October 12, 2024

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Good morning. After last weekend’s glorious string of college football upsets (six top-25 schools lost, none a bigger stunner than unranked Vanderbilt toppling No. 1 Alabama), I am still thinking about college football and how, in some ways, the loosening of transfer portal restrictions has led to more parity, as evidenced by these upsets. But I am also thinking about what a mess the NIL era has wrought. I hosted a panel chat on the topic this week that further confirmed my views.

Read my weekend column below, and please chime in ( [[email protected]]); last week many of you did, in response to my gripe about live sports TV fragmentation, and I’m including selections from all those notes in a mailbag below today’s column.

— Dan Roberts [[link removed]], FOS EIC

The NIL Era Is a Wild West. Is Anyone Surprised?

Christopher Hanewinckel/Imagn Images

At a special meeting this week between the SEC and Big Ten conferences, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said [[link removed]], “The notion that college football is broken—what we do is broken—is just not right.”

I disagree. It looks pretty broken to me.

But it’s also possible it’s just temporarily broken, and that some of the factors tearing college sports apart will also make it better in the long run.

I am referring to the two factors combining to create a tectonic shift in collegiate athletics: conference realignment and the NIL (name, image, and likeness) floodgates that opened up July 1, 2021, when the NCAA began allowing college athletes to take money for endorsement deals.

The realignment rush has created a head-spinning game of musical chairs (our own Amanda Christovich [[link removed]] has been all over this relentless beat recently) that has left us with conferences whose regional names don’t make sense anymore (California schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference?) and whose makeup will create sleepless travel schedules for the players.

To wit, when I recently interviewed Roger Federer’s longtime agent Tony Godsick [[link removed]] in our FOS studio, he surprised me with his sudden strong reaction when I mentioned NIL: “I am not a big fan of this NIL stuff. My son will be a sophomore at Stanford, plays [tennis] there, he’s now in the ACC. … How’s that going to work? When he’s done playing UNC or Virginia, that’s a long flight back home.” There are obvious ways in which realignment and NIL have overlapping effects, but for today I’m going to focus squarely on NIL.

Former NCAA president Mark Emmert fought tooth and nail against allowing college athletes to get paid under the long-cherished NCAA definition of “amateurism,” and for years he was roundly roasted for it by those who advocated for paying the players, which became the more popular view. The feet-dragging by Emmert and his ilk became an object of ridicule, a “boomer” take that was seen as rooted in greed; Ben Strauss and Joe Nocera cowrote a book in 2016 that argued college athletes are akin to indentured servants [[link removed]] for the NCAA.

The argument in favor of paying the players has always been, in very broad strokes: They are basically professional athletes in all but name; they are generating billions in collective revenue for their schools and conferences; they are being exploited by not being remunerated; scholarships are not enough remuneration.

While I can quibble with some of that, I mostly agreed that the idea of amateurism was absurd when the games are broadcast nationally as part of billion-dollar media-rights contracts, and that if you believe in capitalism you should support some portion of the money going to the players.

But Emmert was directionally right about one thing: Once you open this Pandora’s box, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube—and whatever other mixed metaphors you want to apply here.

Three years into the NIL era, it is clear everyone is flying by the seat of their pants and writing the rules as they go.

Oklahoma State announced [[link removed]] before the CFB season it would put scannable QR codes on player helmets that link to a donation page to the school’s NIL collective; on game day, just before the start of OSU’s first game, the school declared the NCAA nixed the QR codes [[link removed]] under the guidance that they constitute “advertising and/or commercial marks,” prohibited by the NCAA’s existing bylaws. But if the NIL collective is kosher, and inviting donations to the NIL collective is kosher, what’s wrong with advertising the donation page? The answer is it’s one of many preexisting rules that need to change immediately to adapt to the new era—lest this all start to look arbitrary.

But no incident has grabbed mainstream attention quite like the saga of Matthew Sluka [[link removed]], the UNLV quarterback who had the Rebels off to a 3–0 start when he suddenly announced he would sit for the rest of the season due to “certain representations that were made to me” by the school’s NIL collective. As emerged over the course of a frenzied news cycle, Sluka, his agent, and his father believe he was promised $100,000 from the school in NIL money and never got it (but the deal was never in writing). As our Margaret Fleming wrote, “This is believed to be the first time in the NIL era that an athlete has backed out midseason over collective payments (or a lack thereof).”

