Pilchard
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- May 3, 2011
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Should, and I think it eventually will. And I'm fine with that from a Wake perspective. The whole NIL thing will leave programs like Wake on the outside looking in, while the UNC's of the world that don't care a whit about academic or institutional integrity will (now legally) shovel $$ to guys who will either be one-and-dones, or if not NBA/NFL-caliber, can hang around a few more years and make good bank thru NIL handouts. And I'm fine with players making as much money as they can off their image or whatever, but the further that relationship gets from the student/athlete model, the less interest I'll have in it from a fan perspective.
We shall see. When the college free agency via transfers and the NIL rules initially went into effect, seemed like the consensus was that WF would suffer. While the sample size has been small, so far, WF has thrived in the new age of college sports. WF seems to have its own stable of rich donors that have allowed WF to keep up financially, and our football and basketball staffs seem to work the portal better than most. Feel like WF always needs to stay ahead of the curve to succeed, while bigger schools can be less proactive. So, as long as WF has savvy leadership in the athletic department, and in the key athletic programs, WF will do very well.
FWIW, this discussion seems to be lumping all sports together. Athletic program access to maximum money does not seem to be as important for elite basketball success as football. Villanova, Gonzaga, UCLA, Arizona, even Baylor and Kansas aren't among the top schools in athletic department revenue and donor cash, yet they have ruled and appear to continue to be on track for dominating college basketball. Acknowledging that the SEC has improved its basketball profile through football money; still think that basketball success is not as directly tied to the overall size of the athletic department budget. No better example than UGA basketball. The UGA athletic department obviously has more money than it can spend (how much was the Tom Crean buy-out?), yet the basketball program is a joke, and remains a joke with Mike White hiring.
Football is a different story because the rosters are so large and the program requires SOOOOO much money. Even so, people can talk about the SEC or the Big 10 money skewing the sport's competitiveness, but it's still a club of four schools that dominate college football: Bama... gap... UGA, Clemson and tOSU and then a massive gap for everyone else. When Arkansas, Tennessee, or Mississippi State start winning football Nattys (or at least sniffing the 4 team playoff), that would be a sign that SEC money is the reason that no else can compete, but right now, it looks more like the same programs that dominated for the last decade are continuing to dominate regardless of the rules in place or the conferences that they play in.
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