Don't post often, but in this case, I suppose I've been negatively inspired to respond... Back in the day, one of the wonderful things about college basketball was that it wasn't like professional sports. It didn't matter if you rooted for a relatively smallish private college in a small-market city in upstate New York. You still had a chance to be a national power (at least in basketball) and your team could compete at a high level year in and year out because - at least ostensibly - you didn't have to have deep pockets and/or be from a large state university in order to consistently succeed. It was possible through hard work, smart recruiting, and player development to create a somewhat level playing field.
But with NIL, all of that has definitely changed. This situation parallels what transpired years ago for many of the small-market teams in professional sports. Full disclosure, I'm a Baltimore Orioles fan, a once-proud franchise that has fallen on hard times (until very recently
because of a variety of reasons, including of course the fact that the bankroll for their players is not nearly so thick as the Dodgers, Mets and Yankees of the baseball world. But at least there has always been the ability to draft good players (although that has continuously eluded the O's until the last few years). Now whether or not small-market professional teams could ultimately hold on to their players after drafting them, that was an entirely different matter, what with free agency. Yet even so, you nonetheless had a chance to compete for the best players.
That is not the case with an NIL system in which teenagers can reportedly become millionaires - unless you have the alumni and business connections that are willing to toss out the cash, car, etc., opportunities. To date, that does not seem to be the case for Syracuse. We have in essence become a small-market college team, which means the likelihood of regularly competing in college athletics is going to become more and more difficult. So alas, not only am I an Orioles fan, but I am also an Orange fan, and that does not bode well.
I'm afraid my only solace is that I'm quite certain there are a number of Syracuse fans who are also Yankee fans, and now those Yankee fans are perhaps beginning to experience what it's like when your team is not supported by a bottomless well of big bucks. I'm not saying that success for SU basketball or football is an impossibility, but I don't think what we've done so far is going to come close to solving our future problems.
Many apologies for this much-too-bitter and far-too-lengthy diatribe. I guess I'm just another Abe Simpson shaking my fist at the clouds. But this emotional ventilation did help ... a little lol. And I'll still be watching tomorrow, hoping that maybe our football team can pull off an upset!!!