Maybe the first, but he won’t be the last.

I had the perfect group to comment on the Sluka situation this past week as part of a panel on all things NIL at Advertising Week New York. My panelists were Rachel Baker, GM of Duke men’s basketball; Brian Mason, NIL director at the University of Wisconsin; Catherine Marquette, head of collegiate partnerships at Under Armour; and Jeff Granger, an alum and former basketball player at Hampton University in Virginia, and founder of its NIL collective.

Baker, giving the Duke perspective, said, “When you’re making these promises to these athletes and families, the collective has to be in a lot of ways a reflection of what you’re telling them on a day-to-day basis. It, quite literally based on the contract, couldn’t happen at Duke [[link removed]].”

My translation: We’re more careful; we draw up a contract; and no one should be making a college commitment decision based on a verbal agreement.

Granger of Hampton gave his perspective as a loyal alum looking to help his alma mater, a mid-major school that plays in the Coastal Athletic Association: “Duke is gonna be Duke, Wisconsin’s gonna be Wisconsin, and the ads and TV revenue, all that’s gonna flow in. It looks different for us. … We can’t play in the portal the same way, because we don’t have the same pocket. … Now we’re recruiting a high school kid that comes and develops for freshman, sophomore year, and he transfers after the second year because we can’t afford him.”

That’s where the conversation has ended up in college sports recruiting: Can we afford this player? How much will they cost us, and how long will they stay?

Meanwhile, both the NIL director and GM jobs in a college sports setting are newer roles that are fast-multiplying across collegiate athletic departments. (Former NBA scoop master Adrian Wojnarowski is now men’s basketball GM at his alma mater St. Bonaventure [[link removed]].) It is clear to me that no one, including the people in those jobs, is exactly sure of what they are meant to be. The descriptions are different school by school, and everyone is feeling their way as they go.

The same goes for the booster-led NIL collectives: brand-new organizations that have, in many cases, done a lot of good for their school, but also face very little oversight so far, and have in some cases made obvious oversteps that met with slaps on the wrist (see: Miami women’s basketball [[link removed]], FSU football [[link removed]], Florida football [[link removed]]).

I am hardly introducing a novel opinion here. Everyone can see NIL mania has glaring problems. It’s easy to find online much angrier takes that declare NIL is ruining college sports.

I am not willing to say that yet. Many college athletes have used large portions of their NIL money to do a lot of good for others [[link removed]]. Instead, I’ll just say the NIL era is off to a slapdash start. And I suspect it will take a few more messy years before the turbulence subsides. We will watch and see how the Wild West is won.

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Notes From the Crowd Mailbag: Fragmentation Frustration

Raymond Carlin III/Imagn Images

Readers had a lot to say about last weekend’s column [[link removed]] on live sports TV fragmentation.

“People do not want to pay extra for every little app to watch their favorite sport. … I was home Thursday night trying to navigate between the Mets vs Brewers (LGM) and TNF. Switching between a cable channel & streaming service takes about 15-20 seconds (logging in & out)—I am a channel surfer & want quick turnaround between commercials. YouTube is not the answer either—it is cable without the box; still need Hi-Speed WiFi & adding up all the costs of the apps (like you mentioned) will be more than $300 per month. Cable companies need to evolve and provide consumers with an option to create their own packages.” —George Ameer

“As someone who spent time at NBC Sports, DAZN and the NBA, it’s something I think about and have conversations about a lot. There is customer fatigue, no doubt. No one knows where to find games. When the NBA deals kick in next year, I would not be shocked to see cable ratings go down given the movement to new networks and confusion. … There has to be a bubble, but I’m not sure when it comes. The advantage of streaming packages is that leagues and distributors can intimately know their audience: age, how much time they’re watching each game, what they’re watching, what teams they’re watching, etc. Those details lack in cable or linear TV. This data allows the league and distributors to know what brands to negotiate deals with. They can sell these statistics to get the brands excited about increasing their reach and spending more money – which again, drives the bottom line to the leagues and players. It will never go backwards but there needs to be a re-bundling at some point.” —Tony Miller

