It's time for our university to think outside the box on NIL and how to funnel money to players. A few years ago I made a post on the football forum here about how
we should offer an NIL major. I still like that idea, but we need to take it farther.
We need to figure out how to tap the endowment and route general university funds to NIL. It's hard, it probably is not impossible. We're at the point where our financial situation seems dire enough that we should be pushing into gray areas aggressively. Desperate times call for desperate actions.
The Endowment
I'm pretty sure you can use endowment funds on campus infrastructure, research, and academic programs. So, it could be used to renovate/build a dorm that would be like an incubator for the NIL major. The dorm rooms would be baller, there would be studios for podcast recording, classrooms so that athletes living there never had to leave the building to go to class, etc. You'd probably have to make sure some non-athletes ended up there in order to make it kosher, but it seems like an avenue that should be explored by lawyers.
Basically, you can offer a lot of fringe benefits through that idea.
You can also put the endowment into research and academic programs. So, if we have an NIL program and the NIL program is researching the field of NIL, they're going to need some money to do that right? And they're going to need to use that money on NIL. It's blatantly obvious what would be going on, but at the same time it's blatantly a field that deserves study! A couple billion dollars a year flows into NIL.
General Funds
It's reasonable for a university to advertise itself via commercials, right? They all do it! So thus, it's reasonable for a university to hire a firm to do the marketing. Duh! Syracuse University can't pay its players to appear in its advertisements. That'd be wrong! But, Syracuse University can hire an ad agency for $10M a year, which spends $9M a year on athlete endorsements in the ads promoting Syracuse University.
Expanding my Major Idea
I think that maybe the major should be Sports Monetization. Basically, you sit down with Fran and see what he thinks should be included and go from there. It's everything you'd want to teach an athlete to maximize their lifetime earnings
adjacent to playing sports, regardless of whether they make it pro.
Broadcasting/podcasting, NIL, coaching, social media (incl monetization), marketing, agents, merchandising, business, investing.
Make it a differential major, so it costs more, then funnel some of that money back into an investment fund as part of the investing portion - and set that up to go to players somehow. That's very aggressively a gray area, but like I said up top, we need to go for it.
Also this major needs to be structured so athletes can get what they want out of it in 1-2 years, for obvious reasons.
Recruiting Upside
Imagine what Fran, or our next hoops coach, could do with this. It's hard to put a $ value on it, but I'm pretty confident Fran could sell someone on taking 80-90% as much NIL money here but getting this education without leaving their dorm building to close the gap. Especially if they can front load the parts they find most valuable.
Become the School Advocating for Directly Paying Players
We should have Fran, our next hoops coach, Blair, and famous alums beating the drum and making the rounds on media pushing to be able to pay players directly. It's inevitable, and the more we can associate the Syracuse brand with it, the better for our future. They should do this so much that it becomes a running joke among fans of other programs. Let them dunk on us, because future recruits will be hearing that Cuse is the place to go to get paid.
