How to (Legally) Pay a College Football Player: NIL Collectives, Explained

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Nick Sabin was running roughshod over the entire sport and Ayell comes along deuces

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Is your mic on?

I like to turn it off occasionally so I don't make like a bodily noise into the microphone.

That's a thing.

That you have.

No, that's a thing that others do.

You have no tape of me doing it because I'm always good about turning my.

You need it on the entire time?

I need you on the record.

I'm not going to.

I'm not not you're gonna toggle you're gonna toggle yeah i it's it's an on-off swing it's just the way that i would like to operate you have trust issues sometimes i like to you know adjust the saliva in my mouth and i don't want to take the audience on that journey with me i want to start actually by exposing some parts of your body all right for journalistic disclosure's sake i came to miami to see mike ryan's tattoos in person oh yeah i got a lot more since we last saw each other well what do you have most recently uh most recently, I've got a tattoo of the Turnstile album cover.

Oh, God.

Glow-on.

I've got a tattoo of the Clevelander, the Clevelander logo in there.

That leg's basically going to be like, when I'm done with it, a journey

where I've been.

The Clevelander Hotel on your...

Things that shape me.

Things that shape me.

So let's not bury the leader.

Let's not bury what is on your upper calf.

As Lee Corso wearing Sebastian the Ibis' head.

One of the most ridiculous tattoos that is on any person ever.

That's kind of what I was going for.

I mean, it's well done, but it is Lee Corso wearing the suit of the Miami Hurricanes mascot.

Yeah.

Tattooed onto your leg.

Yeah.

This says more about Miami's program over the last 20 years.

There is actually no high-definition image of him doing this.

This is all just totally fictional.

There has never been a big game in my adult life where Lee Corso has been like, let's back the canes here.

So that's a totally fictional image.

You had your tattoo artist

draw your fan fiction onto your body.

Yeah, I have fanfiction of Lee Corso, so actually picking the Miami Hurricanes in a big game on my leg.

And you also have another tattoo?

Yeah, this one's actually more special to me.

This is an Ibis, and this is one of, if not

the final thing that Lebo has done.

Right.

Dan's late great brother.

Famous Miami artist, iconic Miami artist.

Yeah, as you can see, it's an Ibis.

It's got some orange and green in it.

and um it says university of miami yeah i do want to zoom in on the cursive because levo was many things it turns out that he wasn't a great speller that the word university is spelled how bike there's no i there is a nice little lane for an eye to show up in on verse ver yeah but there there is no i

uh it's not like i didn't notice this though and it it's not like it's not easy to fix but um there's a lot of sentimental value in that i'm a big believer in keeping the artist's vision intact.

Yes.

And so if that's what the artist wanted, then I got a typo on my arm and it's how Lebo intended.

And all of this is to say that I summoned you here, the publitory finds out, because I wanted to understand your perspective as a person with all of these things tattooed onto him.

And also as a person who I believe has a singular perspective among everybody that I know into what the f is happening in college sports right now.

It's hard to know what is happening.

And I'm not going to say that I know what's happening.

I just know what's happening in my little corner of the world.

I'm sure there are nightmare stories out there and there's a whole big thing that's hanging over college athletics right now that I'm sure we'll get into.

All right, so you may have noticed that there is a lot hanging over the world of college athletics right now, as Mike Ryan was just alluding to.

And so what I wanted to do was a series of episodes that are all devoted to finding out what is happening on the ground as the concept of unpaid amateurism is very dramatically falling apart.

And so we interviewed the antitrust lawyer, for instance, who beat the NCAA before the Supreme Court and established that athletes can now sign marketing deals, monetizing their name, image, and likeness for the very first time.

And you may have heard us take a call from Paris in the middle of the Olympics from the head coach of USA Divick, who is terrified that colleges are going to adapt to these new rules and economic pressures by killing off small small Olympic sports.

But the biggest money maker by far remains college football.

And so, on Saturday, with the University of Miami opening up the season against the University of Florida, their hated rival, I wanted to find out how a school is fighting and funding a football recruiting war in the present.

This brings me back to Metal Arc's own Mike Ryan, a transparent and very tattooed super fan who had been dying to move the needle.

Well, I had

marginal season ticket packages

as I was building out a career for myself.

And then I finally got to the point where I was able to do well enough in my career where

I could pump it into the school.

