We dance around this question a lot on this forum, so I figured it was time to pose it explicitly. Here is what we know:
1. Each school may set aside $20.5 million in revenue to split among all athletes, with any additional coming from NIL.
2. They claim that NIL payments will now be regulated more strictly to ensure that it is a legitimate NIL deal.
3. These wealthy boosters are very likely able to get around increased enforcement via actually putting these kids in ads.
4. Therefore, while the $20.5 million will help us significantly, it will not bring us to parity with peer schools.
5. We will spend most, though not all, of the $20.5 million on football.
Just doing some quick googling, it appears the top 25 football programs had NIL budgets starting at around $10 million, with the top 10 and especially top 5 being way above that. With athletic departments now being allowed to infuse cash directly, NIL has become a supplementary way to pay players rather than primary. One of the major questions people have is how that will impact donor investment into NIL. This is speculation, but my belief is that NIL donor activity will increase as a result, especially at the "rich" schools. That being said, we are probably looking at having a budget anywhere from half to 75% of our top level peers, depending on our corporate support.
It doesn't seem to me that we can compete in such an environment, as our best players will always get poached. Why wouldn't a Clemson or Florida State type of program just buy our best players every year? People may point to Indiana or Vanderbilt as examples of why we can still win, but these schools have far more resources than we do and have only been able to sustain this level of football for 1 or 2 seasons so far. This seems like a situation where we have been rendered structurally incapable of competing at the highest level of college football.
That being said, if you take the $20.5 million and apply it 100% to men's basketball, suddenly you probably have about $25 million annually in player payment budget. It has been publicly reported that the "$10 million club" is the gold standard currently for college basketball program NIL spending. 9 of the 10 programs in that $10 million club play high level football, and of those only Duke will spend a bulk of those funds on basketball. If the athletic department makes a conscious decision to pivot to a basketball centric focus, the basketball program actually could sustain one of the highest NIL budgets in the nation on an annual basis. At that point you would have a program with one of the largest fanbases, one of the largest NIL budgets, in relatively close proximity to hotbeds like NYC & Philadelphia, you can see how it brings basketball back to being a potential powerhouse.
That being said, it's not so cut and dry even if the AD wanted to make the pivot I am suggesting. The ACC will insist that we maintain high level football, so doing this would functionally mean we are telling the ACC to kick us out. It may lead to a few seasons of putting a shell of a football team out there to get slaughtered every fall. We would also be banking on the Big East taking us back when an eventual ACC split happens, which I think is a fairly safe bet.
To be clear, none of this speculation is something I enjoy stating. I have been a Syracuse football fan since I went to my first game at home against Rutgers when I was 11 years old back in 2003. I was a fan through Perry Patterson, Greg Paulus, Ryan Nassib, Terrell Hunt, AJ Long, Rex Culpepper, Zack Mahoney, Eric Dungey, you name it. But at this point I am looking at two floundering programs, and on the football side I just can't convince myself that we have any hope of competing at the highest level going forward. That being said, I would rather go all in on basketball with the prayer that we can get the program back to where it was when I was a kid than keep pretending we have a chance at competing in football.
