RALEIGH, N.C. — The tweet went out on a Thursday afternoon in May, a routine announcement of a nonconference basketball game more than seven months away. It was a clean and simple graphic, with the teams’ nicknames in bold type and the time, date and location of the game over an outline of the Atlanta skyline. Nothing special.

Only a handful of people within North Carolina’s athletic department even knew that senior guard Seth Trimble was unexpectedly not pictured.

In years past, photos of Trimble, as the team’s most prominent and popular returning player by far, would have been in heavy rotation on UNC’s social media channels, advertising, promotional materials — anything basketball-related ahead of the new season.

But this is officially the future in the NCAA, in a post-House world where players can be paid directly by schools while pursuing their own NIL deals, where players like Trimble can sign contracts that give them the right of refusal over how the school uses them to market itself. In this case, the production of the graphic spawned an internal conversation about whether the school could use Trimble’s image.

Trimble announced in early April he would return to North Carolina for his senior year. That day, North Carolina posted a Trimble highlight video on the basketball X.com account under the text “Senior season loading.”

Three weeks later, on the evening of April 30, Josh Reavis, UNC’s assistant director of creative services for men’s basketball, sent an email to senior associate athletic director Robbi Pickeral Evans, men’s basketball sports-information director Steve Kirschner and graphic designer Brandon Gray that referred to a new issue with Trimble and corporate logos that had clearly been a topic of previous discussion.

“Here’s the first iteration of asking if Seth can appear on a graphic with a corporate logo (CBS in this instance),” Reavis wrote in the email, obtained by The News & Observer. “The game gets announced tomorrow (5/1) at 11:00 AM. Given our current roster, he and James Brown are the only returning players who logged any minutes last season that we could include. Has there been any movement on the situation?”

“I will check on this but I would go ahead and create one with James Brown or don’t use a picture,” Pickeral Evans replied seven minutes later.

“I’d recommend no photo if we can’t use Seth,” Kirschner later replied.

And that’s how the graphic went out the next day at 12:51 p.m., posted on UNC basketball’s X.com account without Trimble and with the Atlanta skyline as the background: Tar Heels vs. Buckeyes, with the date and location, followed by small UNC and Jordan Brand logos at the bottom.

The CBS logo appeared only within the event logo at the top of the graphic, along with the logos of the four teams annually involved in the neutral-site doubleheader — North Carolina, Ohio State, Kentucky and St. John’s (which is replacing UCLA in the event beginning this year).

In years past, this wouldn’t have been a consideration, or even a thought. The presence of a corporate logo would not have mattered in the slightest. Universities had long assumed the rights of their players for their own promotional and financial purposes, even after college athletes were permitted to start capitalizing on their own images in the summer of 2021.

But in this new post-House era, when players can now sign not only NIL contracts but actual revenue-sharing contracts with their schools, in some cases schools no longer have free use of their players’ likenesses.

“As part of his revenue share contract, he did not agree to have his image used in commercial activity,” Pickeral Evans told the N&O. “We are continuing to work with him on this.”

Attempts to reach Trimble’s family for comment were not immediately successful.

In terms of the big-picture issues, like how much of the $20.5 million revenue-sharing pool to allocate to which sports — North Carolina has focused most of its spending on football and men’s basketball, with smaller amounts for women’s basketball and baseball — there has been more than enough time to prepare. (In the case of football, it happened six months before the House settlement was even approved, when Bill Belichick was hired.)

In a letter to supporters this week, North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said the athletic budget would increase by about $30 million to $180 million to account for the revenue-sharing payments and 200 additional scholarships. As with the reduction in NCAA basketball tournament money to pay back damages to former athletes, these are all easily anticipated consequences of the settlement.

Not being able to use a star athlete to promote his team in something as menial as a game-announcement graphic? That’s new.

On June 4, the team tweeted a photo of Trimble reading to an elementary school class and a video of him handing out UNC cookies to the students. Eight days after that, another schedule announcement, for the game against Kentucky in the ACC-SEC Challenge.

This one had a photo: the legs of an unidentified North Carolina player dribbling a basketball, from the waist down.

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