CLEMSON -- The spring game is eight days away, but the most interesting development next week might come off the field.

For months, plenty of fans have been wondering how Clemson plans to adapt and innovate in the new world of Name, Image and Likeness. The apprehension tends to increase in the wake of grand NIL announcements from other schools such as Georgia and Ohio State, plus the fashion by which Texas A&M brought in a blockbuster recruiting class.

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Next week, we'll start to get more clarity as Clemson plans to make an announcement of its own on how it will enter the new world of players being compensated for marketing deals and such.

Two primary factors have inhibited progress on this front until recently:

1) Last summer, the state of South Carolina passed legislation on NIL establishing limits on the types of deals college athletes can strike, and on the universities themselves helping facilitate deals. Now there's movement at the legislative level to relax some of those restrictions and put Palmetto State schools on a more level playing field with some of their competitors in other states.

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2) Clemson had to figure out its own philosophy on NIL, and then establish a method for fundraising.

We don't know the intimate details of what Clemson will unveil next week, but some of the more important facets:

We are told the collective has been headed up by prominent boosters Kendall Alley and Rich Davies, who have spent time in recent weeks soliciting donations from heavy hitters.

As of two weeks ago, the collective had raised between $4-5 million in a short span of time. This has sparked a surge of confidence and assurance that Clemson is going to be able to go toe-to-toe with most of the big-name schools out there.

When new AD Graham Neff had his first press conference in early February, he said he wanted to be aggressive on NIL.

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"There are things within our state law and within NCAA guidelines that we can do a little bit more aggressively, and that's not to say we haven't. Maybe the best way to phrase it is this is not a Clemson-isolated issue. It's more of an industry issue, I'd say. It's been a very passive-type topic. It started in July, and it's market-driven. Student-athletes are able to go build their brand and solicit deals and dollars, and activate that on their own, so to speak, from a marketplace standpoint. So athletically at Clemson and within the industry, we've been rather passive in: 'Hey, we're going to educate you and we're going to help you build your brand, and we have a great social and digital team, and we're going to make sure you play by the rules.' But then it was, 'Go do.'

"But then you overlay the competitive world and industry we live in, there's been more need and calling within the industry for us to be more active, aggressive, whatever thesaurus word we want to get out for our support and programs, community engagement, and internal engagement with our kids.

"So what that passive-to-active presence and what that means, we're working on."

The active part of publicizing it begins next week, when Clemson will put its paw prints on the NIL game ahead of the spring game.

"We want to compete, and we want to win," Neff said. "We need to equip our coaches and our student-athletes to activate on that, have a great experience, and recruit to it."

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