LSU's new ad campaign shamelessly promotes top recruit Ben Simmons

At a time when the NCAA is fighting the perception it profits from the images and likenesses of its unpaid athletes, one of its member schools has launched an advertising campaign that will only further weaken that already shaky argument.

LSU is using highly touted incoming freshman basketball player Ben Simmons as the centerpiece of a 2015-16 season ticket promotional blitz that will include billboards and print and social media advertising. The "25 is Coming" campaign is such a blatant reference to Simmons' jersey number that the school didn't even bother to pretend otherwise in the release it sent out Wednesday.

"This year’s campaign will focus on the arrival of the nation’s No. 1 recruit, Ben Simmons, and his chosen jersey number '25,'" the release stated. Through this '25' campaign, fans wishing to become season ticket holders will have the opportunity to lock in their season tickets for the 2015-16 men’s basketball season in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center."

Did LSU have concerns about whether its Simmons-heavy ad campaign was appropriate at the height of a nationwide debate over whether college athletes are being exploited? An athletic department spokesman did not immediately return an email from Yahoo Sports seeking comment, but a subsequent report from ESPN.com's Darren Rovell may shed light on why the Tigers felt comfortable with their approach.

A tweet Simmons sent Wednesday evening corroborates the notion that he was aware of the campaign and he is on board with it.

LSU is certainly not the first program to try to monetize the arrival of a top incoming recruit without explicitly using his name and likeness in advertising.

In 2007, Memphis put up a season ticket sales billboard that featured a picture of a red rose and the slogan "Witness a Rare Fall Bloom," a thinly veiled reference to incoming freshman phenom Derrick Rose. In 2012, UCLA trumpeted the arrival of highly touted freshmen Shabazz Muhammad and Kyle Anderson with a splash page on its website the day after signing day announcing in all caps, "The Future Is Here." Below were pictures of each freshman and information on how to order season tickets.

What makes LSU's ad campaign more notable is that the climate of college sports is different now.

Ex-UCLA forward Ed O'Bannon won a highly publicized lawsuit against the NCAA last year challenging the organization's use of names, images and likenesses of athletes for commercial purposes. The Northwestern football team exerted further pressure for change last spring when it voted whether to unionize.

In 2013, ESPN analyst Jay Bilas goaded the NCAA into leaving the jersey sales business by exposing that typing the name of a high-profile college player into NCAA site's search function produced that athlete's jersey for sale. The NCAA has long insisted that jerseys hawked by its member schools aren't connected to specific players because they only have numbers on the back and not names.

It probably shouldn't be a surprise that LSU would try to include Simmons in its marketing efforts simply because it would be a missed business opportunity not to do so.

The 6-foot-8 Australia native is Rivals.com's No. 2 prospect in the Class of 2015, a projected top-five pick in the 2016 NBA Draft and the most anticipated prospect LSU has signed since Shaquille O'Neal. He's part of a promising LSU recruiting class that also includes high-scoring guard Antonio Blakeney and Louisiana Mr. Basketball Brandon Sampson.

It makes sense LSU would market the arrival of Simmons and that class. It just further pokes holes in the NCAA's antiquated concept of amateurism that the Tigers have chosen such a blatant approach.

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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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