If college athletics were a person, they'd be a teenager, awkwardly tromping through an unwieldy phase of unpredictable day-to-day changes. But the picture became clearer with the house settlement allowing schools to pay athletes like employees. Given its personality traits of amateur competition and playing for school pride, real and romanticized, college sports' transition to a full-on business with paid labor is one of the most radical structural changes in sports history. The advent of NIL has already brought pay-for-play unofficially, but soon there will be no wink-and-nod required.
Will the new NIL landscape leave the University of Maryland in position to contend? Can the Terps football program survive in an exploding marketplace dominated by blueblood schools in the Big Ten and SEC? Will the men's basketball program have the resources to bring in the next Derik Queen?
There are no definitive answers, like most questions during this transformational moment, because little is definite from one day to the next. We do know, though, that Power Conference schools will be allowed to directly negotiate with and pay athletes beginning in the 2025-2026 seasons with a salary cap of $20.5 million. That payroll will come from existing revenues, so while Maryland is fortunate to be raking in big money from the Big Ten -- about $60 million last year -- there's no big funnel of new money coming in for them to pay players with.
At schools like Ohio State and Michigan, the money will be easy to find. The Buckeyes raked in more than $251 million in revenue last year, the highest amount in college sports. Maryland, at about $107 million, ranked 43rd nationally and 16th among the 18 Big Ten members. So for OSU or Michigan, the only problem with that $20 million cap is that it's not high enough. For Maryland, the issue is finding the money and generating more.
Still, I'm told Maryland is planning to spend the entire amount. How will they do it?
"Lots of dollars moving around, meaning Big Ten [revenue], having vendors pay into the collective and [Kevin] Plank," a source with direction knowledge of the athletic department's planning told IMS.
So that's good news. The bad? That's not the only cash needed. Well-funded programs will continue to associate with collectives that have been making deals with athletes, extending well beyond that $20 million cap, which, by the way, will progressively climb to more than $30 million within 10 years of the new deal's start.
"I think that schools are approaching the future of their collectives in a couple of different ways. Schools that have enough resources and money to pay that much, I think, will keep their collective around to exceed the cap through outside collective dollars," Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports said. "NIL dollars like athletes have been receiving. Schools that don't have the resources to meet that cap will probably not need that collective and will shut it down. And I think in a lot of instances we'll probably see that happen."
That some could be spending $30 or $40 million, maybe more, on athletes beginning next year. Maryland has scraped by largely on those kinds of private donations to the collective. But you can only shake the same trees so many times. And the trees are bigger and more plentiful in Columbus and other locales where everyone supports State U.
"It's still primarily the same donors for years and years [at Maryland]. We have done a better job trying to get corporate sponsorships and the athletic department actually has been helping us with it, but if you look at College Park, there isn't a car dealership, there's a couple bars and some franchise-type restaurants," Harry Geller, who operates Maryland men's basketball's Turtle NIL collective, said on IMS Radio (his interview begins around the 15-minute mark below).
"But there's really, it's not like Columbus, Ohio or Lawrence, Kansas or State College, Pennsylvania, where you have a whole community just based around the school. So getting corporate donors is always a little more difficult and then you're fighting with other elements within the school, the arenas, you know, they want to get corporate donors to put signs in the arena and help sponsor some of those things that way. So you're always competing against those types of things for NIL dollars."
If other Big Ten schools continue to raise and spend significant money beyond the $20 million through outside deals, Maryland will have to find a way to keep up or face a competitive disadvantage. Other schools have received help from their state politicians, too; Ohio recently got ahead of the curve by making it legal immediately for universities to directly offer money to and pay athletes. At Missouri, it's no coincidence the football program has been thriving after the state enacted a law allowing high school athletes to receive NIL as long as they're committed to a state university. Maryland could use similar forward-thinking assistance from the state government.
Those are far from the only competitive disadvantages many schools will face. Scholarship limits are expected to rise from 85 to 105 in football and 13 to 15 in men's basketball. So schools will have to face the challenge of finding the money to fund scholarships for those extra players. If they can't, a bunch of their opponents will have bigger armies than them. There's a reason football produces so many war metaphors; attrition is constant in both and so there's strength in numbers. It's unknown at this stage how athletic director Damon Evans plans to approach the scholarship issue.
It'll be easier to stomach in basketball, with just three extra scholarships to fund, and I'm told Kevin Willard will be more open to taking on a developmental high school prospect or two per year who won't need to help right away thanks to the increased roster size, almost like how NBA teams can take players and let them grow in the G League. Those kinds of players also won't take up as much NIL as big-time high school recruits and transfers. And in college basketball, you only rely on eight or nine players anyway.
On the flip side, if you can reel in a program-changing recruit like Derik Queen, you might be able to keep him from going pro by offering seven figures per season.
The other big question: how will that $20 million be spent? It doesn't seem like Title IX will apply, so ADs won't be required to spend money evenly. Most are expected to spend between 75 and 90 percent on football and men's basketball, leaving the non-revenue programs to mostly fend for themselves by fundraising. Now that college sports are becoming full-fledged business, lifelong pretenses of fairness will dropped in favor of fueling the teams that make the money. This could lead to wealthy athletic programs like Ohio State dominating the non-revenue sports because they can find a couple million for each of them in the couch cushions, while other schools are struggling just to find the two money-making sports.
Maryland's men's basketball's highest-paid players are in the $500,000 neighborhood this season their NIL budget likely to roughly double to around $6 million next season. How much will the Big Ten's best-funded men's basketball programs spend on next year's rosters?
"They'll be spending, top schools, in the five-to-eight million range, would be my guess. Maybe even a little more," Geller said. "We may be on the lower end of that [top] level, but we'll be competitive and even looking back this year, we didn't miss out on anyone because we didn't have money."
Although the school has a basketball-crazed fanbase, football still generates the majority of the revenue and will have a roster six or seven times as large, so Mike Locksley, who's faced an uphill battle with one of the Big Ten's smallest football NIL budgets, will get a big chunk of that $20 million salary cap. Locksley is also close to Under Armour's Plank. Multiple sources said Plank (pictured with Locksley and Stephen Curry), who along with Barry Gossett has been one of the program's top two benefactors for years, is expected to be a generous supporter of the program's NIL efforts moving forward. Under Armour's stock has slowly been rebounding after its years long freefall, something every Terps fan should be rooting for.
There's no telling how that will affect, for example, the women's basketball program. Brenda Frese's program received more than one-third of the funding the men's program received last season. In such a cutthroat, survivalist landscape, it's hard to imagine how Evans will to able justify allotting that much of the money on any program that doesn't return a profit. Some sports could struggle to survive, though with most schools pouring most of the cash into football and men's basketball, most of their peers could be in a similar university-funding situation, meaning collectives could still be vital.
The value of NIL deals have multiplied quickly during the past couple of years. It'll be on Evans and the other decision-makers at Maryland to keep up with all of the above.
"Looking at projections from three years ago to what we spent last year, what we spent this year, it's three and four times the amount that it did when it started," Geller said. "And at this point, it's kind of a players, sellers' market where the student-athletes who really just want to maximize their earning potential, with hundreds of schools out there, they're going to find someone that's going to pay them what they want if that's what they want to do."
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