(Side note- I don't know if Neil Paul is on this board but, if he is, I agree with you)
Brent Freeman has been a Georgia football season ticket holder all 32 years of his life. The tickets were passed down in the family, and now he and his father donate just more than $4,000 per year to UGA for the right to have four seats around the 25-yard line, about 50 rows up.
“It’s perfect,” Freeman said of the view.
Freeman, who lives in Evans, Ga., just outside of Augusta, describes himself as middle class. Spending thousands of dollars per year for tickets isn’t ideal, but it just always has been in the family budget. He loves the Dawgs. Two years ago, when a friend pointed him to Georgia’s new name, image and likeness collective, Freeman decided to chip in: $30 per month.
But now the dynamic is changing. The collectives are seen as the way to get players, and Freeman worries he and other fans will be asked for more. Meanwhile, he sees the SEC paying tens of millions each year to its schools, including Georgia. And he hears about the NIL payments — from fans like him, not the schools — going to certain recruits.
“No ill will toward the university or anything. My gripe is with the system,” Freeman said. “Asking us fans, I think, is wrong. I think it’s comical the money the NCAA brings in, and the fact they’re asking fans — and not just Georgia fans, but fans across the country — to give more, it’s just kind of comical. You can’t explain to me that this is the best way to do it.”
That is an emerging complaint from fans and one more factor that could create big changes in college sports, including revenue sharing in which schools directly pay their athletes, rather than asking fans to foot the bill through collectives.
There’s a term for it in the NIL industry: donor fatigue. Fans who are already asked to donate a lot for season tickets, not to mention the facilities arms race, are now being asked to essentially pay the players, while the schools are prohibited from doing so directly by NCAA rules.
“It certainly is on the minds of all of us right now,” said Walker Jones, executive director of The Grove Collective, which supports Ole Miss athletes. “I think there’s an understanding that donor-led and fan-led model is not equitable and not sustainable. …
“I think it’s wise for these power conferences to figure out a revenue share and to figure out a way to collectively bargain. Which would then address donor fatigue, it would add sustainability and it would give the athletes the ability to truly capitalize on name, image and likeness, through revenue sharing.”
One person likened NIL to a trampoline: It’s used to get the program to the next level, but the trampoline costs money to build, and people need to be shown how to use it. Other people might not see NIL as a trampoline but as a burden.
The collectives don’t depend entirely on small, month-to-month donors. Big donors, whether individuals or businesses, often compose the majority of the donations. But the attraction of small donors is that they could be more consistent. If a collective can tap the thousands of fans at each school for small monthly donations, that means a lot of money.
But fans have to be convinced to give, and many are unwilling. Greg Sullivan, 57, lives in Athens, goes to many Georgia sporting events and has been a football season ticket holder for more than 30 years. He pays about $3,000 per year for his two tickets at Sanford Stadium.
When asked to donate to the collective, he declined. Part of it, by Sullivan’s acknowledgment, is he’s old school.
“I guess since I’ve been there so long and going so long, I got used to the old way of doing things,” he said. “You’ve seen where a lot of money goes, Lamborghinis and stuff like that. Not something I want to get involved with.”
If the NIL era is here to stay, Sullivan thinks the schools should be the ones directly paying. He pointed to another factor in his reluctance to give: a lack of transparency from the collectives, which are not public and don’t have to divulge their finances. Fans not privy to information don’t know how much players are getting, how much the collective needs and how much the collective has.
“You don’t know if they’ve got enough or they need more,” Sullivan said.
Neil Paul, a Clemson fan in Anderson, S.C., had been giving money to Clemson’s athletic department fundraising arm since 1987, paying around $2,000 each year for his season tickets. After sitting out the 2020 season because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Paul and his wife opted not to renew and haven’t looked back. Among friends who remain season ticket holders, he hears the same refrain: People have only so much disposable income to support their teams.
“The money overcomes the loyalty,” Paul said. “I’ll hear friends who are donors say, ‘Well, they’re hitting us up for this, can you increase your donation by 10 percent’ or whatever amount? … Where does it end?”
Jason Belzer is the founder of Student Athlete NIL Agency, which advises around 50 collectives. He says donor fatigue was inevitable in the current model.
“Those people have now had to step up to pay not only the university’s regular operating costs but now the payroll of these teams,” Belzer said. “We’re now in the third year of NIL, and a lot of schools’ donors aren’t getting a return on their investment. Before you at least got your name on the building. Now you pay for the payroll, and your team doesn’t win.”
This season, Belzer estimates, at least 15 schools’ collectives will be paying more than $10 million total to their football teams. He said the median among the power conferences will be around $4 million to $5 million. That’s money that is either in addition to or in place of money that is going to traditional donations for season tickets, facilities or other things.