And the real impetus.

for it was the University of Miami being bad for so long in athletics.

And I would often crack open this microphone and I would complain about it to much fanfare, but nothing would ever get done about it at all.

I would lament my frustrations constantly over the air and I would talk to people around the program and someone mentioned to me to possibly be the change that I sought.

And

the Gandhi quote inspired you to donate money to myself.

Yeah, I didn't want to openly complain about things not getting better and not actively be part of the solution right and that's what that's what brought me to donate and your sort of psychological torment as unrepentant homer was also coinciding with a time when actually this was possible above board yes well i started before it was possible when i became when i started donating to uh the program this was pre-nil and right as nil came came around i finally met golden cane's status um it's when you donate a certain threshold, and then was there a ceremony?

Yeah, there's bloodletting.

It's a whole deal.

I like shit mask.

But

then two years ago,

our show had an NIL program, the Shell Corp of the Sesta Cyclones.

This is all very ridiculous.

Is this a confession?

It's going to be when you pause it and say the Sesta Cyclones are one-time Battle Corps champions, which is, but our highlight team won prize money money for winning the league.

And we decided that our charitable effort that year was going to be Miami's NIL program.

And so wait a minute.

So

you were running a High Alli Convention.

Shell Corp.

Yeah, a Highlight Shell Corp.

To fund

the University of Miami.

Well, we didn't pay any money for the team.

It was a marketing partnership.

And then our team won the league.

And we had all this money to give to a charitable effort.

And kind of as a bit, I said our charitable effort would be, you know, NIL because this whole portal had opened up.

And then we won the thing and I had to figure out exactly what that looked like, how we actually did that.

How do I take this pool of money and distribute it to student athletes?

Not the first time a Miami booster has wondered, how do I do this?

But this was all above board, I assure you, because I called the University of Miami, very old school, like, how do I do this?

And they told me the ways that I could remain inside of compliance.

I had to Google.

At that time, the school couldn't push you directly to representation.

You had to go to a website to find out who represented these athletes.

Sometimes it was as crude as going to their Twitter link at the time and finding out who represented them.

I would get in touch with reps.

I would negotiate these deals and then I would present it to the university for

compliance approval.

So I've done it that way.

That sounds like so much work.

It was a lot of work.

You're negotiating deals.

Yeah, it all feels very silly too, especially with all the added highlight contexts.

But I also have the other other experience on the other end, just a year later, having a fully endorsed by the school NIL collective that was basically a one-stop shop.

They would handle all the compliance.

They would handle all the negotiation.

You trust them.

You vet them.

And it's a game of talent acquisition.

Want to make sure that you're competitive.

Historically, Miami is an outlier.

It's a very small school, not a huge graduate base, not a lot of big-time boosters.

So Miami had to get really organized and really efficient in ways that other schools probably didn't have to.

They would be in constant communication with the athletic department, which had its own compliance officers.

And

you would trust the collective, this group of individuals.

They would distribute the funds to student athletes in exchange for their name, image, and likeness, be it autograph signings or what you've seen a lot of student athletes do the swipe-ups, you know, on their social media platforms, that kind of stuff.

By the way, I don't know of a better summary for the rapid evolution of college sports than what you just heard, which is Mike Ryan going from personally negotiating deals for Miami players to promote the Sesta Cyclones, one-time battle court champions, to joining the university's official NIL collective.

which is called the Keynes Connection, a whole genre of organization, incidentally, that didn't even exist until schools realized that while they still cannot pay players for their NIL directly, a technically separate organization can.

And that such an organization might even be more effective as a money funnel than, say, your local Hi Ally team.

But at this point, I also think it's worth getting the perspective from somebody who does not work with the Keynes connection.

And so what I did was call up Andy Staples, a former offensive lineman at the University of Florida who won a national title there in 1996 and then became the only national champion I've ever heard of who quit their football team to write for the school newspaper.

Rivals, I don't think, was invented for another three or four years after I finished high school.

So there was no star rating system.

But if there had been a star rating system for Andy Staples' offensive tackle from Lake Mary Mary High School in Lake Mary, Florida, I would have been a zero-star recruit with a bullet.

This kind of self-awareness led Andy to eventually get a job at Sports Illustrated, which is where I first met him.

And he is now a reporter for On3, which is an outlet specializing in news about recruiting and NIL.

And all of this basically means that Andy's personal perspective on these last five years or so in college football is especially informed.

