I think everyone agrees the current landscape of college athletics is unsustainable. From $20 million mens basketball rosters to $50 million dollar football rosters how much longer can this continue? Schools seemingly willing to bankrupt their athletic department to field mediocre teams (Maryland and Rutgers Im looking at you), to cutting non revenue sports and future title IX considerations.
Why would donors fund MAC collectives when we lose any good player that we develop across all sports? Even die hards are starting to say “the hell with it”. When does the bomb go off and what is the tipping point and is it close? Whats the supply side of this equation (is it the players or is it the donors) and what is the demand side? Im not interested in an argument about NIL payouts to players, etc. Im more interested in the macro view of when will this collapse, and I think a collapse is inevitable. What say you? Love to hear from you all…
I would think some level of NIL is hear to stay but a tipping point of the top 40 schools who function as for profit enterprises and dont have students is less than 10 years away. This might only be for football and basketball too. Then the rest of the schools try to maintain some level of student/athlete model with payments of players and some olympic sports
I think just about everybody agrees this whole college athletics landscape ain’t sustainable long term. When ya got basketball rosters pushin’ $20 million and football programs flirtin’ with $50 million, ya gotta wonder how much longer schools can keep burnin’ money like this just to field average teams. At some point the math quits makin’ sense, especially for schools outside the blue-blood crowd. Athletic departments already runnin’ deficits, non-revenue sports gettin’ squeezed, and Title IX questions sittin’ there like a storm cloud nobody wants to talk about yet. And honestly, what MAC donor in their right mind wants to keep feedin’ collectives when every good player ya develop gets poached the second they break out? Feels like smaller schools turned into farm systems for the Big Ten and SEC. Even some die-hards are startin’ to throw their hands up and say, “the hell with it.” To me the supply side is donor money and schools willing to spend themselves silly outta fear of gettin’ left behind. The demand side is elite players knowin’ somebody out there will pay more next year. Right now there ain’t enough guardrails to slow any of it down. The tipping point probably comes when boosters stop believin’ the investment actually matters. Once donor fatigue hits middle-tier programs hard, this whole thing starts shakier than folks wanna admit. I don’t think it collapses overnight, but I do think a correction’s comin’. Bigger divide between the top dogs and everybody else, more regulation, maybe contracts, maybe caps, maybe schools flat-out scaling back.
Feels like we’re a lot closer to that moment than people wanna believe.
I think it’s closer to breaking than some think. Like less than three years away from imploding. The payment part isn’t going away but the donor fatigue is already happening and there isn’t enough money for it to go up forever short of selling college sports to a sovereign wealth fund where money is irrelevant. The tipping point is when the economy goes into a recession, alum start thinking harder about financial priorities, plus the window when less overall students are applying to colleges. For big schools (and prolly a lot of them) it will be “here’s our budget. Work with it.” For the poor schools it will mean dropping a lot of sports and no NIL of any real note.
The solution is athletes become employees of the school, sign a three-year contract, and enter into a CBA with the school, or more likely their league. That’s the answer. The problem with that answer is that right now nobody cares to move on that. Old heads like us are repulsed by NIL and collectives and the portal, but the IU student whose football team just won the NC loves it, doesn’t care that the players aren’t students, and can’t wait to bet on the next game. TV ratings for this circus are going UP, and alums are forking over the dough, especially at schools where they couldn’t do it effectively before. The portal has replaced recruiting as something to follow and get irrationally geeked up about. In a so-called free-market society, this is all going to continue until alums run out of money, or keep spending money with no titles in return, whichever comes first. No incentive to change this right now.
I’m not sure I understand the overall trend, but in my own experience, it’s disheartening to make fairly significant contributions to athletics (against my general giving strategy) only to see that the cost of “doing business” is rising even faster than our significant increases in fundraising. The Old Bobcat would have described this as trying to piss up a rope. It won’t work for long, if at all.
I’m likely to retrench and increase my giving to the academic side of the house where there are significant needs and let other folks chase this dragon.
On our side as long as we are top three in the MAC spending and dominate the championship side I think you accept that you’ll lose top players after a year or two to the P4 and accept you have the resources to keep replacing them. Be the blue blood of your conference and you have to be somewhat happy.
Agree with Redhawk_24 and “be the blue blood of your conference.”
We need full multi-years contracts or it will likely all implode and even the elite the power school’s will become frustrated in massive bidding wars. The goal is to hang until it implodes and be at the top of the group of 6 and be at the table when restructuring occurs with caps, better rules, multi-year contracts, etc. Many in the bottom half of the group of 6 will not be able to sustain at the same level in 10 years sadly.
I think Private Equity is the next lever that is being pulled. We are already seeing it and I think that investment accelerates and will potentially delay any implosion. I think the anti trust issue needs to be resolved and ultimately congressional action will be the only thing that remotely fixes this. Factor in the pending demographic cliff and non-flagship, non-blue bloods will really start to feel the pain and reevaluate their investments.
Folks, what are we talking about? Think big picture with Miami Athletics…
The athletic department is trying to position itself to be considered for a better conference within the next 5 years, American or even ACC (when FSU, Clemson, etc., join the Big 10/SEC). By stopping support for athletics, Football is more likely to join the Pioneer League and play at Welcome Stadium vs. UD instead of joining a stronger conference.
I am an old guy and a former D1 football player. I only have an issue with the collectives, less so with NIL, but I think we have strayed far from what we all thought NIL would mean. I have zero issue with the portal and free movement. It sucks as a fan, but I dont think players should ever be held hostage by limiting transfers (unless you sign a contract).
Out of curiosity what amazing academic strides has Louisville made since joining the ACC? Are they on the verge of an AAU invite? Have they put together a big boy endowment? Have their rankings and selectivity shot upwards? How about WVU and the B12? Nebraska and the B1G?
Did Rice plummet as an academic institution after dropping out of the power conference ranks?
I’d be curious to understand more about how you think I am missing the big picture. But what I see is that my alma mater raised unprecedented amounts of NIL and other athletic funds this year – and actually fell further behind P4 schools where the player salary budgets appear to have increased by about 40%.
You want to talk about the ACC? I know a bit about that league. Forget Clemson or FSU for a minute. Do you really think Miami can raise and annually sustain the level of NIL and institutional support those schools spend? And I’m not talking about Duke here; I’m talking about UVA, Georgia Tech, or even BC.
So, I come back to the Old Bobcat and pissin’ up a rope. At some point, you might want to stop doing that. And I’d much rather see Miami’s institutional resources and giving focused on getting the university back into the US News top 100 or thereabouts than chasing some athletics pipe dream.
I think an economic downturn is a decent guess. Even if it isn’t as deep or lengthy as the Great Recession, many individuals and businesses will be unable (or unwilling) to give enough to keep things going at the rate they are. The few with the means to continue will break off into a superleague so everyone else can hopefully take a deep breath and calm down this BS system.
We have a good thing at MU. I think 3-4 of our men’s /women’s sports can always be top 25. But maybe only 1-2 in a year. We had field hockey, and hoops this year. But have had hockey and football and others like softball. Being at the top of the funding heap might not actually change that. Lots of good schools out there.