Can we stay competitive in the NIL era?

[Augusta_Jacket]

Does anyone have links to where I can find this info. Donation/funding/expense rankings for FBS schools? I’d like to see a legit, complete list of all schools.

See my post below yours and above this one.

Edit to add: I didn't intend for this to sound snarky. I was typing my response when you asked this question.

 

[gte447f]

If these current trends toward transitioning to a pro football model continue, won't there come a time when the the schools/colleges/universities are forced to cut ties with these professional football teams that use their names? Then instead of the University of Alabama Crimson Tide vs the u(sic)ga bull($**t)dwags, you have the Bama Boomers vs the Georgia Mutt Hounds in a lower tier professional sports league, and no one cares, just like no one cares about the XFL. How can academic institutions continue to be involved with professional sports? Legally and legislatively I mean. I'm sure cynics will say that the universities benefit financially from the sports and are too greedy to ever let go of that money. That may be true. It probably is. I am ignorant on the subject. Serious, naive question, how do the universities benefit financially, other than indirectly through popularity, etc? I read all the time on this board that the Institute and the GTAA have little to nothing to do with each other.

 

[UgaBlows]

If these current trends toward transitioning to a pro football model continue, won't there come a time when the the schools/colleges/universities are forced to cut ties with these professional football teams that use their names? Then instead of the University of Alabama Crimson Tide vs the u(sic)ga bull($**t)dwags, you have the Bama Boomers vs the Georgia Mutt Hounds in a lower tier professional sports league, and no one cares, just like no one cares about the XFL. How can academic institutions continue to be involved with professional sports? Legally and legislatively I mean. I'm sure cynics will say that the universities benefit financially from the sports and are too greedy to ever let go of that money. That may be true. It probably is. I am ignorant on the subject. Serious, naive question, how do the universities benefit financially, other than indirectly through popularity, etc? I read all the time on this board that the Institute and the GTAA have little to nothing to do with each other.

Have you checked out the olympics lately? Clearly no-one cares any longer about amateur sports, it’s about wining period and damn the cost.

 

[forensicbuzz]

I am not sure if it is an issue of 'cannot' or 'will not' but the result is the same. We are not going to be competitive in the new era. We don't have the alumni willing to put up the money to play the NIL game, we don't have the majors to attract a wide selection of elite HS athletes, we aren't setting up the shell 501c3 and 501c4 corporations needed to fund the program at elite levels, we have 7,802 international students on campus that don't give a crap about American football (see collegefactual.com) , we have a fan base that is scattered all over the country and isn't concentrated in one Geography (ie. UGA), we are in the heart of a region where 4* and 5* players have too many options to count, we are in a big city filled with sports and entertainment options, and we have a coach and an athletic director that aren't creative enough to do anything other than go head-to-head with the major football factories. It is a sad time to be a Tech fan.

I was with you right up until the final clause in the second-to-last sentence. Then it got stupid. And you were doing so well...

 

[forensicbuzz]

If these current trends toward transitioning to a pro football model continue, won't there come a time when the the schools/colleges/universities are forced to cut ties with these professional football teams that use their names? Then instead of the University of Alabama Crimson Tide vs the u(sic)ga bull($**t)dwags, you have the Bama Boomers vs the Georgia Mutt Hounds in a lower tier professional sports league, and no one cares, just like no one cares about the XFL. How can academic institutions continue to be involved with professional sports? Legally and legislatively I mean. I'm sure cynics will say that the universities benefit financially from the sports and are too greedy to ever let go of that money. That may be true. It probably is. I am ignorant on the subject. Serious, naive question, how do the universities benefit financially, other than indirectly through popularity, etc? I read all the time on this board that the Institute and the GTAA have little to nothing to do with each other.

This is HUGE. Name recognition for schools competing for out-of-state dollars and instate enrollees is a big part of it. It provides prestige that bleeds over into the academic side of the university. For somewhere like Stanford, GT, Northwestern, etc. that are already highly regarded academic institutions, it is less important because acceptance is already so selective, but at other schools is really important.

 

[bigrabbit]

I read a consulting research study that said universities who do well in sports get more of their current category of academic students applying, but usually not significantly better students. I recall the study referred to how university presidents know this little secret. So you can go from a 52% acceptance rate down to 45% but sports will not take a school to the next level - like GT at sub 20% with steadily climbing admissions stats.

