Aaron Murray

Aaron Murray started a company for college players because he was a four year starter at Georgia and never made a dime off his name.

Murray came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast the week before G-Day, with the Players Lounge booked at Creature Comforts in Athens on April 15 and SALTYmf planning to be there handing out gear. The two sides were already working on a deal with Chandler Hayden at Tennessee. Brad Banyas said he had watched Murray play plenty of football and liked the person more.

The Players Lounge started with four Georgia lettermen, Murray, Keith Marshall, Ty Frix and Trent Frix, and has since expanded to Clemson, Tennessee, LSU, Texas and Oklahoma. In a little over a year it paid players close to a million dollars. The work is tailgates, golf tournaments and digital content, and a day at the BMW test track that Kendall Milton and five members got to spend as a group. The model turns on who is holding the microphone. A reporter arrives with a list of questions and a player arrives with his guard up, so the Lounge puts former lettermen in the chair instead, Josh Dobbs at Tennessee, Derrick Johnson at Texas, Roy Williams at Oklahoma. Murray's other observation is that college players can already shoot and post, they just have no hours, so the Lounge takes the filming, the editing and the distribution off their plates.

Asked what he would tell players heading into the pros, Murray said to get a no man or a no woman. His has been his wife, who vetted every deal that came in, because everything sounds great when it arrives attached to money. He built a golf net and a simulator into a garage bay during COVID and hits balls most days, which his wife calls the lab. Last year he took his mother to the Masters and sat at the first hole for an hour and a half to get her five feet from Tiger Woods.