[BillBradley]

Personally, I don't like NIL as currently practiced by collectives, as a way to circumvent pay-to-play rules (I have no problems with paying athletes to use their name, image, or likeness in a legitimate way, such as Nike paying an athlete to appear in a TV commercial, but that is not what you are asking).  But it's not my money, so if others are keen to donate to Lifetime Cardinal that is their business.

As far as Agara specifically, in your hypothetical, we should allocate whatever money the collective has in such a way to maximize return across our teams.  Unless donors have given Lifetime Cardinal so much money that we functionally have no limit, then presumably whoever is allocating the funds will have to find a way to budget it.  My guess is that you develop a budget by sport, and the coach will have some input into how it is allocated.  So, let's say there is a pot of $10 million/year, of which $500k is allocated, to WBB, then we might have to determine whether matching USC by spending $400k (throwing out a number) to keep Agara is worth it, or if it would be better to invest less money across more players.

BC

That was how I was thinking about it as well. Crazy difficult, even if you have deep pockets. I continue to think the best way through this mess is through 3rd party deals. You can grow it as you go and not be on the hook to fork out a bunch of cash up front. And as others have pointed out, the cash up front piece will be limited in the next go round.

[BillBradley]

Personally, I don't like NIL as currently practiced by collectives, as a way to circumvent pay-to-play rules (I have no problems with paying athletes to use their name, image, or likeness in a legitimate way, such as Nike paying an athlete to appear in a TV commercial, but that is not what you are asking).  But it's not my money, so if others are keen to donate to Lifetime Cardinal that is their business.

As far as Agara specifically, in your hypothetical, we should allocate whatever money the collective has in such a way to maximize return across our teams.  Unless donors have given Lifetime Cardinal so much money that we functionally have no limit, then presumably whoever is allocating the funds will have to find a way to budget it.  My guess is that you develop a budget by sport, and the coach will have some input into how it is allocated.  So, let's say there is a pot of $10 million/year, of which $500k is allocated, to WBB, then we might have to determine whether matching USC by spending $400k (throwing out a number) to keep Agara is worth it, or if it would be better to invest less money across more players.

BC

That was how I was thinking about it as well. Crazy difficult, even if you have deep pockets. I continue to think the best way through this mess is through 3rd party deals. You can grow it as you go and not be on the hook to fork out a bunch of cash up front. And as others have pointed out, the cash up front piece will be limited in the next go round.