Former Colorado Football Coach Explains Why He Went to Saudi Arabia for NIL Money

WAIKOLOA, Hawai‘i — Former University of Colorado assistant football coach Trevor Reilly—who abruptly resigned from head coach Deion Sanders’s staff Aug. 1—is even further removed from his former life than the 3,000 miles between the mountains of Boulder and the volcanic rocks of Hawai‘i’s Big Island would suggest. 

“I just gave 20 years of my life to football, 16 to 36,” says Reilly, who played parts of four seasons in the NFL before entering coaching. “I’m tired.”

Reilly is a self-proclaimed “guy who gets shit done.” And that’s why, as Front Office Sports reported last month, Reilly found himself in the Middle East around Christmas last year seeking NIL (name, image, and likeness) money for Colorado football players. 

A Colorado athletics department spokesperson says Reilly “acted on his own accord.” Reilly reiterated he funded the trip himself. 

Why did he pay for his own travel to Jordan, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia? 

“I’m betting on myself,” Reilly says, adding his aim was to “get more money so we can get better players. That’s it. More money, better players. What else is there? We had no NIL money when we came there [before the 2022 season].”

Reilly says he sought the same NIL support at Jackson State University in Mississippi, where he started as an unpaid assistant under Sanders. He helped with special teams and, when needed, on the defensive side of the ball. He says he could afford to work as an unpaid volunteer in his three seasons at Jackson State because he was living off the $1.5 million he earned in the NFL from 2014 through 2017.  

When Sanders, who retired from the NFL after the 2005 season, accepted the job at University of Colorado in December 2022, Reilly followed him to Boulder. A lack of NIL money—for players not named Shedeur Sanders or Travis Hunter, who will likely be top NFL draft picks in 2025—is part of what Reilly says led him to leave Colorado.

“I think Deion’s getting fucked,” Reilly says. “We’re asking him to do all this stuff and make all these miracles, and he only has $6 million [for NIL]. He brought it to the table, not them. There was no donor, there was donor fatigue. He shows up, they get this money.”

Reilly continues: “They haven’t capitalized on it. All that emotion that that guy brings, all the celebrities, all the CEOs, and they don’t get a single dollar.”

Reilly says he’s frustrated by CU football’s NIL budget, which he says hamstrung recruiting efforts. CU dispersed $3.6 million in 2023, according to a 5430 Alliance (Colorado’s NIL collective) presentation obtained by FOS. In that same presentation, the projected NIL budget was $8 million for the current season. 

Taking NIL Fundraising Into His Own Hands

Reilly, who is Mormon, says he has plenty of connections to business owners and donors and people with deep pockets within the church. He worked those contacts to help bring in money at Jackson State and, later, Colorado. While he was the special teams coordinator at CU, he took it upon himself to get involved in NIL fundraising efforts that aren’t typically in the purview of college assistant coaches. 

Saudi money is a lightning rod issue in sports these days. Just look at the LIV Golf Tour and other professional sports leagues and teams that signed megamillion-dollar deals funded by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.

Reilly’s pitch didn’t get any bites in Jordan. He spent about five days there, bought a thawb (a long-sleeved, ankle-length, traditional robe) and worked on his manners. When he got to Saudi Arabia, he walked around a government complex all day asking to meet people, and eventually got a meeting with PIF officials. 

FOS has reviewed an email from a PIF executive dated Dec. 28, 2023, that confirmed the meeting. 

The pitch deck he sent to a PIF executive before the meeting, obtained by FOS, highlighted Deion Sanders and his children (Deion Jr., Shedeur, Shilo, and Shelomi, who has since transferred to play women’s basketball at Alabama A&M) along with star receiver/defensive back Travis Hunter. The “Extra Points” newsletter first published the deck earlier this week. 

Later in the same deck, Reilly proposed an investment of $10 million in CU’s NIL collective. Reilly says the Saudis hope to bring 500 million more visitors to the country over the next 10 years and potentially host a college football game there.  

