COMMENTARY
MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — We’re a week into the college business of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) and — not surprisingly — college athletics have yet to collapse onto itself.
Make no mistake, it’s the wild, wild West out there, as college athletes by the thousands have tweeted for companies to direct message them for endorsement opportunities, while the local universities have little to go by in terms of regulating what’s happening around them.
The results have been both interesting and expected.
A BBQ joint in Arkansas signed the offensive line from the University of Arkansas to a deal to promote the restaurant.
That one was pretty good.
The flip side is the story out of Miami, where gym owner Dan Lambert signed every University of Miami scholarship football player to an annual $6,000 deal — $500 a month — to promote his gym.
That deal will cost Lambert more than $500,000 per year, in what really is a story of a booster simply handing cash over to college athletes … legally.
There is more to the NIL story, though, than just the cash exchanging hands.
What NIL has the potential to do is change the landscape of athletics and how the rest of us view wins and losses.
What we’re talking about here is not the athletes already signed and enrolled at schools, but rather the impact that NIL will have on where future top-level recruits sign and play.
We’re talking about recruiting wars that were once settled by things such as tradition, facilities, the level of conference the schools played in and a possible path to the pros now being settled by what kind of endorsement opportunities are available.
Let’s keep this discussion to college basketball, because that truly is the one money-making sport where a team’s fortunes can change drastically with just two or three players, as opposed to college football, where you need so much more than just a star quarterback or defensive lineman.
Could a Division I school — any of them from Kent State to Stanford to Rutgers — afford to go out and make the commitment to make a deal good enough to sign, say, three of the top 10 hoops recruits in the class of 2022 and also maybe a top player from the transfer portal?
Absolutely. It’s simply a matter of having the booster(s) with deep enough pockets and the desire to see it through.
Let’s not be naive here, it’s always taken money to compete at the highest level in college, but it was money set aside for facilities and the best coaches and all the other bling-bling to attract the top players.
Now you just need money from rich boosters or alumni to directly, ahem, sponsor the players, and that’s a heck of a lot cheaper than renovating locker rooms or building new facilities.
The schools’ boosters willing to make that type of investment could be the ticket for your future Final Four teams.
That could be Rutgers rather than Kansas. It could be Marshall rather than Villanova.
In truth, the NCAA’s desire for years has been to create a level playing field throughout its membership, well, what NIL has done is exactly that.
If a big-money alumnus at Pitt is willing to open up his checkbook to a bigger tune than an alumnus at Duke, the Panthers could become the next power of the ACC, even if just for a season or two.
Prior to NIL, you could never really think that, because Duke had the tradition of developing pros and a better NCAA tournament history and head coach Mike Krzyzewski.
The real interesting part is how will we view our favorite schools moving forward that do not go out and make a push to buy a run to the Final Four?
New York Yankees fans love that Hal Steinbrenner spends money on top players. Pittsburgh Pirates fans hate Robert Nutting for being so cheap.
Essentially, college basketball could take that same form.
And then do we blame the coach or the athletic director, which was the traditional route or do we start to blame the rich alumni for not spending enough?
That will be the new conversation to be had for the future of college basketball, one made possible because of NIL.
TWEET @bigjax3211