“I have this conversation with ADs constantly. I say you have to be ready, or you’re going to be on the wrong side of what’s about to happen,” Belzer said, meaning revenue sharing.
But in the current model, where do programs stand? In talking to several experts, who were granted anonymity to speak about these issues, the consensus is that it varies by program.
Georgia is probably in the same group as Alabama as programs that have recruited well and won recently on the field, although Alabama faces a big change as it moves forward without Nick Saban. They have built a lot of facilities during the past decade, fundraising to do so, and thus many donors might be closer to being tapped out. LSU, Clemson and other schools that went fully into the facilities race are in that boat. Teams like Georgia, however, have the added “burden” of recent success, which makes fans wonder why their collectives need the money.
Sullivan’s reluctance speaks to what the Georgias and Alabamas are up against: the lack of panic.
“I guess it’d be a little different, would you give to get one of those championships,” Sullivan said. “But we just ended a 41-year drought.”
At Texas, Texas A&M or Tennessee (among others), programs and donors might have great facilities and such, but they’re incentivized to participate more in the NIL donating program because they want to get back to the glory days. There’s a desperation factor at places like Nebraska, which saw a huge influx of donations after snagging five-star quarterback Dylan Raiola away from Georgia in December.
Some programs are sneaky good at NIL, like Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri, which need that bump to get to a higher tier. Athletic directors and coaches have realized it’s a good tool, so they’ve encouraged donating. As in: Hey, this is a way to have a better product on the field.
When it comes to fundraising, school administrators have realized they need to adjust. Some are scaling back on asking for money for facilities and other traditional things, knowing even their big-money donors have only so much to spend.
“At the end of the day, NIL is probably the most direct line to being competitively relevant,” one administrator at a power conference program said. “The old adage in fundraising is to say: ‘Coach what do you need, how can I help you?’ It used to be, ‘I need a new locker room’ or something like that. Now, 90 percent, if not 100 percent, of coaches are going to say, ‘I need NIL money.’”
Ole Miss is among the schools that have felt that already: Athletic director Keith Carter said this week that it had “put on the shelf” plans to renovate the stadium, citing the current landscape.
But when it comes to fundraising for collectives, Ole Miss is an example of full buy-in, from the coach to the administration to the fans. The Grove Collective has been one of the most high-profile collectives, and Ole Miss followed up an 11-win season by getting key transfers.
“I think everybody understands that you’re showing proof of concept then you’ll probably be OK,” Jones said. “But the moment you have any downturn in success on the court or the field, you’re probably going to have some issues.”
That speaks to the sustainability of the current model. Schools can hit up fans for money for only so long. That’s what makes revenue sharing more attractive. It would have the benefit, if the money were going to the schools rather than the collectives, of being tax-deductible for donors.
But there are concerns about taking funds away from women’s and non-revenue sports. The worry is if a revenue sharing percentage is too high — 50-50, for instance — that athletic directors are going to cut sports like cross country, golf, tennis, etc.
That’s why Jones and others are in favor of getting ahead of the issue with collective bargaining with athletes for a percentage that keeps things viable for every sport. It would take pressure off the collectives to raise the money themselves.
“Right now everybody’s on the hamster wheel 365 days a year trying to make payroll and make money,” Jones said. “If you can have some pressure taken off your collective and your donor base, then I think everyone wins, including your student-athletes.”
What it all looks like is still complicated. The power conferences, especially the Big Ten and SEC, should take the lead on figuring it out, Jones said. It could mean directly paying the players, or it could be paying them through the collectives.
“We’re seeing a slow and steady push to common sense and acceptance of what this really is and where it’s going,” Jones said. “People fought it, fought it, fought it. Now I think everyone’s like, ‘Well, there’s no use fighting it anymore. We have to come to the best way to embrace it.’”
Freeman agrees the players deserve to be paid. He’s happy they are.
“I just don’t think it should be coming from hardworking middle-class people who have been donating to the school,” he said. “Especially when you hear about the billion dollars they’re getting from ESPN.”
And in talking to his friends and fellow season ticket holders, he is sure he’s not alone.
“The consensus is it’s not fair to the fans. It’s not fair to pile on and to give and give and give. And there’s no regulation or policing of it,” he said. “We’re just starting. When’s it going to stop? What’s it going to look like in five years?”
Donor fatigue: Some college football fans wonder why they have to pay for players
Brent Freeman has been a Georgia football season ticket holder all 32 years of his life. The tickets were passed down in the family, and now he and his father donate just more than $4,000 per year to UGA for the right to have four seats around the 25-yard line, about 50 rows up.
