….about the future of Michigan sports and college sports. On vacation on the beach, which bores me, so I have some time to kill:
1. NIL: Michigan boosters will create a fund that within five years will be worth at least $1 billion. Annual distributions via NIL to Michigan athletes through that fund will be between $20 and $35 million a year. Majority will go to football and mens basketball players, but others will benefit as well, including softball, ice hockey, wonen’s basketball and baseball. This should generate ample cash flow to compete with any school out there when it comes to financial benefits.
2. Michigan will establish itself as a blue-blood basketball program over the next five years. All the pieces are falling together. A smooth transition from the great foundation established by John Beilein to Juwan. A great first two seasons under Juwan. Recruiting at a much higher level. The departure or imminent departure of coaching legends at schools such as Duke, UNC and Michigan State. Juwan should step into that so-called elite coaching vacuum and be on the Mount Rushmore of active coaches sooner rather than later. In Juwan we have a coach who has the personality and values to be able to recruit at an elite level but also earn the respect of the basketball community as a whole. He also has learned to coach from among the very best at Miami and, of course, is one if the very few elite coaches who can say that they have been there (NBA for something like 20 years) and done that (NBA champ, NCAA finalist) to recruits. And, finally, he is a Michigan man in the best sense of the saying. Throw in the NIL booster deep pockets that a school like Gonzaga lacks, and the future is indeed bright!
3. College football is trending towards one or two super conferences within 10 years. If just one, it will either be a completely new conference, a merger of relative equals between the two last-standing super conferences or the current SEC platform gobbling up the remaining national elite programs. If two super conferences one will likely be the SEC after gobbling up the best of the ACC southern schools (Clemson and the Florida schools) and a combination of the Big Ten and the best of the Pac 10. The Big Ten presidents want AAU universities. This would actually fit well with who the Big Ten would ideally want for football and streaming revenues as that would be the four California schools, Washington, Oregon and Colorado. Notre Dame would also be a great gig academically, but could come down to a tug of war between the two conferences. If two super conferences, I envision 40-48 P5 teams left standing. With just one, that number could come down to 32.
4. Pay for play. NIL is just the most recent step. I envisage that within the next 10-12 years athletes will be paid directly by their schools. This final but inevitable step in a long and drawn out process will be the one that either saves college (or perhaps, junior professional) football as we will come to know it and/or destroy college sports as we once knew them. I think that the end result will be tiered. For the elite few schools (eg 32 in a super conference) their football players will be fully salaried. The cash to pay them will come from increased revenues due to being in a super conference and a decreased cost base due to schools dumping many non-revenue producing sports. In other words, cash generated from football and basketball will need to be diverted back to those sports in order to remain competitive. This would mean the end of these schools subsidizing the entire athletic department and all those non-revenue sports. As such, the nature of athletic departments for Super Conference schools will fundamentally change, as there will be a further disassociation from the student body as a whole as their aim will be to ensure competitiveness in a small number of select sports. Moreover, in order to cut employee ( football and basketball players will be employees, for practical and legal reasons) costs forget about seeing 85 players on scholarship. No need to sign 25 freshmen and slowly develop them. Scholarships will be cut from 85 to 65 or perhaps 55. If 55, that would mean a savings of 60 scholarships a year as we won’t have to have 30 females on scholarship for things to be even from a Title IX perspective. And from a football perspective, schools will want players who can contribute immediately. And with the transfer portal and de facto free agency they can get them. No need to carry around unproven dead weight in freshmen and sophomores. I expect that the elite schools will only sign the very best freshmen (10-15 per year) to leave room for proven transfers. Freshmen not in that national top 400 range who would not land a Super Conference scholarship and salary would sign with a lower level program and hope to play themselves into an upward transfer. Lower-tier programs may decide it is not worth playing the money game, especially as TV revenues would dry up for them. They, as well, would have to cut many non-revenue programs, which leads me to my final point…..
5. The creation of a college football super conference or super conferences will lead to the destruction of the U.S. scholastic sports model in developing elite athletes and will close the door to many, many female and male athletes from playing college sports or from receiving scholarships to play college sports. From an international competitive perspective this would destroy the US in Olympic sports, where so much of our success has been a function of our scholastic scholarship system. Moreover, greed on the football side could well also destroy college football. Why? In part, because it will no longer be viewed by many as college football. But also in good measure because if they take this greed thing too far and maximize cash flows by making it into a paying into a paying streaming service they will no longer generate new fans. I, for one, stumbled across college football on free TV as a small child. My father was an immigrant from Italy with no interest in the game. The only sport my mother watched was tennis. They would have never paid to watch a football game. A pay per view model, to capture as much money as soon as possible, would accelerate the complete destruction of the game in a similar manner that boxing has lost popularity over the past 40 years.