Alums drive most of the sports mania and it’s therefore a bit easier to attract alum engagement for development when the team is doing well. Alums at top schools get excited or frustrated about sports, but most of their money still goes to academics.

I don’t think GT is in a particularly unique situation. I have a grad degree from Duke and their alums can’t believe how football there perpetually stinks while basketball is so good. I think Duke’s endowment is in the mid teens of billions. Stanford football sucks now and they could kill NIL if they really really wanted to. It’s worse for us being located in the southeast, close to uga, bama etc. Texas would be tough as well…probably explains A&M throwing the kitchen sink at it.

Btw I could see us in the B1G if it solves the TV revenue issue, could pick up lots of B1G alums in Atlanta as sidewalk fans. One good thing about ACC football is how the hurdle for being competitive is so low, few factories, even Wake is competitive.

 

[forensicbuzz]

I read a consulting research study that said universities who do well in sports get more of their current category of academic students applying, but usually not significantly better students. I recall the study referred to how university presidents know this little secret. So you can go from a 52% acceptance rate down to 45% but sports will not take a school to the next level - like GT at sub 20% with steadily climbing admissions stats.

Alums drive most of the sports mania and it’s therefore a bit easier to attract alum engagement for development when the team is doing well. Alums at top schools get excited or frustrated about sports, but most of their money still goes to academics.

I don’t think GT is in a particularly unique situation. I have a grad degree from Duke and their alums can’t believe how football there perpetually stinks while basketball is so good. I think Duke’s endowment is in the mid teens of billions. Stanford football sucks now and they could kill NIL if they really really wanted to. It’s worse for us being located in the southeast, close to uga, bama etc. Texas would be tough as well…probably explains A&M throwing the kitchen sink at it.

Btw I could see us in the B1G if it solves the TV revenue issue, could pick up lots of B1G alums in Atlanta as sidewalk fans. One good thing about ACC football is how the hurdle for being competitive is so low, few factories, even Wake is competitive.

I agree that it doesn't change the caliber of students, but it does change the number of applications being submitted and the general attractiveness of the university. These mid-level land grant universities are competing for students and athletic success helps attract students.

Athletic success (especially at big land-grant universities) also tends to loosen the purse strings on the academic side too. Name recognition helps in getting funding from grants and other sources. Athletic success (generally) is a big boost to Academics.

 

[burdell151]

I wonder how much money we could raise if everybody had to throw in $10 to the A-T Fund per post for each post they‘ve made in this thread. Think I’m in for under $50.

 

[bigrabbit]

I agree that it doesn't change the caliber of students, but it does change the number of applications being submitted and the general attractiveness of the university. These mid-level land grant universities are competing for students and athletic success helps attract students.

Athletic success (especially at big land-grant universities) also tends to loosen the purse strings on the academic side too. Name recognition helps in getting funding from grants and other sources. Athletic success (generally) is a big boost to Academics.

I think Bama has benefited, better students, money for academic facilities, research activities. I looked up Tuscaloosa research $$ about ten years ago and it was a laughable, maybe $30M, way less than UAB (med school). They’re up to $171m now, weak but not a complete joke.

GT otoh is driven by engineering research funding - that is what attracts and keeps faculty, keeps the engineering rank where it is. GT worries about losing rock star faculty to Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT etc (schools with little or no football). Having an elite engineering school spills over to the rest of GT in terms of national academic footprint.

To me, football is important at GT for student life, some fun to balance out nerd life. Unfortunately our students don’t care so much. My kids are maybe typical - both like sports but both passed over honors college at schools with good football teams to go to GT and Johns Hopkins. Those of you with h.s. kids know how hard it is to get into GT now. We have the smartest kids of any state university (according to a Duke study). Different universe from Bama.

 

[chewybaka]

I think Bama has benefited, better students, money for academic facilities, research activities. I looked up Tuscaloosa research $$ about ten years ago and it was a laughable, maybe $30M, way less than UAB (med school). They’re up to $171m now, weak but not a complete joke.

GT otoh is driven by engineering research funding - that is what attracts and keeps faculty, keeps the engineering rank where it is. GT worries about losing rock star faculty to Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT etc (schools with little or no football). Having an elite engineering school spills over to the rest of GT in terms of national academic footprint.

