Lexington, Chapel Hill, Lubbock, Austin, Ann Arbor, etc…
It’s worrisome that the mid major conferences will gradually become showcases for the big 4 conferences to cherry pick recruitment from…
Someone more in-the-loop than me please let me know if any Ivy AD’s have addressed this. Excuse the doomer language, but it’s not looking good.
I have been writing Abt it for 2 years.
And I posted only 2 days ago that I raised it with Vicky Chun in Denver.
It is what it is; competitive destruction at work. Get used to it
This might help frame it…
a sports agent texted me this yesterday. “We expect every power IV starter to make $500,000 next year”
-Louisville going from $4mm to $8-10mm in nil
-we think $4-5mm has been the ceiling for budgets
-will more than double
Me: this is an agent but a reputable one who works with a lot of household names
As we’ve mentioned, not only Power 4 schools. Davidson, Furman, Holy Cross and others all ramping up NIL efforts.
Most Ivy League basketball players don’t plan on being bankers or going to law school right after graduation. Some still do, but not most. They want to be professional basketball players somewhere. I know that sounds horrible. Might as well get a full scholarship, play basketball somewhere with decent academics and get paid.
Yes.
This is what most ivy fans don’t get.
in my era we went ivy to work on wall St etc because some.of us knew while we had offers at bigger conferences we weren’t playing in the NBA and Europe wasn’t paying much back then unless you were elite.
This is not true anymore and one of the reasons the IL has improved. This also makes it vulnerable.
We studied this at Yale while exploring collectives and has been a huge cultural shift in 30 years
$500k is a useful benchmark. It also means that these schools have approx $2.5 mil to distribute to non- starters, assuming a $5 mil NIL fund. Some schools will certainly have more than $5 mil.
Could James or Rutgers or someone else knowledgeable about athlete compensation explain how the current NIL system works and what will change with the House settlement? Or point us to a good article on the subject? What is the source of the money currently and how is that expected to change going forward.
i will defer to Rutgers, who is an attorney I believe. my advice is to use Grok 3 or any tool and you can find a million articles to this end.
anecdotally, i will tell you the research i have done is of the primary variety. Collectives are the wild west of the NIL game. They are unregulated, unaudited structures–blind pools-- mostly funded by boosters or alums or just fans pre house settlement.
Take UGA football, a modern powerhouse in the vaunted SEC…well for $10,000 in NIL contributions as of last March i can play golf with coach Kirby smart or attended practices or both.
Anecdotally this should give you a sense for how it has worked. Most funds unlike Texas Tech football (see articles) have come from a a diverse cadre of mostly small donors. But again, they are blind unaudited pools so only snooping around and asking questions of both guys who run the collectives as well as NIL donors have i garnered this intell.
it’s not perfect but given my relationships in the SEC i feel good about characterizing the mosaic.
i will let Rutgers fill in the blanks.
These collectives are unaudited and the accountability is with the coaches, who need every dollar to pledge to players in order to win. JWill on ESPN did a take this week on how NIL is the death blow to mid major cinderella stories in the NCAA tournament. I would broaden that as NIL is really hurting mid majors (IL) in the near term. The opportunity lies in the fact that most of the HM D1 programs are no longer recruiting high school players as they are focused on the portal and, to a lesser extent, the prep schools (Monteverde, IMG, Northeast league (Brewster, NMH, etc). Mid majors who are good at recruiting can identify and recruit HS players who would otherwise be scholarship athletes. The downside is of course the Perkins, Mack, Wolfe affect where they leave after 1-2 years. But that’s a problem for a different day. The talent pools are still there for the IL, just have to look in different places.
yea, i mean it doesnt take an espn desk job to forecast that removing Danny Wolf from Yale basically chops the head of the team’s potential.
i have written exhaustively about it predicting this fate for 2 years. Why? i dont know. i feel like the more aware we are the more the impetus for change.
This was somewhat naive bc no one cares until disruption hits them. I suppose this is true for the IL writ large.
To your point, i have also written exhaustively of how i was wrong in forecasting the imminent demise of IL recruiting for the all the reasons you cite.
This is the good news though does it matter? Probably not assuming our 19 year old post players will be playing against their 24 year old portal pros in March.
This assumes they dont cancel our automatic bid anytime soon. I think that siren gets louder however as evidenced by no cinderellas this March.
Once House is signed off on (and it will) universities can spend up to 20.5 million on student-athletes (athlete-students). The rough allocation at most Power schools will be 70% football, 18% men’s basketball and 5% women’s basketball. There is a very dubious Title IX objection in light of the Trump new Regs. NIL will be over and above, with a check on all dreals over $600. The effective dates of all this will be July 1. I will say that at least 6 Ivies will be paying in 25-26, one way or the other.
I have a slightly contrarian view about Ivy League guys who leave after 1-2 years. The league has always recruited undervalued and under recruited kids and coached them up and can continue to do just that. The league just has to manage its rosters the same way the rest of college basketball does now. Assume you get a kid for a year or two and he might leave if he blows up. League needs some NIL to compete but will never match Alabama or Duke. Wolf for 2 years, Okereke for 3 etc makes your team better. Ivy presidents and ADs won’t want to hear it but they aren’t doing anything about it.
There is no way I can see an Ivy paying a basketball player $500,000 to play. It’s just too countercultural.
The one thing that kind of bugs me about media coverage of the sport (and football) is that no one ever asks the players what they’re majoring in, what is their favorite class, how hard is to transfer credits, etc. These guys who switch schools three or four times–I mean, come on.
Let’s just put them on staff like the secretaries and IT folks and be done with it.
If we go that route, will the Dartmouth players reincarnate that unionization drive?
Seemingly lost in this debate are (1) college athletes deserve to be paid, and (2) the Ivy League presidents are highly unlikely to change their stance on NIL, which I agree with. We have a different model that has worked for nearly 70 years, and I believe will continue to work, NIL or no NIL. It’s really only Ivy Men’s Basketball that has been and continues to be quite affected by NIL, and I agree with the poster who said in substance the way to combat the portal is to continue to find hidden jems,
Sorry, gems.
Football is not totally immune, some former ivy players getting $250 to $450 per year
I’m more pessimistic if things don’t change. Yes we can find gems, but will likely only have one season of them before they can move onto better pastures. Timing teams perfectly to be successful in this new era will be nearly impossible.
The Ivy selling point of successful career post college is way less convincing when a big time program can offer a player 750k+ at 20-22 years old.
Princeton’s Sweet 16 run would have not happened if some big time program offers Tosan after he averaged 16 7 and 4 after 2022, which I imagine they’re likely to do.
The floor/ceiling of Ivy hoops is tremendously lower in tomorrow’s era.
Decades ago, before Princeton (and other Ivies) dramatically ramped up their financial aid programs, Pete used to bemoan the fact that he was trying to win with “three-car garage kids,” ie, players whose families could afford to pay for their kids to go to Princeton (and not be tempted by cash that in those days was paid out under the table). I believe he said that you could win with three-car garage kids but not four-car garage kids.
So add players with vast family wealth to the equation. Can the Ivies win with:
I’m not sure how many serious hoopers are in that last category but I believe Princeton has had some over the years.