Deacfreak07
Ain't played nobody, PAWL!
It depends on how you define success. I would argue at least the this point, WF has benieftwd more from NIL than it’s been hurt, and it’s really not that close yet. The Hartman story gets the headlines, but our biggest NIL causality thus far is frankly Jewel Spear. Her path was as much about playing for a contender like Conti did pre-NIL. Pre-NIL Hartman just leaves school.I don't speak for everyone, but it bothers me because I just don't see a way a school with a small alumni base like ours can compete at a high level long term when the dollar has an exponentially increasing impact on competitiveness in college athletics.
It's a cycle of "hey, we are doing great today" followed by "shit, someone else is gonna poach our talent for more money."
Now, it may turn out there is enough money to go around and my fears are unfounded. I'm as guilty as anyone of grossly underestimating how much money there is around college sports.
I'm a long suffering A's fan who watched his team essentially get treated like a farm system for big market teams, so I'm likely dealing with long term PTSD here.
If you want to compare it to small market MLB teams, that’s fine, but if the A’s could poach guys from the minor league systems of the bigger markets with a quicker path to the Bigs, then they would likely be better. That’s the option here. We can’t win bidding wars against the bigger schools consistently, and we weren’t before. However we can, and really have done very well, luring talent from below us on the pyramid. I have no doubt that plenty of (maybe most?) our coaches don’t like the current NIL landscape, but they aren’t afraid of it.
In MBB, Baseball, Football alone, we’ve had more talent transfer in than out recently. A lot more.
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