To me, football is important at GT for student life, some fun to balance out nerd life. Unfortunately our students don’t care so much. My kids are maybe typical - both like sports but both passed over honors college at schools with good football teams to go to GT and Johns Hopkins. Those of you with h.s. kids know how hard it is to get into GT now. We have the smartest kids of any state university (according to a Duke study). Different universe from Bama.

Agreed, my nephew did not get into Tech but is now going to engineering school (chem) in Boston…Tech has stepped way up academically.

 

[BuzzStone]

As always, it's not just the ranking, but the delta between GT and the schools at the top that's problematic. We are falling furter and further behind...

Thanks for all the info, this is what the main issue is. We can not keep up with the Top 25 let alone the top 10. The Top 10 will be competing for titles regularly.

 

[chewybaka]

Thanks for all the info, this is what the main issue is. We can not keep up with the Top 25 let alone the top 10. The Top 10 will be competing for titles regularly.

An insurection by the balance of the +100 FBS college football programs vs. the SEC is warranted, but will require mindful, effective conference coordination but will most likely be too little to late...it is a crossroad...

 

[BuzzStone]

@Augusta_Jacket where is the recruiting budget at in these numbers?

 

[bigrabbit]

Agreed, my nephew did not get into Tech but is now going to engineering school (chem) in Boston…Tech has stepped way up academically.

It’s just a different world and especially hard on our older alums. Started with Pettit, accelerated with Stelson and Crecine, you just can’t run a school like GT of the 60s/70s any more. I was in Stelson’s office in the late 80s and he had every PhD dissertation piled on his table to read. Now, they’d fill up a room.
Terrible freshman retention doesn’t work now. GT is now crazy hard to get in, but they want everyone to graduate. If GT had not transformed research wise, we’d be Cal Poly I guess.
I read about foreign students, true for grad/doctoral students but not undergrads. The Asian undergrads are Asian Americans, most from top Atlanta area high schools. Doctoral students are the cheap labor behind successful research labs…not sure how I feel about that but iiwii.
How many elite academic schools play elite football now? Very few. Michigan, Notre Dame maybe, although nobody thinks either of them are about to win a national championship. UT and TAMU are ok and guess they’ll make a run at it.
Maybe it’s good we’re in the ACC, we can compete with that crowd.

 

[Augusta_Jacket]

Somewhere along the line, the way athletics, athletes, and athletic competition is viewed by both the universities and the general public has completely changed. In the early days, (1800's to early 1900's), athletics was viewed by universities as at least useful, if not necessary, to complete the "rounding out" of young men as they prepared them for life. A student chose the university based on the curriculum offered and if he happened to be athletically gifted, might choose to represent the school on a sports team. Before the widespread advent of baseball and football, this was generally through rowing, golf, or other Olympic sports such as fencing and running sports. Baseball and football, and their massive appeal to the general public, changed all of this. Schools began to compete more fiercely, and ringers were often brought in for key games. As the early part of the 20th century closed, we started to see the conferences work to regulate the sports. Scholarship limits were imposed, and yet this was already a sign of massive change in the way we viewed college sports. No longer was the student primarily a student, but now we were recruiting specific students based on their athletic ability. Throughout this period, however, the ideals of amateurism, which were socially important in the early 20th century, were strictly enforced. In baseball, which at this point had been around for a while, farm clubs and independent teams dotted the landscape and every decent sized town had a "local 9" that offered a chance for non-student athletes to play. The nascent NFL did not have such a setup and profited greatly by drafting their players from the pool that had used up their college eligibility. As the years chugged along, gradual changes to the way college athletics was viewed continued to mount. With TV, college games became huge, and by the late 20th century rivaled the NFL for popularity. More and more colleges began to make exceptions to their academic requirements to admit star athletes to play for them. With the money pouring in to the programs from rabid fans and boosters, a shady underground economy of bagmen emerged to pay a player for their enrollment at a desired school. At the same time, societal views towards amateurism had shifted to view it as anachronistic at best, and unduly cumbersome to an athlete who should be able to monetize himself. With the advent of NIL laws, the bagmen no longer had to operate in secret, but can now form shell companies to pay their desired targets completely above board.

