Auburn football player uses NIL funds to open a community hub in Birmingham

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Jourdin Crawford, a defensive lineman at Auburn University, is using money earned from his collegiate Name, Image and Likeness to give back to his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama.

The 18-year-old opened The Greedy House headquarters, a nonprofit serving as a community hub to help those in need, on Saturday (March 7).

“It’s basically just like a community center. Just open to everybody, open every day, just to chill,” Crawford said at the grand opening event. People in the community were able to look inside the house and around the property. The first 100 people to show up received a free plate of chicken wings from Big Dawg’s food truck.

The 700-square-foot house on 422 Sixth Avenue South used to be a coffee shop, called The Modern House. Jourdin’s mother, Patsy Crawford, said he would eat breakfast there every day before school — specifically a ‘really good breakfast bowl’ — on his way to A.H. Parker High School, where he was a state champion and state lineman of the year.

Patsy said Jourdin pours back into the community whenever he has the chance, from donating books to a local elementary school to assisting middle schoolers with food and clothing.

“He started giving back his senior year. He gave 100 books to Glen Iris Elementary School, and then we just kept finding small things to do, and then we eventually turned to the Essentials Room. It’s in C.J. Donald Middle School,” Patsy said.

Jourdin used the Essentials Room to give students hygiene products, clothes, food and school supplies. However, Jourdin needed a central location to continue this work. When his go-to breakfast spot became available, he and his mother leased the building from former owner Troy Whetstone. Jourdin had a good relationship with him as a customer, and through sponsorship work he did for Whetstone’s Little League baseball team.

The Greedy House will help Jourdin continue his philanthropic work at a larger scale — offering emergency meal kits, hygiene kits and access to resources within the community. It’ll also host a number of programs for kids in the area.

“We’re starting a book club for the young kids — kindergarten through fifth grade — and then we’ll also have other events and workshops, like a mental health workshop,” Patsy said.

The house will also offer help building resumes, a workspace and even an event space.

“And everything is donation-based, so it doesn’t cost a whole lot of money,” she said.

Jourdin used roughly $30,000 from a Name, Image and Likeness deal at Auburn to create The Greedy House — a play on his personal slogan ‘Wake Up Greedy.’ For Jourdin, Greedy doesn’t have anything to do with food, but a hunger for impact, change and purpose.

While NIL helped Jourdin create this, the system for which players can now get paid while in college is under scrutiny.

The opening for The Greedy House was just a day after President Donald Trump had a roundtable at the White House, critiquing NIL. Trump said college sports are currently a pay-for-play system that has cost universities millions of dollars.

“I thought the system of scholarships was great,” the president said. “I was with [Former University of Alabama head football coach] Nick Saban the other day, and, you know, his timing is exquisite. When he saw [NIL], he said, I’m going to get out of this. ” I’m not doing this anymore.”

Saban has been vocal about his disdain for the current state of NIL since his retirement in 2024. The 74-year-old intends to assist President Trump in working on the ‘ramifications’ of the state of college sports. At the hearing, Saban said his goal as a coach — other than winning — was to prepare his players for success after athletics. He believes NIL is not doing that.

“In this current system that we have, that becomes impossible to do because people, instead of making decisions about creating value for their future, they were making decisions about how much money they could make at whichever school they could go to or transfer to,” Saban said.

Patsy Crawford said that outlook is not the full story. She believes that with proper guidance, the current NIL system can set players up for their future after athletics.

“It’s not like a doomsday thing,” she said. “Like we just kind of see what’s on the outside. We don’t get to see all the hard work that the kids go through, the stress that they put on their bodies, their mental health. I mean, they deserve something. And a lot of them do give back with what they have.”

After The Greedy House’s grand opening, a video the Gulf States Newsroom published about it on social media went viral. That day, Patsy said Jourdin doesn’t get much news coverage for his community service.

Well, that’s changed now.

“We have a landline here, and it never gets used, and I got here this morning and had a bunch of missed calls,” Patsy said. “I had a ton of emails. I’ve been responding to emails since I woke up yesterday. A lot of donations, interview requests, a lot of positive feedback from the community.”

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.