(10-14-2024, 07:59 PM)branner Wrote: Oregon's NIL budget is supposedly $23 million; Ohio State's $20 million. The NFL salary cap is about $250 million per team. I have read that NFL players receive close to half of NFL revenue. Some of the larger college football programs generate $150 million to $200 million in annual revenue. If this NIL experiment works, I would reason that NIL budgets could double or even triple, so that players earn a more NFL-like slice of the pie. It's all just business at this point.
Possibly the universities will discover the need for an "NIL cap" to keep the game relevant. Otherwise, it seems that a relative handful of teams will be able to outspend everyone else.
I favor college players sharing in the revenues, even substantially so. But I wonder if at some point, big-business college football becomes orthogonal to universities. At some point in time, do students begin to resent fellow students making millions of dollars per year? I don't know the answer, but do wonder about that.
As far as our beloved Cardinal are concerned, if we are going to compete, we are going to need to compete in NIL deal values. This is a problem that has a solution, but it may be that only those of us who love Stanford sports even see the matter as a problem. Does the board even want the university to compete at the highest levels of sport? Based upon what I've seen over the past few years, I have my doubts.
So...
$23 million - Oregon
$20 million - Ohio State ($13 million as of two years ago)
$7.2 million - Texas A&M (avg $85,000)
$5.5 million - Michigan and Oklahoma (avg $64,000 - $65,000)
The last few numbers came from ChatGPT and sound low to me, but if they are in the ballpark, we should be able to field a fairly solid team with a budget of $3-4 million, which an $100 million endowment should be able to cover