IMO, we are at a similar place in the evolution of college sport as when we first began to recruit specific athletes. Then, the conferences had to come together to codify regulations to ensure competitive balance was maintained for the sake of the sport. Today, we are going to a similar movement to regulate the madness NIL has unleashed. Otherwise, we are going to see a slow but massive change in the landscape of college football as we know it. Leagues like the SEC and the B1G will likely swell to 20+ teams each and develop their own championship system where they control all the marbles between the two of them. The Big XII, already greatly diminished, will wither on the vine and become a G5 league. The best programs in the PAC will join the B1G, and the best programs in the ACC will join the SEC. The rest will sink into the dustbin of irrelevance and become G5 schools.

IMO, GT is a borderline candidate for the SEC or B1G. FSU, Clemson, Miami, UNC, and VT are the shoe ins. USC, UCLA, Stanford, Washington, and Oregon are the major candidates from the PAC. I don't see any poachable schools from the Big-XII remaining that would be attractive to a two conference super league.

Now, is all of this unavoidable? No. A lot could and likely will happen in the interim. Smarter people than me are working to avoid the iceberg looming ahead of us. I hope they are successful, but frankly, I have my doubts. The business of the college football model and the willingness of the American public to enable a handful of programs to monopolize the sport likely assure the changes outlined above. The only real hope we have right now is for the "alliance" of the B1G, ACC, and PAC to become that governing body that holds the SEC to account, and the only way for that to happen is for the factories in each of those leagues to act selflessly knowing it will mean diminished benefit from the new NIL model to their recruiting. Since I don't see this happening, my gut feeling is we are witnessing the downward spiral of competitive football at Georgia Tech, and that has absolutely nothing to do with our coaching staff. Our fate was sealed the day we walked out of the SEC. We stood on principle, but today principle and $1 will get you a large sweet tea at McDonalds.

Anyway, this is definitely TLR for some, but it's what I see unless major changes happen soon.

 

[Augusta_Jacket]

@Augusta_Jacket where is the recruiting budget at in these numbers?

It's not readily available in those links, but it is in the P&Ls each public university releases. Here is a link with the numbers from 2019.

Ranking college football programs in recruiting spending

Here's what public Power 5 conference programs told the NCAA they spent on football recruiting during the 2019 fiscal year.

www.on3.com

 

[SOWEGA Jacket]

An insurection by the balance of the +100 FBS college football programs vs. the SEC is warranted, but will require mindful, effective conference coordination but will most likely be too little to late...it is a crossroad...

Never gonna happen. They may envy the SEC success but there is actual hatred against each other in the +100 crowd. All of this is just BS talk. Michigan and Cincy could have boycotted. But they didn’t and they won’t next year or the year after.

 

[g0lftime]

It’s just a different world and especially hard on our older alums. Started with Pettit, accelerated with Stelson and Crecine, you just can’t run a school like GT of the 60s/70s any more. I was in Stelson’s office in the late 80s and he had every PhD dissertation piled on his table to read. Now, they’d fill up a room.
Terrible freshman retention doesn’t work now. GT is now crazy hard to get in, but they want everyone to graduate. If GT had not transformed research wise, we’d be Cal Poly I guess.
I read about foreign students, true for grad/doctoral students but not undergrads. The Asian undergrads are Asian Americans, most from top Atlanta area high schools. Doctoral students are the cheap labor behind successful research labs…not sure how I feel about that but iiwii.
How many elite academic schools play elite football now? Very few. Michigan, Notre Dame maybe, although nobody thinks either of them are about to win a national championship. UT and TAMU are ok and guess they’ll make a run at it.
Maybe it’s good we’re in the ACC, we can compete with that crowd.

I was a grad student in EE in the early 70's. Half my classes were students from Pakistan or India. You are correct about PHD numbers. EE usually only admitted 4 per year as doctoral students back then. Pettit was responsible for major emphasis on increasing the grad program. He didn't seem to have any interest in athletics.

 

[davesbrain]

It's ultimately going to take enough 4 or 5 star busts to temper the insanity / hysteria gripping the nil phenomenon.

 

[AlabamaBuzz]

Did not read all of this, but I think the NIL combined with portal creates the following at some point:

32 Team "super league" at the top, with the remaining 100 schools left to have their own championship playoff or whatever. I would assume there still can be crossover games for sure, but only those who sign up to compete at a high level of NIL would be considered for the 32 team league.

I don't want this, but I think it is the only outcome where the rest of the teams have a legitimate chance at a natty, albeit a lesser league natty. The best HS players are going to go where the NIL $$ are, and the players that develop into top talent in the lower league will mostly head for the NIL deals with those same teams via portal.