italian Restaurant and we knew it would gain some attention, and it did.”
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This story was originally published July 1, 2022 at 6:10 AM with the headline "A famous Raleigh restaurant searches for the right NIL recipe with NC State athletes."