“I said, ‘Let’s get together a formal proposal.’ This is totally rough. Here is me showing up here and trying to make some s*** happen. And they understood it. They were like, ‘Yeah, let’s go,’” Reilly says. 

For a public university, accepting NIL money from a sovereign wealth fund would surely be a mile-high problem even if it were allowed under NCAA rules and U.S. law.

Reilly never scored any deals for Colorado from his Saudi efforts. 

Once he got back to Colorado in January, he talked to some coaches—not Sanders—and athletic department officials about his trip, and that’s when “things got weird,” he says.

“I didn’t say Deion was going to do this, but I did say that he might be open to a conversation,” Reilly said. “So that’s something that I told them. I said, before we even go down any road with the collective, you guys need to decide if you want [the] Deion Sanders brand to be involved with that.”

A personal representative for Sanders declined comment for this story.

While Reilly returned from the Middle East months before Blueprint Sports—which represents 27 colleges, including Penn State and UCLA—took over at Colorado, his solo efforts to land NIL money for the 5430 Alliance created friction once Blueprint took over in March. In a statement to FOS, Blueprint says it played no role in Reilly’s outreach, and the company hasn’t sought or obtained sovereign fund money for any NIL collective it manages. 

“We want to clarify that Trevor Reilly has never been authorized or directed to speak or advocate on behalf of 5430 Alliance in Saudi Arabia,” Blueprint says. “Since our launch in March 2024, all funding and initiatives have been managed solely within domestic channels and are entirely unrelated to Mr. Reilly’s work.”

Further fueling Reilly’s frustrations was when Colorado athletics told him his three children—ages 9, 11, and 13—could no longer have access to the facility unless they were supervised the entire time, Reilly says. 

CU athletics declined comment when asked about the situation with Reilly’s children. 

Eventually, Reilly gave Colorado an ultimatum: He wanted to see progress on NIL deals he’d teed up and wanted his children to have the same access they had before. He gave Colorado less than a week.

Reilly says neither happened. On Aug. 1, he resigned in an email to coaches and staff. He was angry his work on potential NIL deals fell through, but he was more upset about the limiting of access for his children.

“The final straw for me was the kids,” Reilly says. “That pissed me off.”

A Parking Lot Altercation Caught on Video

Days after his resignation, he returned to Boulder for his daughter’s basketball tournament, and went to campus to retrieve electric bikes and other belongings. When he wasn’t allowed into the athletics building, Reilly got into an altercation with a graduate assistant named Josh Jynes after Jynes wouldn’t retrieve Reilly’s belongings. 

Reilly says he called Jynes a “coward” when he was unable to get access to the bikes. Then things turned physical. Reilly can be seen in the video blocking a punch, getting hit, then hitting Jynes back and knocking him to the ground. Reilly says he was hit three times. 

FOS obtained a video of the altercation, which shows Reilly trying to de-escalate a situation that became physical. The video was recorded from security footage.

According to Reilly, he and Jynes have since reconciled. Asked whether these types of fights were common at CU, Reilly says no more than any other football team.

“CU Athletics is aware of an incident involving two staff members, one of whom is no longer employed at the university,” the CU athletics department said in a statement to FOS. “The incident has been addressed internally and we have no further comment.”

Reilly has put down temporary roots in Hawai‘i with his girlfriend, where they jet around the island on a moped and live without running water, he says, which is how he likes it. For work, he helps a nearby golf course owner with a pig problem. Dozens of pigs invade the property and tear up the golf course, so Reilly will regularly slit the throat of a pig and cook it in his makeshift smoker. He shows off a picture of a pig that’s ready for cooking. He also washes dishes in a restaurant twice a week and is a volunteer assistant football coach at Kea‘au High School. 

He says he will still be cheering on Sanders from Hawai‘i. 

“I will always defend him and always help him. I don’t care what he says about me. If he says he doesn’t claim me or I’m this and that or I’m crazy, I don’t care. Deion gets a pass. He gave me my first job.”