Notre Dame Football: What is the Irish Players Club?
By Tyler Kruse
Former Notre Dame football players Mick Assaf and Nic Weishar have created The Irish Player’s Club (IPC) to help benefit current Irish players.
Regardless of your thoughts and opinions on the name, image, and likeness rules now in place for collegiate sports, it’s here and likely for good. With that in mind, it’s great to see current and former Notre Dame football players teaming up to keep the Irish in the NIL race. While you should certainly check out the IPC website for thorough information, here’s a little breakdown of what you can expect.
"“The Irish Players Club (“IPC”) is a collection of 5,555 unique leprechaun NFTs created by former Domers in an effort to support currently rostered Notre Dame football players. The IPC works directly with 80+ current athletes. With our mission to benefit athletes in mind, 75% of profits from the Irish Players Club will be distributed to the active players involved”"
If you haven’t heard of NFTs, no problem as, to be frank, I don’t know a whole lot about them. That said, NFTs or non-fungible tokens are non-interchangeable units of data on blockchain that can be sold and traded.
They’re pieces of digital content and are authenticated to show proof of ownership. While I still don’t know how I feel about NFTs personally, they’re a huge hit and don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.
My biggest takeaway from this; it doesn’t matter your thoughts on NFTs, it’s absolutely for a great cause. Supporting Notre Dame’s student-athletes is really all I needed to know to pull the trigger and acquire my first NFT. They’re incredibly well-designed pieces of content and to be able to support players of my favorite team in the world was something I could get behind.
The best part is that it doesn’t stop there, the Irish Players Club offers numerous benefits to purchasers or “members” of the IPC. For instance, if you’re planning on attending the spring game, there’ll be a members-only tailgate and a similar meet and greet with players following the game.
They’ll be doing giveaways at various junctions throughout the year and bring even more perks during the season.
One of my favorites is the game ticket raffle. For every home game in 2022, IPC will raffle away 4 tickets, and owning 1 NFT is good for 1 entry into the raffle. There will be game-used memorabilia giveaways that’ll be available to members and plenty more cool perks of joining the club.
Supporting Notre Dame football players
Regardless of your thoughts on NFTs, supporting the players makes it worth it. The sense of community that is being created is a byproduct of the best fans in the world supporting the greatest school in the world.
While I don’t intend to push the NFT space on anyone that isn’t in support, as a fan of Notre Dame you should do your research. If you love the concept and have the means, definitely take a look at IPC.