It's as if everything

changed in five years when nothing changed for 100 years.

If you look at history, you know, we have these periods of history where very little changes technologically, and then there's this compressed period of 50 years or so every so often throughout history where everything changes.

This is the everything changes time in college sports.

When I was a freshman in college in 1996, the idea of

players getting paid by their schools was completely foreign.

When I covered the sport for Sports Illustrated in 2011, I wrote a column that essentially was NIL.

What I described was what came to be an NIL.

I remember that.

That seemed like a far-fetched fantasy in 2011.

People are like, what are you talking about?

There's no way this will ever happen.

And that, too, is a useful summary of the evolution of college sports.

Because the desire to pay college football players has existed for for a very, very long time.

In fact, paying football players illegally off the books, even at the risk of your team suffering crippling NCAA punishments, has been happening for about as long as capitalism itself has existed.

Which is why the concept of Mike Ryan's NIL collective in Miami, as arcane as it all may sound at first blush, also looks kind of like a thin disguise.

The whole thing sounds pretty familiar.

It's really an offshoot of the booster club.

It's boosters paying players because the way it worked out was when the initial NIL laws got passed, and this is all by state legislatures, basically

to get them passed, you had to say, well, it can't be paid for play and the schools can't pay them directly.

So basically anybody else could pay them.

Well, who else wants to pay them?

The boosters want to pay them, of course.

The boosters would like to win.

As the years have gone by, and it hasn't been that many years, we're only three years into this, the boosters have gotten slightly fatigued with this whole arrangement because they were already getting hit up by the athletic department, like, hey, listen, we need to build a new softball stadium.

We need a new locker room for football.

We need a new waterfall in the locker room for football.

Now it's

While you're doing that, could you also write us a check to pay the quarterback?

Because we're going to need that too.

And, oh, by the way, paying the quarterback is probably more important because better players are probably more critical to winning than locker room waterfalls.

Do you have a sense of how much money is under management with the Kanes collective, with the Kanes connection?

I don't have an idea for all sports.

I think that some of the numbers that have been reported out of Miami, you see a lot of things.

I saw Rick Neuheisel said something about Oregon's situation.

Yeah, he said that Phil Knight has an unlimited Nike CEO.

Phil Knight has an unlimited NIL budget to help Oregon win.

The number that somebody from another collective throws out in Twitter spaces is not what is actually going to be there.

Yeah, Rick Neuheisel threw out the infinity symbol.

Yeah.

I mean,

it stands to reason given how active they are in talent acquisition

and the resources that Phil Knight has, they're competing at the very highest level.

And Miami is trying to do its best to compete at that level.

So is there a ballpark, roughly?

Like,

what kind of money are we talking here?

I think in terms of athletic budget, you're getting north of $10, $15 million.

Like it changes year over year.

It all depends on how many boosters you bring in.

It depends on how much you want to invest in certain recruiting classes after they're brought into your tent.

So it's like any business.

It's like any startup business.

You have to stick to your budgets in order to be sustainable because

it's one thing for a company to go under.

It's another thing entirely to let down a family, to let down a student athlete if you can't come through.

And considering the spotlight and the fact that it's just the right thing to do by kids, you need to come through and uphold your end of the bargain.

And so when you mentioned that, okay, we're talking, you know, in those eight-figure terms about the annual budget, I want to point out Georgia football, the estimation is more than a million dollars a month total.

So putting them at about 12 million.

That's just Georgia football?

Georgia football.

See, that's just the football program.

And so who knows what the entire athletic program does?

A lot of these collectives oversee, you may have some specific to the sports, but a lot of them oversee all of the NIL deals for the entire athletic program.

Right.

Another estimate, just for context's sake, is that there is this thing called the Collective Association.

It's 35 power conference collectives, and their combined annual payroll is more than $200 million.

This is effectively what it's like to have a payroll in college sports for a specific team.

Yeah, as any startup company would.

Which, by the way, is just unthinkable if you grew up in the era of like how

this alone, you admitting this, Mike, in 1995 would be the death penalty.

100%.

It's pony excess without car dealerships.

We got spreadsheets.

Yeah, it's spreadsheets now.

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This smooth, flavorful cognac is crafted from the finest grapes and aged to perfection, giving you rich notes of oak and caramel with every sip.

Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

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So if you're not familiar with the history of college football scandals, and you may not know, for instance, that the pony excess is the story of how Southern Methodist University and their boosters illicitly paid all of these players to the point where they basically got their football program shut down for a while.

I need you to respect how the University of Miami is a truly elite contender in this category.

Like, consider the story of Nevin Shapiro in 2011.

A former Miami booster serving a 20-year prison sentence for masterminding a $930 million Ponzi scheme has told Yahoo Sports he provided impermissible benefits to 72 of the university's football players and other athletes between 2002 and 2010.

And so when a booster named John Ruiz emerges one decade after this in 2021, once the Supreme Court rules against the NCAA and ushers in the new age of NIL, lots of people were suspicious.

Because John Ruiz made a huge splash by promoting his own billion-dollar company that nobody had really heard of, named LifeWallet.

And he started handing out dozens of LifeWallet endorsement deals to University of Miami athletes.

911, what's your emergency?

When you're injured or suffering a medical emergency,

my name, Gibbon Farson.

My image, right before you.

Like me now.

My life depends on it.

LifeWallet, saving time, saving lives.

John Ruiz was a pioneer.

He was at the very forefront.

He was at the very beginning.

The curtain fell down and John Ruiz was there with LifeWallet.

Nobody has made more waves in the name Image Likeness Waters

than Miami businessman John Ruiz.

Billionaire John Ruiz is giving millions to UM players.

It steals for players sometimes worth well into six figures.

What have you found works with NIO?

You have really good boosters.

That's how you do well at it.

Anybody can read a lot into whatever you do.

As long as you do it the right way, there's nothing wrong with it.

There were a lot of legacy boosters that, you know, we have the post-traumatic stress of Nevin Shapiro on us.

Yeah.

Nevin Shapiro went to prison.

Yeah.

All that.

No, it was a bad situation.

And here's someone who you're learning about

as he's paying college athletes.

It's all very foreign.

And naturally, some of the legacy boosters were made nervous about it.

A lot of people around college athletics, a lot of fans

were very active on social media saying, okay, well, we're going to poke a bunch of holes in this.

There's no way this lasts.

This is going to flame out.

So I think John Ruiz did allow for the University of Miami and its athletic programs to have a leg up in the NIL space, no doubt.

But it also,

I think, magnified the need for a collective because his persona was growing so big.

And I think the university, the collective, other boosters like myself weren't super comfortable.

Other people that were actually really giving to the program weren't super comfortable with John Ruiz being at the forefront of this.

And I think

things need to be put in place to kind of rectify that and streamline it and make sure that everything was done on the up and up with administration oversight.

Everybody wants to undercut John Ruiz, but I do think John Ruiz did good things from a Miami perspective in that

he kind of established a template.

And some of that could be like like do's and don'ts, but

I think that everyone kind of recognized

that it's not good to have it all fall on one person's shoulders.

But about those shoulders, I should underscore here a whole bunch of don'ts.

Because a little over a week ago, John Ruiz admitted in a new SEC filing that there was, quote, substantial doubt that LifeWallet, a large-scale medical claims company, it turns out, would be even able to stay in business beyond the next 12 months.

Last year, Ruiz reported, LifeWallet had net losses of $211 million.

And the SEC, as in the Securities and Exchange Commission at the conference, is currently investigating LifeWallet's operations.

as is the Justice Department.

And while all of this helps explain why Miami has embraced a more collective approach, that approach is also what brings us back around to the school's recruiting war with the previously mentioned University of Florida, its hated rival.

All of this happening because of a prospect named Jaden Rashada.

Jaden Rashada is a quarterback, a quarterback who himself has expressed substantial doubt about Florida's NIL collective, in particular, to the point where Jaden Rashada actually sued the Gators head football coach, Billy Napier, in May.

Let the record show that Pablo brought up that Jaden Rashada is suing Billy Napier, not me.

I didn't say any of that.

But it's probably the most high-profile disaster when it comes to the collective era to date.

Jaden Rashada, a good high school quarterback from California.

Not the top of the line elite best player in his class type player, a good high school quarterback that a lot of schools wanted.

He was committed to Miami with a pretty good NIL deal.

Florida really wanted to flip him.

And I am convinced that if he was not committed to Miami, none of this would have ever happened.

If he'd been committed to LSU or he'd been committed to Illinois or he'd been committed to Cal, this never happens.

