As much as most of us don’t like it, the reality is NIL is here to stay. NIL is a huge part of athletic success. TU just lost its top men’s & top women’s basketball player. TU must hire a dynamic fundraiser as their new athletic director.
TU has a small alumni base, but is the best sports entertainment option in a metro area of over 1 million people. TU must find a way to attract new fans and donors that are not alumni. We need a dynamic fundraiser to connect with the Tulsa area business community.
If we are to have athletic success in today’s NIL world we must truly become Tulsa’s team. That starts with hiring a new AD that has the personality and energy to lead that drive.er th
I disagree.
I think the legal landscape will be more firm over the next two years making NIL largely irrelevant.
While the debate over NIL has been front and center, that has really just been a ploy by labor leaders and labor/trial lawyers to force concessions on wages for participation as part of an overall strategy of finding college football liable for antitrust violations.
Without going into a diatribe that some of you hate, what you are seeing trickle out is a multi stage, multi decade legal strategy.
One of the little discussed nuances of anti-trust law is that you are able to recover triple damages for wage fixing violations. There is no limit as far back as that can go. The labor unions, and their lawyers, have been trying to get a hold of that kind of $50 billion dollar payout for about 20 years. Basically, threatening the NCAA that they are liable not just for not paying the players this season, but every season, going back to the creation of television and even radio. Times three. It could take millions and years for experts to determine just how much that number is, and they’ve been trying for awhile.
The NIL thing was always a way to sympathetically phrase the problem to the public and get the system evolving towards a wage model. Once there, strategically filed law suits, one of which is pending settlement, would memorialize what a fair wage scale based on gross revenues would be, if there was actually a single body to collectively bargain with, which there likely never will be. Then the guys trying to get a settlement that would make tobacco lawyers blush can go after all the past money. TU’s liability could be considerable.
So the lawyers knowledgeable on these issues, lawyers who have never lost a case, and have been doing sports law since their clients Curt Flood, Freeman McNeil, Etc were playing say it’s 10% of gross media rights. We are talking guys who are in Michael Jordan’s speed dial. Guys David Stern called the most dangerous men in America.
So in TU’s case, let’s say media revenue stays at $7 million. And let’s say Congress or the President steps in and says the women get an equal share. That’s $7 million divided by 530 roughly, Or approximately $13,000 a player. Not much more than what we are paying them now in Alston funds and none of it erodes the donor base.
Now that will stink for TU because it will mean that the pay will always be lower than the SEC. And we likely won’t be in the top classification anymore. But it also means the new AD probably shouldn’t run out and raise $10 million to give to our basketball team when that money could be spent on appropriately sized and budgeted facilities we have needed for twenty years.
