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Sunday Edition

December 8, 2024

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Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be back in your Sunday inbox. This week I have Michigan football on the brain—and I’ve got no ties to the school. But neither did Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. Nonetheless, he was at the center of a massive NIL money injection to get the nation’s top high school QB prospect to switch his commitment from LSU to Michigan. To me, it’s the perfect representation of the new era of college sports, and it raises a lot of questions.

I welcome your input on this. Write to me at [[email protected]] or reply directly to this email.

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

College Football’s Billionaire Backer Era Begins

Rick Osentoski/Imagn Images

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: The third-richest person in the world [[link removed]] just bought the University of Michigan its next star quarterback.

If you missed this whole news cycle, here’s the gist: Michigan scored big last month when top high school QB Bryce Underwood flipped his commitment [[link removed]] from LSU. What sealed the deal was reportedly a $10 million to $12 million promise (the precise price tag is not publicly known) from boosters at Champions Circle, the Michigan NIL (name, image, and likeness) collective.

NIL collectives are a product of the new college sports Wild West [[link removed]] created in July 2021 when the NCAA started allowing college athletes to earn money from endorsement deals; schools can’t directly pay athletes to play a sport (though even that might soon change with the House settlement [[link removed]]), so instead, the collective gives the athlete an endorsement deal. This way the school can say it’s not engaging in “pay-for-play” since the school isn’t paying the kids, the alumni are—but I don’t see a huge difference.

In its official statement about the flip, Champions Circle thanked “Larry and Jolin Ellison.” That was a surprise—the Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle founder? Yes, the Larry Ellison, FOS confirmed [[link removed]] with two cofounders of the collective.

There was additional weirdness and intrigue: Champions Circle deleted its initial statement (too late, everyone saw it) and reposted it with the name “Ellison” removed. This time, it simply thanked “Larry and his wife Jolin.”

But who is Jolin [[link removed]]? She’s a 2012 Michigan grad named Keren Zhu who lives with Ellison, FOS learned over the Thanksgiving holiday. (WSJ was first to report Jolin’s identity Tuesday morning.) She appears to be his sixth wife (it’s not 100% clear whether they’re married apart from the collective calling her his wife) and was the obvious driving force in getting Ellison, who did not attend Michigan and has no other ties to the school, to cough up millions. (Michigan alums Tom Brady and Dave Portnoy were also involved in the wooing.)

Putting aside the Jolin part of the equation, the broader signal in all this is that college football is entering its billionaire boys club era.

Sure, you could retort that rich people donating money to their school is nothing new. Just look at how many college campus buildings bear the names Koch, Schwarzman, Griffin, Bloomberg, Munger, and so on.

Mark Zaleski/Imagn Images

But now the money is raining down onto football fields, and the process strikes me as more naked than it’s ever been. Now a rich guy can buy you a quarterback because his wife asked him to—just do it through the collective and call it an NIL deal.

Let’s also note that Michigan having a competitive football team is to the advantage of the Ellison family business: Ellison’s son David heads up Skydance and will be CEO of Paramount after those two companies merge; Paramount owns CBS, which airs Big Ten football games.

Ellison isn’t the only example, just the most famous and richest so far. Nike billionaire Phil Knight has donated more than $1 billion to his alma mater Oregon and appeared in a recent video that announced Na’eem Offord, the No. 2 cornerback recruit in the country, has flipped his commitment from Ohio State to Oregon. Offord told CBS Sports [[link removed]] that Knight “played a big role, like a huge, big role.” In July, former UCLA football coach Rick Neuheisel said Oregon enjoys “ unlimited [[link removed]]” NIL funding thanks to Knight. Like Ellison with Michigan, Knight has a vested business interest in the school’s football success: Oregon is a Nike school.

SMU’s football team made the ACC championship game this year, its first in a new conference, largely thanks to NIL money from alums like Bill Armstrong and other oil barons. Armstrong himself told ESPN [[link removed]] in September, “I bet a lot of these schools look at SMU and go, ‘Oh, shit, here come all the billionaires.’”