But because he's committed to Miami, the Florida fans just got, ooh, and there were certain Florida donors that just just really it rubbed them the wrong way and they wanted to get what miami had so they wanted to flip jane rashada so here's the deal they they make a deal with this kid and there's a booster named hugh hathcock who according to the the people who were involved in it hugh was supposed to fund this deal

but they ran it through the collective that was operating at the time, or one of the collectives that was operating at the time called the Gator Collective.

The Gator Collective was not going to be responsible responsible for funding it.

It was doing these little small deals where they're paying people, you know, a few hundred bucks here and there, a few thousand bucks here and there.

They were not doing these massive deals, but because they had the infrastructure in place, they ran the contract through these guys.

I don't know who put the numbers on the contract.

That's still the great mystery because no one will own up to it.

Because the numbers are staggering.

But when they got done,

it was a four-year deal that was worth worth up to $13.8 million.

That was so out of whack for the market at the time.

A quarterback of Jaden Rashada's level in the class he signed in probably would have been to about 400 grand a year.

So it would have been a four-year, $1.6 million deal, not four years, $13.8 million.

So this contract gets signed.

The person who was going to pay decided,

no, they saw the numbers like, no, absolutely not.

Not paying this.

And so they terminated the deal.

And so now you have the ultimate in college football soap opera.

The backup quarterback at Georgia, actually, the third string quarterback at Georgia is suing the head coach at Florida, alleging fraud.

Breaking news here in college football.

Georgia quarterback Jaden Rashada has sued Florida head coach Billy Napier, a top gators booster and a former football staffer over a failed NIL deal.

He's claiming that Napier said you'll get this much money if you sign your letter of intent.

But there's no recording of that.

There's no written version of that.

It's basically Jaden Rashada's father saying this is what he was told,

and that's it.

So

it's legally, I'd say pretty shaky.

Right.

So at the very least, what this is, is an embarrassing chapter in the University of Florida's football history.

Very embarrassing.

And if they lose to Miami, it will just be another knife in that wound.

Miami and Florida have been in a lot of recruiting battles over there.

You have your victories, you have your losses.

That all comes with it.

But look,

the kid was committed to Florida, then committed to Miami, then went back to Florida.

The NIL collective apparently to what Rashad is saying did not come through.

He finds himself over in Arizona State and now he's at Georgia.

That's a lot of stops in a very young career for Jaden Rashada.

At least he has avenues that he can make something of his career.

And every year he can kind of, if he wants to, hit the reset button, see what the market thinks of his talents.

But as for the future of that market, the market for college football players in the years to come, There is a far larger development that you should know about.

Because late late last month, the settlement agreement in the Pivotal Antitrust case of House v.

NCAA was finally filed.

And for the first time in history, schools will be able to pay their own athletes directly without a middleman or a collective.

And granted, the total amount is very carefully calculated and capped as a percentage of annual television revenue.

But the maximum amount a school can choose to pay out in year one, and they can split this up however they want among all of their athletes, is up to roughly $22 million,

which is notable financially because if you're Miami's Keynes Connection Collective, as Mike Ryan told us earlier.

In terms of athletic budget, you're getting north of $10, $15 million.

Less, in other words, than what the University of Miami itself could now spend as early as next year.

And so if a house settlement gets approved, unlocking this additional flood of cash, one question for Jaden Roshada and the entire sport becomes this.

How much are the prices players are going to get paid going up?

That's the big question, Pablo.

We don't know yet because every athletic director I talk to would like it to be where the schools just pay.

But the problem is the way the settlement is written, it's essentially a salary cap.

Well,

I don't really understand how these guys don't get it yet.

How many times they need to be whacked on the nose with a newspaper by the federal court system.

Like, they cannot unilaterally impose a salary cap unless they collectively bargain it.

So in practice, what is probably going to happen is the schools will pay.

And they also will have collectives that will then supplement.

Yes.

To get up to whatever the market will bear.

And that market's been really interesting watching it as just the collectives have been paying over the last three years because it has found its level very quickly.

Whereas in the first couple of years, you could have some really kind of out-of-whack deals for a quarterback coming out of high school.

Now,

quarterback in the transfer portal is worth this much.

All the offers have gotten very similar and very competitive because that's how it works.

It's your job to figure out what the market is.

And guess what?

These collectives have figured it out very quickly.

Do you have a sense?

Is there a back of the envelope just estimate of like what it costs these days to get a high-level quarterback?