1. NIL: Michigan boosters will create a fund that within five years will be worth at least $1 billion. Annual distributions via NIL to Michigan athletes through that fund will be between $20 and $35 million a year. Majority will go to football and mens basketball players, but others will benefit as well, including softball, ice hockey, wonen’s basketball and baseball. This should generate ample cash flow to compete with any school out there when it comes to financial benefits.
2. Michigan will establish itself as a blue-blood basketball program over the next five years. All the pieces are falling together. A smooth transition from the great foundation established by John Beilein to Juwan. A great first two seasons under Juwan. Recruiting at a much higher level. The departure or imminent departure of coaching legends at schools such as Duke, UNC and Michigan State. Juwan should step into that so-called elite coaching vacuum and be on the Mount Rushmore of active coaches sooner rather than later. In Juwan we have a coach who has the personality and values to be able to recruit at an elite level but also earn the respect of the basketball community as a whole. He also has learned to coach from among the very best at Miami and, of course, is one if the very few elite coaches who can say that they have been there (NBA for something like 20 years) and done that (NBA champ, NCAA finalist) to recruits. And, finally, he is a Michigan man in the best sense of the saying. Throw in the NIL booster deep pockets that a school like Gonzaga lacks, and the future is indeed bright!
3. College football is trending towards one or two super conferences within 10 years. If just one, it will either be a completely new conference, a merger of relative equals between the two last-standing super conferences or the current SEC platform gobbling up the remaining national elite programs. If two super conferences one will likely be the SEC after gobbling up the best of the ACC southern schools (Clemson and the Florida schools) and a combination of the Big Ten and the best of the Pac 10. The Big Ten presidents want AAU universities. This would actually fit well with who the Big Ten would ideally want for football and streaming revenues as that would be the four California schools, Washington, Oregon and Colorado. Notre Dame would also be a great gig academically, but could come down to a tug of war between the two conferences. If two super conferences, I envision 40-48 P5 teams left standing. With just one, that number could come down to 32.
4. Pay for play. NIL is just the most recent step. I envisage that within the next 10-12 years athletes will be paid directly by their schools. This final but inevitable step in a long and drawn out process will be the one that either saves college (or perhaps, junior professional) football as we will come to know it and/or destroy college sports as we once knew them. I think that the end result will be tiered. For the elite few schools (eg 32 in a super conference) their football players will be fully salaried. The cash to pay them will come from increased revenues due to being in a super conference and a decreased cost base due to schools dumping many non-revenue producing sports. In other words, cash generated from football and basketball will need to be diverted back to those sports in order to remain competitive. This would mean the end of these schools subsidizing the entire athletic department and all those non-revenue sports. As such, the nature of athletic departments for Super Conference schools will fundamentally change, as there will be a further disassociation from the student body as a whole as their aim will be to ensure competitiveness in a small number of select sports. Moreover, in order to cut employee ( football and basketball players will be employees, for practical and legal reasons) costs forget about seeing 85 players on scholarship. No need to sign 25 freshmen and slowly develop them. Scholarships will be cut from 85 to 65 or perhaps 55. If 55, that would mean a savings of 60 scholarships a year as we won’t have to have 30 females on scholarship for things to be even from a Title IX perspective. And from a football perspective, schools will want players who can contribute immediately. And with the transfer portal and de facto free agency they can get them. No need to carry around unproven dead weight in freshmen and sophomores. I expect that the elite schools will only sign the very best freshmen (10-15 per year) to leave room for proven transfers. Freshmen not in that national top 400 range who would not land a Super Conference scholarship and salary would sign with a lower level program and hope to play themselves into an upward transfer. Lower-tier programs may decide it is not worth playing the money game, especially as TV revenues would dry up for them. They, as well, would have to cut many non-revenue programs, which leads me to my final point…..
5. The creation of a college football super conference or super conferences will lead to the destruction of the U.S. scholastic sports model in developing elite athletes and will close the door to many, many female and male athletes from playing college sports or from receiving scholarships to play college sports. From an international competitive perspective this would destroy the US in Olympic sports, where so much of our success has been a function of our scholastic scholarship system. Moreover, greed on the football side could well also destroy college football. Why? In part, because it will no longer be viewed by many as college football. But also in good measure because if they take this greed thing too far and maximize cash flows by making it into a paying into a paying streaming service they will no longer generate new fans. I, for one, stumbled across college football on free TV as a small child. My father was an immigrant from Italy with no interest in the game. The only sport my mother watched was tennis. They would have never paid to watch a football game. A pay per view model, to capture as much money as soon as possible, would accelerate the complete destruction of the game in a similar manner that boxing has lost popularity over the past 40 years.
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