Lots to unpack here.
As stated the coaches’ discretionary funds are used for operational expenses. Coach Jack purchased a custom conference table and some workout equipment in the past. Coach McIntyre has tapped his for some additional travel amenities on road trips. These funds cannot be used to supplement revenue sharing with student athletes.
Revenue sharing and NIL are two separate means of providing compensation to student athletes. Revenue sharing is the only means by which schools can provide direct payments to athletes and is capped at $20.5MM this year. That cap applies to the aggregate across all sports and may be decremented by up to $2.5MM if the school adds additional scholarships based on the roster limits set by House. The vast majority of this pool goes to football and men’s basketball ostensibly because it is in fact revenue sharing and those are the only two sports that are revenue positive. The Athletics Competitive Excellence Fund under CAF and ChampionCuse directly supports revenue sharing. I don’t believe there is a methodology to target to an individual athlete or sport since every dollar paid from this fund comes out one $20.5MM bucket but suggest anyone interested reach out to Jordie Kindervater for complete information.
Schools are still prohibited from engaging in and brokering true NIL deals which are payments to student athletes for use of their name, image or likeness. These deals are generally one to one between a specific player and a business. Women’s basketball is featured prominently in local ads for NYE Auto and Apex Entertainment.
There are two channels for an individual to support NIL nationally. The first is to broker and fund an individual deal for an appearance, merchandising or autograph session as examples.
Syracuse used to enable this through the Accelerate platform operated through the INFLNCR app. It doesn’t appear that this is currently active.
Another widely used platform is Opendorse. This is a menu based one-to-one tool to transact directly with an athlete similar to Cameo. Several women’s basketball players are active here though I don’t know how much of a role the SUAD plays in administering or promoting.
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The other avenue for an individual to support NIL is through a collective. That approach uses an intermediary to harvest grass roots donations, aggregate them, and contract with a student athlete directly supplementing a business opportunity, supporting a charitable or community based event, or holding meet and greet type events with the public. With the sunsetting of Orange United SU no longer has an active collective other than SU Football NIL which is involved with only that sport.
When I ran the SyraCRUZ Tailgate NIL Initiative I started by personally harvesting donations and working directly with student athletes via INFLNCR. We had naming deals with Enrique Cruz but also had appearance deals with athletes from 8 other sports including women’s basketball players Olivia Owens, Dyaisha Fair, Kyra Wood, Lexi McNabb and others where they attended our tailgates. As that initiative grew - we did deals with 48 student athletes totaling over $68k over three years - it became too big for me to manage using home grown spreadsheets and personal bank accounts so we partnered with Orange United. Unfortunately with no replacement for OUC our NIL Activity was discontinued.
The final point is specific to foreign student athletes. It is the restrictions under their -1 student visa that excludes them from NIL activity, not an NCAA rule. Holders of -1 visas are not permitted to perform and be paid for productive work in the host country. There are workarounds where an NIL deal can be executed in the athlete’s home country or a different class of visa is applied for (many professional athletes are here on O-1 visas issued for exceptional talent) but those approaches are much more tedious administratively to execute. For someone like Uche there is also the allure of professional basketball. Based on her age I think she is still a year away from the WNBA draft eligibility age limit of 22, but there is discussion that may change as early as this year. The age limit for international players who don’t play ncaa basketball is 20. So keeping her in orange means not only fending off other college programs with greater resources and more aggressive approaches to circumventing visa requirements, but may also involve the potential of a professional opportunity.