Yeah, Bryce Underwood, he's going to LSU.

The range for that right now,

last year, in last year's class, it was about a million and a quarter per year to get.

one of the best quarterbacks.

I'd say it's probably between that and 1.5 million.

In the transfer portal this past year, if you were looking at a quarterback who's established, who's been a starter at the power conference level, who you feel like you can plug in right away and start, you were talking about probably a million five per year.

The assumption is like the NFL salary capital go up every year.

So the deals you're seeing now getting written for these guys that are that are going to come into school in January 2025 and start playing college football next fall.

A lot of that is, it's assumed that a lot of that money is coming from the school.

So I think we're going to see bigger dollar figures.

So I said that that million and a quarter for the guy in the class of 2024,

it may go up more closer to 2 million a year

because there's extra money coming into the system.

And then, oh, by the way, the court system may say, no, no, never mind.

You got to do it differently now.

Right.

No one knows what the f is happening is the sense that I get.

That is actually the motto of college football since the the sport began.

Rutgers versus Princeton in the 1800s.

Like,

no one knows what the f is happening

should probably be inscribed on every stadium.

And so, you may have noticed at this point in our discussion of collectives and NIL that this whole thing has basically become a de facto pay-for-play system

because, of course, it has.

Right?

The thing driving the rising value of NIL payments is not the increasing upside for LifeWallet or any other company an athlete may endorse via a social media post or swipe-up thing or commercial or autograph signing or whatever.

It's the on-field upside for the team they are playing for.

That's the dynamic that Mike Ryan and the collectives have been maximizing in lieu of a professional pay-to-play model.

And that's the dynamic that the NCAA and the otherwise dying amateurism model is still fighting to kill.

Because there's another aspect about the house settlement that you should know about here, which is that the NCAA will be forming a a clearinghouse database and designated enforcement agency with the power conferences to regulate third-party NIL payments.

And so any NIL deal that is worth $600 or more must be reported and proven to be a quote-unquote true NIL deal,

not just some pay-to-play salary.

or else.

They're going to judge and there's going to be some independent arbiter who judges whether something is a quote-unquote true NIL deal, whether it's truly market value.

So, if you're getting money from a collective on top of what you're getting from the school, is that deal commensurate with the rest of the market for what it is you're doing, whatever it is you're advertising, whatever company you're reping?

But

I don't know.

As someone who gets paid to talk about sports and is still pretty

slackjawed that that's a thing that I could actually make a living doing this.

I've learned throughout my life, you're worth whatever somebody's willing to pay you.

And I think the NCAA is going to struggle with this.

I've talked to athletic directors about this.

I'm like, guys, you realize you're going to pick on the wrong player, and the attorney general in that player's state is going to sue you, and you're going to lose.

Right.

Like, all politics are local.

It doesn't matter how much they agree with you, what party they are.

If you pick on the quarterback at the state you

and the AG cares deeply about that state you,

he's going or she is going to come after you.

But even just the idea of like, okay, now the NCAA's enforcement division gets to figure out, they have the power to figure out, is this a marketing deal?

As in

They're drawing a distinction between they're paying someone because they're good and paying someone because they're marketable.

And good luck to the constitutional scholar that can draw a bright line such that one is black and one is white.

Why are you marketable?

Because you're famous.

Why are you famous?

Because you're good at college football.

Like, it's pretty easy to figure this out.

What I fear would happen if the NCAA does do away with collectives and

true NIL is what it sounds like, which is totally at the whim of this widely unpopular

entity in the NCAA.

You're going to have what you had during the pony access days.

You're going to have what you've always had around big time college football, which is cheaters finding a way to circumvent the bumpers that are put in place to stop them.

And some programs have proven to be historically good at doing those things.

Other programs historically have a much larger lens over them than others.

And are maybe not as good at getting away with it.

I have this whole theory.

The biggest college football scandals outside of Penn State, and you think about how long it took for that to be uncovered.

SMU, USC, Miami.

What do these programs have in common?

That they got hammered hard by the NCAA for the very thing we're here to talk about.

And they're in major metropolitan U.S.

cities.

They're universities that aren't responsible for the entire income of that region.

It's easier to get away with something in some back road college town

in the middle of America than it is when you have real journalists circling the program and they don't need you.

So if the NCAA does come back

and they have full autonomy over it, I think the same programs that used to get away with working themselves around the NCAA in the relative section.

