NIL rules spreading the excess
The kid grew up, appropriately enough, in a Kansas town called Plainville. When he left for college, he did so without an athletic scholarship, and without any apparent expectations of finding fame or fortune.
Not only did he join one of the most abysmal college football programs in America, he joined as a walk-on. He wasn’t guaranteed to play a single snap, and his team wasn’t guaranteed to win a single game. Statistically speaking, you never should have heard of him.
But three weeks ago, thanks to an unlikely starring role in one of the season’s most unlikely upsets, Jared Casey sat at a table in an Applebee’s, delivering scripted lines into a camera.
“Hey,” Casey said, rubbing his hands over a pair of entrees during a commercial for the casualdining chain, “you always gotta go for two.”
This was feel-good capitalism, and it almost seemed wholesome. The week Casey caught a pass for a game-winning 2-point conversion to lift Kansas past Texas, he was as popular as he’s ever likely to be during his football career, if not his life. And the fact that the NCAA’s long-overdue change to its name, image and likeness (NIL) rules allowed him to cash in on that brief notoriety was something everyone — except maybe the Longhorns — could celebrate.
But at its core, college football isn’t wholesome at all, and it hasn’t been for quite a long time. It is, above most everything else, an enterprise in obscene spending, and that won’t change because athletes have a few more rights.
Now they just share in the excess.
Take, for instance, the financial behemoth that Casey helped knock off last month. The Longhorns have been wasting money for years on coaches and administrators, not to mention unfortunately designed end zone renovations. So, of course, now that the rules allow it, they’re going to try throwing bundles of cash at teenagers, too.
Starting next August, every offensive lineman on scholarship at Texas will get an extra $50,000 per year as part of a new NIL deal announced this week by a nonprofit entity called “Horns with Heart,” founded by six unnamed Longhorns supporters. Per the organization’s announcement, up to 16 linemen per year will be compensated in return for lending their names, images and likenesses to charitable causes.
The group said the program could be expanded to other Texas teams and position groups, and it follows last week’s news of a $10 million “Clark Field Collective,” which also will fund NIL deals for Longhorns athletes.
Now, let’s set aside for a moment that, in terms of altruism, the $800,000 spent on relatively unknown offensive linemen to bring attention to charitable causes might be better spent on, well, charity. We’re not here to tell wealthy donors how to spend their money, and funneling it toward frivolous pursuits isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
So even if “Horns with Heart” is a blatant attempt to stock the roster in an area of obvious need right before national signing day, it’s a natural progression for the sport, and one everyone could have seen coming.
After all, it’s been more than 30 years since SMU earned the NCAA’s “death penalty” for a pay-for-play football scheme. Per an official investigation into the 1980s scandal, former Texas Gov. Bill Clements, who then served on the school’s board of governors, met with SMU athletic director Bob Hitch and decided to keep a “slush fund” for players because they “had a payroll to meet.”
Only the most naïve college football fan believed there were no other versions of payrolls between “Pony Excess” and “Horns with Heart.” What the Longhorns are doing out in the open under the new NIL rules might look jarring, but that’s only because it’s above board now.
Sure, if you operate under the belief that college football is supposed to be about kids getting an education and playing for school pride, then recruits choosing programs based on the highest NIL offer is grotesque. But is it really any more grotesque than the millions of dollars universities have spent on coaches for years? How about the staggering amount of money spent on fired employees to NOT coach anymore?
According to an ESPN analysis of open records, in 2020, public universities in major conferences distributed a combined total of more than $533 million in dead money to fulfill the contracts of coaches in all sports who’d been forced out or left their jobs. That number is expected to grow in 2021.
To hire Mario Cristobal away from Oregon this week, Miami paid $8 million to buy out the contract of fired coach Manny Diaz. It paid $9 million to buy out Cristobal’s deal with the Ducks. And that’s before it pays Cristobal a reported annual salary of $8 million to do his job.
Is any of this fiscally responsible? Of course not.
Could it be categorized as wholesome? Not hardly.
Will spending $50,000 on offensive linemen provide rich donors with a more efficient return on their investments? Doubtful.
But if there is outrage this week about the compensation headed the athletes’ way, it seems a bit misplaced.
After all, the players didn’t invent the grift. It’s just easier now for them to get in on it.