Indeed, here they come. $10 million (or whatever the number was) is like pennies for Ellison, whose worth is estimated by Forbes at $236.4 billion as of Dec. 6. How much more will he give? There’s no cap (yet) on how much one alum can give to an NIL collective. Jolin might have Larry buy a whole new football team.

What’s to stop Sergey Brin and Larry Page from buying Stanford a great team? Same goes for the Walton family (Arkansas alums), Michael Dell (Texas), and any other rich alums (they don’t have to be billionaires!) who want their alma mater to win.

To those who fully support the new capitalist approach to college athletics (the players should earn as much money as they possibly can), I’d ask: Is this the landscape you want? If you went to a school benefiting from all this, you may say yes. My Michigan alumni friends tell me they love the Ellison news. Why wouldn’t they? LSU fans, less so.

That’s college football recruitment now: The highest bid wins.

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Good Week / Bad Week NFL Ratings Pop; WNBA Stumbles

Detroit Free Press

Good week for:

NFL on Thanksgiving ⬆ The tripleheader on Thanksgiving averaged 34.2 million viewers [[link removed]], the most-ever, according to the NFL. The Giants-Cowboys game, which aired at 4:30 p.m. ET on Fox, was the most-watched of the season, drawing 38.5 million viewers [[link removed]], despite the two teams entering the game with a combined 6–16 record. Bears-Lions at 12:30 p.m. ET nearly surpassed the Cowboys with 37.4 million viewers.

Big Ten and SEC ⬆ The penultimate College Football Playoff rankings were released Tuesday, and it solidified the strength of the two conferences as each had four teams in the top 12 [[link removed]]. The expanded Playoff format is set to be financially lucrative for the two leagues as they will split a pot of $116 million [[link removed]] based on how many of their schools make the CFP and move forward in the bracket.

Bad week for:

WNBA ⬇ While the league experienced unprecedented growth in 2024 [[link removed]], it is still showing its growing pains. On Tuesday night, the name of the Toronto expansion franchise was accidentally leaked on social media [[link removed]] due to a mistake on the WNBA’s website. The name “Tempo” would be officially announced Thursday. Also, confusingly and to the disappointment of fans, the Golden State Valkyries’ expansion draft on Friday did not reveal the unprotected pool of players [[link removed]]—which other pro leagues have recently done.

NIL implementation ⬇ Tulsa football players and their families claim coaches, including fired head coach Kevin Wilson, made promises of NIL (name, image, and likeness) payments, but they haven’t received anything [[link removed]]. Lawmakers are arguing NIL restrictions (and revenue-sharing caps) in the House v. NCAA settlement proposal violate multiple state laws [[link removed]]. And the IRS could be coming for NIL collectives [[link removed]], calling them one of its “compliance enforcement priorities” for the 2025 fiscal year. More chaos is coming.

You Might Have Missed FIFA Resistance; NFL’s Potato King

Yukihito Taguchi/Imagn Images

Some of soccer’s biggest stars are already exhausted by a practically nonstop schedule. But FIFA is moving to add even more matches. The push is not sitting well inside the game: Although players are usually reserved about expressing frustrations, their voices are getting louder. Contributor Mike Jakeman [[link removed]] reports on the growing resentment inside global soccer [[link removed]]. Connor McGovern is an NFL journeyman—and the heir to a half-billion-dollar potato empire that supplies McDonald’s, Frito-Lay, and more. In our FOS Explains video series, Derryl Barnes breaks down [[link removed]] how McGovern left behind the lucrative legacy of R.D. Offutt Farms—the largest potato supplier in the U.S.—to carve his own path in professional football. FOS reporter Alex Schiffer [[link removed]] has the full story [[link removed]]. 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]], Catherine Chen [[link removed]], Peter Richman [[link removed]]

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