Shadows.

Yeah.

that have operated in towns where it's easier to keep these secrets, where you're just drawing the map of the SEC on your, on the table here, incidentally.

I'll pound the table.

Like, you can't make the argument that this is going to level a playing field, that you're worried about NIL making it unfair for other schools to compete when you had Nick Sabin ruling this sport for two decades.

So just to recap all of this here.

If regulating true NIL will not be all that effective, and if the NCAA might not be able to successfully defend true NIL in the court system, where their nightmare of having to collectively bargain with athletes like their, you know, actual employees seems almost inevitable now, thanks to all of the antitrust litigation, then there's yet another question to answer.

What is the NCAA's end game now?

And the only logical answer anyone can think of is that they are buying time so they can get protection from antitrust litigation itself.

Which is why the NCAA chose former Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, a guy with zero college administrative experience, but a surplus of political experience, to be their new president.

And it's why they sent Baker to Capitol Hill in January to lobby Congress for the Holy Grail,

an antitrust exemption.

Even if it's limited protection, because otherwise, one of the things I've learned in my brief period here is if a member doesn't like a rule that the membership made,

it's a federal case, like the next day.

And people start spending money on lawyers.

And I don't really see how that benefits anybody.

This has been the end game.

This is why they brought in Charlie Baker.

The new president.

Yeah, they want to be able to win this at the very top level because they can't win this in the courts, as they've shown.

They're pretty toothless when it comes to enforcing these things.

They're just kind of along for the ride.

But

in most pro sports, and I think we'd be lying to ourselves if we didn't say that college football in this country, it's one of the three major sports in this country.

It's the second biggest sport behind the NFL.

It's huge.

But in the NFL, revenue is split 50-50 amongst owners and players, or close to that.

And you have a whole bargaining process that sometimes leads to lockouts.

This right now is just the NCAA.

What they hope to get with these antitrust exemptions is to basically say, it's 80-20.

80 goes to us.

We'll figure out what to do with that, here's your 20.

And all of this is being met with great fanfare.

But at the end of this path for this Trojan horse is an antitrust exemption for the least popular governing body in the world outside of maybe FIFA.

No one trusts them.

And it's funny that we can't really find consensus in this country on anything.

General disdain for the NCAA seems to reach across the aisle in ways that nothing else does in this country, because while they do have bipartisan support, they also have heavy bipartisan opposition from the top level.

We're talking about Justice Gavanaugh and Justice Thomas.

Yes, yes.

In the Alston ruling, which was a 9-0 ruling in favor of the athletes against the NCAA.

I think handing over the keys to an entity that has

at every turn tried to undo NIL.

is a very bad thing.

It'd be like handing over the keys to the EPA to the head of Chevron, which may actually be a thing that happens.

Yeah, I have bad news, Mike.

It may actually be a thing.

That's a different episode of Pablo.

I'll show you my chevron tattoo.

But I don't trust the NCAA

with full autonomy and safe harbor status.

And I think the rules that they've outlined for NIL are pretty subjective.

I don't think more bureaucracy is a good thing.

And I think that you can cherry-pick some bad collectives across the nation.

No doubt there are some horror stories out there, but I do think that there are some really good collectives that can maximize someone's name, image, and likeness.

And I think ultimately the NCAA

may

indirectly or directly cap what a student athlete can make through their own incompetence or subjective roles.

How do you see the NCAA's actual like chess move here, if there is one, Dandy?

Oh,

they're not even playing checkers.

I think they're playing Candyland.

So

it's their only hope.

It's a Hail Mary.

And I think they feel like if you have

Republican in the White House, Republican-controlled House, Republican-controlled Senate, that they can get that passed.

But

I don't even know if that would get passed at that point because they've had multiple bills raised here and that were actually some of them bipartisan and only one of them even got to a committee.

Like, I'll be shocked if we see anything get to the floor of either chamber of Congress because they got other things to worry about.

And the other thing is, if they get any sort of antitrust exemption, it's going to be fairly limited.

They still won't be able to impose a salary cap.

Like, they can try all they want, but eventually they're just going to have to give up and either let the market do what it does, which by the way, it already has been, and just don't worry about it, or

bargain with the players.

Whether you have to make them employees or not, you know, that's probably a debate for the courts.

