On Friday night inside Barnhill Arena, Arkansas gymnast Morgan Price stuck a vault so clean, so undeniable, that four judges reached for the same number: ten. It was the first perfect score in the history of the Razorback gymnastics program, 8,442 days and 24 competition seasons in the making. And somewhere in the afterglow of a moment that rippled across social media from Fayetteville to the national stage, a young military veteran and NIL startup president, Payton Dunn, fired off a congratulatory text to Price, one of his partnering athletes.
“It just means I might not be a coach, but I have a pretty good recruiting eye for what we’re doing here,” Dunn said. “I knew she was fantastic when she was at the HBCU level before she came to Arkansas. She got a perfect 10 there. Lightning does strike twice. I do believe here in Fayetteville.”
Price is the headline moment, but she is not the whole story. The story is Choose Arkansas — the fan-run NIL marketing company Dunn founded that is trying to do something almost no one else in college athletics is attempting: serve every university in the state, not just one flagship program. In a chaotic, big-money NIL era, Choose Arkansas is betting that being the underdog people trust will matter more than being the loudest name in the marketplace.
Built from the Ground Up
Dunn is an Arkansas Army National Guard officer, a Harding University graduate in political science, and a man who will tell you, without a hint of hesitation, that the state of Arkansas is tattooed on his body. The idea that became Choose Arkansas started as the Pig Pen Collective, born the night he watched the Razorbacks lose to Memphis, and a barbecue joint jokingly asked if he needed extra tissues for his tears. That sting turned into a business plan.
From there, Dunn did what underdogs always have to do: build from scratch. He formed an LLC, launched a website, set up social media, and picked up the phone to make sure the university understood what he was trying to do and that it fit within the rules. He was not backed by a Fortune 500 company or a national NIL operator. He was backed by a sense of responsibility to the place that raised him.
Then the ground shifted. The NCAA tightened its rules on collectives, banning guaranteed third-party deals and requiring real marketing activations in every NIL contract. Plenty of outfits flinched. Dunn didn’t.
He pivoted. Pig Pen became Choose Arkansas. The operation restructured as a marketing agency instead of a traditional collective, sliding out of the most vulnerable part of the crosshairs and into a model built for the long haul.
“All plans die at first contact,” Dunn said, leaning on a lesson that’s drilled into every soldier. “So we have to be very vigilant, stay in the news, and be prepared for whatever comes out because things change every day. The way Choose Arkansas is being built and run is the best way to be flexible. We expect rules to change. We expect regulations to change. So we can literally just change a couple of words on a contract to keep doing what we’re doing.”
That flexibility is not an accident. Dunn’s business partner, David Smith, a retired FedEx executive who serves as chairman of the board, gave him the freedom to design the company the way he saw it in his head. The result is an NIL outfit built to bend without breaking, nimble enough to adjust contracts while others scramble just to keep up.
The Biggest Challenge: Earning Trust
Ask Dunn what has been the hardest part of this venture, and he doesn’t bring up the NCAA. He doesn’t even start with recruiting athletes. Those things, he says, have come more naturally than people might think.
The toughest part has been the most human one: trust.
“We’re grassroots, just started,” Dunn said. “Earning the trust, it might be a little harder getting in doors at first. We’re definitely starting to open them. I was very humbled when I first started, and I was starting to get the flow of it, but getting other people to get the flow of it — now I’m having to coach the things I have taught myself over the last couple of months. Trying to actually market and get it out there more and see the dollars flowing in from that. That’s been the biggest challenge.”
That challenge is amplified by Arkansas’s place in the NIL pecking order. The state sits in the middle of the national pack in NIL spending, and somewhere in the middle of the SEC as well, a ranking that doesn’t quite match the passion of a fan base that will fill a 76,000-seat stadium on a Saturday and call the Hogs from every corner of the state. Recent shifts in how Arkansas Athletics handles NIL, including stepping away from a previous management partner and moving toward a new internal model, have only added to the confusion.
In that uncertainty, Choose Arkansas is trying to be something simple and rare: a steady hand. It is not trying to outspend the mega-collectives in Alabama or Texas. Instead, it focuses on local and statewide businesses, connecting them with athletes across Arkansas’ entire college landscape, including the Razorbacks, Arkansas State, UCA, UAPB, and others. The model is straightforward: the bulk of the money flows to the athletes, while a small slice keeps the operation running.
“We’re targeting the people that want to market in Arkansas and do business in Arkansas and stay in Arkansas,” Dunn said. “If I go pitch one of those businesses in Fayetteville, they’re probably marketing to Fayetteville, but they’re also probably marketing to Jonesboro, Little Rock, Searcy, Russellville, and all over the state.”
Trust, in that sense, is not a slogan. It is a transaction. Local dollars stay in local hands, tied to local names wearing local jerseys.
More Than a Business, A Mission
There is a reason Dunn chose the word “choose” for the brand. It’s active. It demands a decision.
“I was born and raised in Arkansas,” he said. “Anywhere I’ve gone in life, they’ve known me as the Arkansas guy, whether that’s the military, college, wherever. There’s just that state pride, that national patriotism that lives in me. If I can’t give back to the place I was born and raised, then I don’t think I’m much of a man. I’m going to choose where I came from first. Give back to that, build it better than where I came into it.”
That mindset bleeds into the way the company operates. Dunn talks about his business partner like family. The retired FedEx executive has washed his car in the snow, opened doors that would have been locked to a young entrepreneur, and talked him down when the job — and his own competitive nature — started to boil over.
“He’s just like, ‘Hey, it’ll work out, we got it,’” Dunn said. “We complement each other perfectly. I couldn’t ask for a better business partner.”
This is the kind of leadership dynamic that fans and businesses rarely see but always feel: a young president with energy and edge, balanced by an older mentor who has already navigated boardrooms and bottom lines.
What Comes Next
Choose Arkansas’ roster of partnering athletes is growing, and Price’s perfect 10 is already a signature example of what the outfit wants to be about. When their athletes shine, Choose Arkansas is there — reposting highlights, telling their stories, and, more importantly, sending the quiet messages that never make it into a press release.
“Ultimately, they’re the ones doing all the work,” Dunn said. “But it just does mean the world.”
The rules around NIL are going to change again. That much is certain. New requirements, new interpretations, maybe even new laws — all of it will test how durable any NIL model really is. Dunn has built Choose Arkansas on the assumption that change is coming and the belief that being ready is better than being big. The military taught him that no plan survives first contact. NIL is teaching him that trust, once earned, multiplies.
In a state where athletic tradition runs deep, from Nolan Richardson’s 40 Minutes of Hell to the Razorback faithful who call the Hogs from Bentonville to Blytheville, Choose Arkansas is making a different kind of bet. The future of college sports here does not have to belong to whoever writes the biggest check. It can belong to the people who care enough to keep their money, their athletes, and their belief at home.
Right now, that means one thing for fans and businesses staring at a confusing NIL landscape and wondering where to turn. The underdog is on the table. And Arkansas is learning to trust it.
