Numbers being reported for some of the recruits signing today:
Hurricanes paying OT Jackson Cantwell 2.5 million as a freshman.
Texas Tech paying OT Felix Ojo 775,000K as a freshman
Tennessee paying WR Tristen Keys 1 Million as a freshman
Tennesse paying QB Faizon Brandon 1-1.5 Million as a freshman
These are just a few numbers. Costs a lot to employee college athletes these days.
The house settlement cap (which pretty much every “big” program will fully use) gives schools $20.5m to spread among all athletes and the guideline is to allocate about 75% of that to men’s football, so we’d expect the entire rosters to have direct payments of 15.4m or so. Seven figures to a single freshman WR seems to eat up a lot of that, so not sure how that squares with the cap.
We know from the Lane Kiffen drama that LSU was willing to commit to find $25m in “above the cap” payments from third parties, which need to be approved in the NIL portal and can’t be promised as part of signing/recruiting.
Will be very interesting to see how much revenue sharing each MAC program is using when these hit public records. I’d guess we are probably a year or so from seeing that.