“I’m having trouble keeping up with NASCAR because the races are shown on different networks and I often miss them. Now, it seems like I’ll need to subscribe to Amazon Prime just to watch a race. It’s becoming really difficult to follow the sport.” — @DrewPalmquist [[link removed]]

“It’s ridiculous. Not only hard to find the games but half the streaming networks don’t load up seamlessly so it’s even more of a pain.” — @RESeattleAnn [[link removed]]

Good Week / Bad Week Utah HC Debuts Strong, Super League Stumbles

Rob Gray/Imagn Images

Good week for:

Utah Hockey Club ⬆ After relocating from Arizona following its acquisition, the NHL’s newest team has started the season strong. But Utah HC scored in other ways, too, recording a sellout crowd of 11,131 fans for their inaugural game. (There were actually 16,020 fans at the Delta Center, but the league does not officially count seats with obstructed views.) FOS’s A.J. Perez was present for the opening game and wrote about the stellar atmosphere [[link removed]]—and the record beer sales [[link removed]].

Vanderbilt ⬆ Following last Saturday’s win over Alabama—one of the biggest upsets in college football history—Commodores fans celebrated by storming the field, incurring a $100,000 fine in the process [[link removed]]. However, it seems like Vandy was happy to take the fine—and the school and its players have found other ways to monetize their shocking win. The school has been selling merchandise and auctioning off items from the game [[link removed]], including game balls and pieces of the goalpost. Quarterback Diego Pavia also publicly requested his interest in more NIL deals by tweeting his agent’s number.

Bad week for:

CFB super league ⬇ A group called College Sports Tomorrow unveiled a proposal last week for the College Student Football League, which would pool 136 programs together into two leagues. Another proposal, Project Rudy, would completely change the schedule and media deals for the Power 4 conferences. However, these proposals face an uphill battle because they will need network cooperation as media-rights deals are set for multiple years for many of the top conferences. On Thursday, leaders from the SEC and Big Ten publicly opposed the super-league proposals [[link removed]].

NBA’s cap structure ⬇ The NBA introduced a second apron last season: a payroll threshold about $48 million more than the soft salary cap limit which, when passed by teams, results in severe roster construction penalties. During NBA.com’s 23rd annual GM survey released Tuesday, they voted the second apron as the No. 1 rule they wish to change [[link removed]]. However, commissioner Adam Silver defended the structure Thursday [[link removed]], saying the apron was instituted to create parity and “it seems to be working so far.”

You Might Have Missed An HBCU Bets on Hockey, DraftKings and Fanatics Fight in Court

Courtesy of TSU

Tennessee State announced last year that it will be the first HBCU to introduce a hockey program [[link removed]], beginning next season. It has hired a rising-star coach and has ambitious plans to go big from the first puck drop. But, as FOS’s Meredith Turits [[link removed]]reports, the university is facing an urgent existential crisis it’ll have to navigate if it wants to hit the ice at all. Since DraftKings executive Michael Hermalyn jumped to Fanatics Sportsbook last February, DraftKings has led a bicoastal legal blitz to enforce his non-compete agreement. A.J. Perez [[link removed]] went inside the bitter and expensive battle [[link removed]], talking to current and former DraftKings employees about the drawn-out conflict. WWE’s farm system churns out generational talent, produces stars for the flagship shows, and has become its own prime-time draw. NXT recently debuted on The CW after a five-year deal worth about $20 million annually. There’s a lot behind the “talent factory” [[link removed]] that got NXT to this point, and FOS contributor Mark Lelinwalla [[link removed]] has the details. Advertise [[link removed]] Awards [[link removed]] Learning [[link removed]] Events [[link removed]] Video [[link removed]] Podcast [[link removed]] Written by Daniel Roberts [[link removed]], Colin Salao [[link removed]], Meredith Turits [[link removed]] Edited by Or Moyal [[link removed]], Peter Richman [[link removed]], Catherine Chen [[link removed]]

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