COLLECTING

 

               The word “collective” has a strong political scent, connected as it is to the wealth-sharing philosophy of taking the land or tools of formerly independent operators and combining them into larger entities in the name of social equity. As Karl Marx put it, “From each according to his ability, for each according to his needs.” Nice thought, maybe, but it seldom worked very well.

               But while Soviet-style collectives reside in the dust bin of history, a new incarnation of the word now is on every tongue in the robustly capitalistic world of big-time American college sports. Just about every school that charges admission for its games has one or more of the things, the better to leverage the wealth created by the opening of money-making opportunities for their athletes.

               Those new riches—allowing the jocks to be paid by check rather than cash—came about in July of 2021, when the National Collegiate Athletics Association, bowing to legal and journalistic pressure, began the NIL Era, the initials standing for name, image and likeness. Now college athletes can cash in on just about anything they do off the playing fields, endorsing products, signing autographs or, even, playing catch with somebody’s kids. Thanks to the wonders of social media, they can monetize their often huge followings on the likes of Instagram or TikTok to produce incomes their parents envy.

               The powers behind the collectives are boosters, people (mostly men) who back their love of their favorite college teams with m-o-n-e-y. Booster clubs are established college institutions, existing to gather and funnel the green stuff to the schools’ athletics departments. That’s within NCAA rules (and tax deductible), but the largess of some of the good ol’ boys also extended to payments that weren’t. When I covered the 1956 University of Illinois football team for the Daily Illini student newspaper, the players joked about the “$20 handshakes” they received from boosters after games.  The practice no doubt was repeated at other schools, with inflation affecting the amounts as the years rolled by.  

               Some boosters kicked in more than could be passed by hand. The “godfather” of the UCLA national championship basketball teams of the 1960s and ‘70s was Los Angeles businessman Sam Gilbert, who kept the hoopsters in clothes, cars, spending cash and other things. Ed Martin, a Detroit numbers-racket operator, played the same role for the University of Michigan’s “Fab Four” era   basketball teams, by his own admission paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to players. For the transgressions the NCAA later stripped the school of its 1992 and ’93 Final Four banners.  

               Now, boosters can operate openly, in effect buying players for their schools if they can link their support to a commercial purpose. The collectives pool boosters’ money and expertise, and serve as middlemen. Formally unaffiliated with their schools, but actually quite close, they operate in a gray area of law and regulation that’s turned college-sports recruiting into a veritable “Wild West.” The universities used to spend their considerable political clout fending off the government hand. Now, they beg for it. The NCAA, once impervious to outside influence, sees its own bleeding away, and its very existence threatened.

               NIL money wasn’t supposed to be a lure in athlete recruiting, but by all accounts it has come to dominate it. The poster boy for the new era has been Jaden Rashada, a tall, skinny, strong-armed football quarterback from Pittsburg, California, who was on just about every college’s wish list. He’s the model of the young jock on the make, having attended three different high schools in search of tutoring, playing time and media exposure.

               Rashada made the University of Miami his initial college choice but backed off when the University of Florida’s collective reportedly put together for him a four-year NIL package worth about $13 million. When that didn’t pan out he again opted for free agency, finally jumping to Arizona State University. The value of such deals needn’t be reported, but one can surmise that ASU interests kicked in handsomely.

               The advent of NIL money coincided with a liberalization of transfer rules in college sports, and it also weighs heavily there. Schools used to subject varsity athletes to transfer limitations not applied to other students, mainly sports sit-out periods and conference limitations, but those now are gone.  The so-called transfer portal, through which kids can seek greener pastures, has come to rival the high-school route for new roster blood. Coaches have to recruit their own players annually. Needless to say, they hate it.

               The schools hate it, too, because much of the money the collectives collect used to go to them, to be spent at their direction. Some of the institutional funds go to the so-called minor sports that don’t support themselves financially; look for more cuts in those. The total amount of money available to college athletes through collective-assembled deals and those negotiated by players’ individual agents (they can have them now) isn’t known, but one published report put it at about $500 million.

 Almost all of that is going to footballers and male basketballers in the “Power 5” conferences (the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC and PAC 12). Several multi-million-dollar individual deals have been reported, including an $8 million package assembled for Nico Iawaleava, a quarterback recruit from Long Beach, California, signed by the University of Tennessee. The trinkle-down isn’t bad, though, Sports Illustrated reporting that the “baseline” deal for a Power 5 scholarship football or hoops player comes to about $50,000 annually. It’ll take some of those kids a few years to equal that figure diplomas in hand, should they find time to get them.