SAN DIEGO — Not long after Texas A&M's football team, which hasn't won a national championship since 1939 (when it was the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas) or a conference title since 1998, secured the No. 1-ranked recruiting class, reports circulated about Aggies boosters assembling a war chest of $25 million to entice players now that they can monetize their name, image and likeness.
Coach Jimbo Fisher took offense.
"That had nothing to do with this class," he told CBS Sports. "This was hard work by our staff. It's insulting to the kids that come here that you insinuate that."
So what are we supposed to believe? That they picked A&M for its chemistry department or the striking beauty of College Station?
But instead of gigging the Aggies, maybe we should praise them. They quickly and accurately assessed the new landscape of college sports, then effectively navigated it.
Here's how recruiting used to work: We think our university can positively impact your future through our various academic programs and life lessons gained through sports.
Here's how it works now: How much do you want?
For that, we can thank Nancy Skinner and others like her. Skinner is the California state senator who had never balanced the budget of an athletic department forced to support dozens of women's sports that lose money but was hellbent on remedying this exploitative system of indentured servitude. The solution: Allow college athletes to control their NIL.
It won't cost the universities a penny, they said, and student-athletes will, finally, be compensated in some fashion, since it wasn't enough that they were already getting an estimated $200,000 or more per year in scholarships, medical care, food, lodging, tutoring, fitness training, equipment, clothing, charter flights, five-star hotels, cost of attendance stipends, coaching and preparation for the professional level. And, oh yeah, admittance to a university beyond the academic reach of most athletes. (The average high school GPA of incoming freshmen at San Diego State in 2020 was 3.97 with a 1283 SAT.)
Practically every president and athletic director pleaded for patience, explaining college sports operate in a unique biosphere, some of it unregulated, some of it highly regulated by federal legislation mandating gender equity. And messing with that delicate economic equilibrium could have — would have — dire unintended consequences.
Skinner et al. pushed forward undaunted, and by last summer enough of these state laws had passed that the NCAA, already teetering from antitrust lawsuits, threw up its hands and threw open the barn doors to NIL. It talked about "guardrails" to prevent abuse, which was akin to setting up a couple orange traffic cones on a curvy mountain road.
Ten months later, predictably, college sports have plowed through them and driven off the cliff.
The Athletic recently reviewed an NIL contract for an unidentified five-star recruit worth $8 million, including $350,000 up front followed by monthly payments amounting to $2 million per year. And one for a four-star receiver worth $1 million, and a three-star defensive lineman for $500,000.
Those are incoming freshmen who have yet to play a snap of college football. There are also the transfers who have essentially become free agents with the NCAA no longer mandating they sit out a year. One coach tells the story of two SEC basketball programs bidding for a high-profile transfer, and one tapping out when it got to $650,000.
Even at the lower levels of Division I, ho-hum basketball transfers are commanding $75,000. Some are demanding multiyear deals.
"It creates a situation where you can basically buy players," Alabama coach Nick Saban said earlier this month. "You can do it in recruiting. I mean, if that's what we want college football to be, I don't know."
"It's the NBA," another coach told me, "without the NBA salary cap."
The only regulation is the universities themselves can't make the deals. No problem. Just as politicians created Super PACs (political action committees) to skirt campaign finance laws, with no limits on donation size, boosters have formed nonprofit "collectives" to funnel money to athletes without answering to Title IX.
What started as modest compensation shilling for a local car dealer or pizza parlor has quickly become unapologetic recruiting payola in the win-at-all-costs world of college football and men's basketball. Tennessee was one of the first to form a collective, called Spyre Sports Group, and landed its first five-star quarterback prospect in two decades who said, cryptically, "they had everything I was looking for." There's FUND (Friends of the University of Notre Dame), The Foundation at Ohio State, High Tide Traditions at Alabama, Division Street at Oregon. Florida and Florida State have two each.
Texas has four at last count, including one exclusively for tight ends and another for offensive linemen and another started with a $10 million commitment.
Most power conference schools have them. So does Texas-San Antonio, Central Florida, Tulsa, SMU, Memphis, Florida International, Gonzaga and Grambling. (San Diego State and its Mountain West brethren so far do not.)
"Whatever casual sports fans or coaches think student-athletes are earning from collectives, they're (underestimating) by 10X," Opendorse founder Blake Lawrence, whose company matches them with NIL deals, told The Athletic. "While $2 million is wild, $200,000 isn't. But most people are thinking they're getting $20,000."
The contracts typically don't stipulate athletes must attend a specific university (but presume they will). Take Shaedon Sharpe, a five-star basketball recruit who graduated high school in December and a month later enrolled at Kentucky, where NIL packages include a Porsche, with the intention of playing for the Wildcats in 2022-23. "Thanks for the wheels," he said on social media. Now he's entered the NBA draft.
It works both ways, though. There are reports some NIL contracts control a players' marketing rights through his collegiate career, limiting the ability to transfer, or contain clauses that siphon off a percentage of future earnings in pro leagues.
There are other dangers, most notably the loss of locker room camaraderie among players with unequal NIL deals and a widening resentment on campuses between regular students riding bikes and entitled student-athletes driving Porsches. And who's responsibly managing all that money for them, or advising them on filing taxes?
And what about the pressures now heaped on 18-year-olds? If they don't meet expectations, it's no longer, hey, they're just college students trying to balance academics and athletics. It's: We spent $8 million on this guy?
Through the orange traffic cones, over the cliff.
"In hindsight," an East Coast athletic director told me, "maybe we shouldn't have let Twitter run college sports."
The question now is whether anyone or anything will regulate it. The NCAA wants no part of it, paralyzed by fear of antitrust litigation. Congress could step in, but with soaring inflation and a divided nation and a war in Ukraine, it has more pressing matters to address than fixing college sports.
That leaves the market itself, which ultimately will decide the viability of an escalating arms race. Schools with billionaire boosters can stomach spending millions for unproven recruits in the name of an SEC title. The have-nots might get $75,000 here or $100,000 there in the short term, but what happens when you keep dipping the bucket into that well?
The bigger concern among athletic directors is what happens to their own budgets when all the millions they traditionally receive from donors are diverted to NIL cooperatives? Women's sports advocates, curiously, haven't made the connection: Their sports will suffer funding cuts and, possibly, probably, elimination.
The college sports landscape is changing so quickly, you might not recognize it soon. Or even now, if you squint and look closely.
But you can be assured of one thing: Jimbo Fisher's staff at Texas A&M will keep working hard.
