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Message: [QUOTE="IthaCuse, post: 5616097, member: 10689"] The best argument I can make for Wildhack is that he is leading an athletic program which has been rendered structurally incapable of competing at the top level, despite that it has a history of being one of the best programs in both football and basketball. He is doing his best to maintain the programs in an impossible situation. If the NIL + Portal situation is not rectified, there's really nothing Wildhack can do anyways. I believe the NIL situation is far, far worse than the "board insiders" on here like to claim. We often hear from that group that NIL is not a problem in basketball and we have plenty of money. That "inside info" just clashes with publicly available information far too often. Boeheim says we need $10 million to compete, public reporting puts our top 5 players at a combined $3 million NIL value (with #5 being at $186,000, meaning the other 8 can't even combine to hit $1.6 million). $1.1 million of that was from Kiyan Anthony, and that was a result of his 1 million Instagram followers, not his on the court play. I also doubt we are paying Kiyan that kind of money, and frankly it would be a huge waste if we did. So we probably have an NIL budget of around $3-4 million in total. That budget for a whole team doesn't even land you the top player per On3, and can get you at most 2 of the top 10 players in NIL value. It has been publicly reported that an SEC caliber starter is now going for $600,000 on the college football transfer portal. That isn't an Alabama or Georgia caliber starter, that is a Kentucky or Mississippi State caliber starter. Per that criteria, we need $13.2 million in NIL funds annually just to pay for our starting 22 on offense and defense in football. At least if we want to compete at the top level. That would imply an overall roster budget of $25 million for football and $10 million for basketball. Again, it was publicly reported that our GOAL was to raise $6-8 million for football alone last year. Which means we MIGHT have $12 million in funds to put towards programs which require $35 million in spending just to compete at the highest level. If that doesn't change, Wildhack will fail to turn these programs around, and he will be the scapegoat for the decline of Syracuse athletics. But that decline has nothing to do with him, he just happened to be the poor sucker who took the AD job right as the college sports landscape changed in a way which rendered his alma mater incapable of competing at the highest level. From what I can tell, other than keeping Autry and Babers around one year too long, he's done the best he can with the cards he has been dealt. [/QUOTE]

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