The other thing is, and we haven't really gotten into this because it does muddy the waters quite a bit, but there's multiple cases in the court system right now that hinge upon whether athletes are employees or not.

And if the court system declares the athletes employees, none of this matters.

They're going to have a completely different system that they're going to have to build from the ground up.

And that's probably the problem

is all these people have had this system for so long and they've had all these little ad hoc solutions where something pops up, they just add a rule, add this, add that.

It needs to be raised to the ground and rebuilt in a common sense way.

So I want to imagine what it's like to listen to this episode, to listen to you specifically, as someone who does not give a f about the Kanes and actually hates them and has other rooting interests.

I wonder how different this all seems to them as they root for their own team to sort of break through.

I don't know.

Maybe that kind of seismic shift in the sport would make me want to quit and maybe speak in front of Congress as to why this thing is bad and needs, you know, needs oversight.

In fact, hand it all over to the NCAA.

I don't think it was better before.

I really don't.

And I think that if

you're sitting back jealous that NIL opens a door for other teams to be competitive and not you, you need to look at what you're doing.

And maybe you can be part of the change that you seek.

You got to get your gear if you want to compete.

Like the pathway is now finally open.

All right.

The monopoly that these programs had over the sport has already dissipated.

Look at the recent results in college athletics.

You're getting pretty random results.

TCU made it to a national championship game just two years ago.

Michigan won their first title in however many years.

In the NIL era.

Yeah, and look, Nick Saban was running roughshod over the entire sport.

NIL comes along deuces.

There's stunning news tonight in college football.

The crimson tide is turning.

Nick Sabin, who has won more national championships than any other coach in the game, is retiring from the University of Alabama, where he's run the football program since 2007.

All this means is more teams are in the game now.

I don't think that's a bad thing.

It's just, I thought we were all in agreement, sports fans, that the NCAA was bad.

Yeah, you may not be in favor of NIL, but do you want to hand over the keys to the NCAA after they've tried to undo everything?

No.

I don't think people want to hand the NCAA the keys, but I do think they probably feel some way about

you shady Miami guys who are really good at moving around money and finding ways to use image as a substitute for substance to thrive in a market that seems basically designed to prioritize people who are good at doing exactly that.

Yeah, no, I understand.

I was familiar with the whole, the John Ruiz experience.

Yeah,

I get it.

This is America.

People get paid for what their market value is here in this country.

I don't know what else to tell you.

Like, if you don't like Miami succeeding in it, which I get,

I'm not a sympathetic figure.

I get it.

Like it's cool.

Like you can have your team.

You could hate that I wear orange and green.

I get it.

Your best recourse to get me back and to shut me up is week one and hope your guys can beat our guys.

That's actually pretty cool.

Like there's actually an avenue for you sitting up in the nosebleeds, getting what you can.

And to some people, $25 is a larger percentage than what some of these big-time billionaire boosters might be giving their programs and you could actually sit back in the sands and say i had a small hand in that in ways that you can with pro sports are you using my question my pushback to segue into a pitch for people to become a starter level monthly contributor to canes connection.com why starter level there's a 58 there that's a top tier you get wonderful meals there was a there was a great spread at one of these events that i went to oh yeah yeah great spread What'd you guys get?

Stone crabs.

Oh, now that is a recruiting advantage.

Me personally, I'm excited to be a part of it because I feel like I have more of an active role in shaping the direction in which the program goes.

I like having a hand in potentially building this thing back up, like the old Gandhi quote.

I like being part of the change that I sought.

And I wanted to get off of the sidelines and into the game.

And NIL has allowed me

to do so.

I was in the game already, but I was giving to the institution.

And the institutions do need support.

These non-revenue sports need support.

And I encourage anybody,

if you're not all the way there with NIL and

it was a bridge for me to cross too.

I didn't know what this whole world was.

It felt a little icky.

I just wanted to give to the institution.

But if you feel like you have faith in the direction that your collective has gone in, if you feel like everything is on the up and up, support it.

And that's a cool way to get involved.

All I can do for my pro teams is complain.

And ultimately, if my team doesn't win over a certain amount of years, I have to look back on what I've done with my money.

But that is my goddamn American right.

And I don't want it to be the NCAA that's in charge of it because I think they're going to try to phase me out of that right.

It is your goddamn American right to spend your money on players and tattoos.

And yes, the unversity

of Miabi.

Go, Kanes.

Thank you, Bike.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.

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