“It’s perfect,” Freeman said of the view.
Freeman, who lives in Evans, Ga., just outside of Augusta, describes himself as middle class. Spending thousands of dollars per year for tickets isn’t ideal, but it just always has been in the family budget. He loves the Dawgs. Two years ago, when a friend pointed him to Georgia’s new name, image and likeness collective, Freeman decided to chip in: $30 per month.
But now the dynamic is changing. The collectives are seen as the way to get players, and Freeman worries he and other fans will be asked for more. Meanwhile, he sees the SEC paying tens of millions each year to its schools, including Georgia. And he hears about the NIL payments — from fans like him, not the schools — going to certain recruits.
“No ill will toward the university or anything. My gripe is with the system,” Freeman said. “Asking us fans, I think, is wrong. I think it’s comical the money the NCAA brings in, and the fact they’re asking fans — and not just Georgia fans, but fans across the country — to give more, it’s just kind of comical. You can’t explain to me that this is the best way to do it.”
That is an emerging complaint from fans and one more factor that could create big changes in college sports, including revenue sharing in which schools directly pay their athletes, rather than asking fans to foot the bill through collectives.
There’s a term for it in the NIL industry: donor fatigue. Fans who are already asked to donate a lot for season tickets, not to mention the facilities arms race, are now being asked to essentially pay the players, while the schools are prohibited from doing so directly by NCAA rules.
“It certainly is on the minds of all of us right now,” said Walker Jones, executive director of The Grove Collective, which supports Ole Miss athletes. “I think there’s an understanding that donor-led and fan-led model is not equitable and not sustainable. …
“I think it’s wise for these power conferences to figure out a revenue share and to figure out a way to collectively bargain. Which would then address donor fatigue, it would add sustainability and it would give the athletes the ability to truly capitalize on name, image and likeness, through revenue sharing.”
One person likened NIL to a trampoline: It’s used to get the program to the next level, but the trampoline costs money to build, and people need to be shown how to use it. Other people might not see NIL as a trampoline but as a burden.
The collectives don’t depend entirely on small, month-to-month donors. Big donors, whether individuals or businesses, often compose the majority of the donations. But the attraction of small donors is that they could be more consistent. If a collective can tap the thousands of fans at each school for small monthly donations, that means a lot of money.
But fans have to be convinced to give, and many are unwilling. Greg Sullivan, 57, lives in Athens, goes to many Georgia sporting events and has been a football season ticket holder for more than 30 years. He pays about $3,000 per year for his two tickets at Sanford Stadium.
When asked to donate to the collective, he declined. Part of it, by Sullivan’s acknowledgment, is he’s old school.
“I guess since I’ve been there so long and going so long, I got used to the old way of doing things,” he said. “You’ve seen where a lot of money goes, Lamborghinis and stuff like that. Not something I want to get involved with.”
If the NIL era is here to stay, Sullivan thinks the schools should be the ones directly paying. He pointed to another factor in his reluctance to give: a lack of transparency from the collectives, which are not public and don’t have to divulge their finances. Fans not privy to information don’t know how much players are getting, how much the collective needs and how much the collective has.
“You don’t know if they’ve got enough or they need more,” Sullivan said.
Neil Paul, a Clemson fan in Anderson, S.C., had been giving money to Clemson’s athletic department fundraising arm since 1987, paying around $2,000 each year for his season tickets. After sitting out the 2020 season because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Paul and his wife opted not to renew and haven’t looked back. Among friends who remain season ticket holders, he hears the same refrain: People have only so much disposable income to support their teams.
“The money overcomes the loyalty,” Paul said. “I’ll hear friends who are donors say, ‘Well, they’re hitting us up for this, can you increase your donation by 10 percent’ or whatever amount? … Where does it end?”
Jason Belzer is the founder of Student Athlete NIL Agency, which advises around 50 collectives. He says donor fatigue was inevitable in the current model.
“Those people have now had to step up to pay not only the university’s regular operating costs but now the payroll of these teams,” Belzer said. “We’re now in the third year of NIL, and a lot of schools’ donors aren’t getting a return on their investment. Before you at least got your name on the building. Now you pay for the payroll, and your team doesn’t win.”
This season, Belzer estimates, at least 15 schools’ collectives will be paying more than $10 million total to their football teams. He said the median among the power conferences will be around $4 million to $5 million. That’s money that is either in addition to or in place of money that is going to traditional donations for season tickets, facilities or other things.
“I have this conversation with ADs constantly. I say you have to be ready, or you’re going to be on the wrong side of what’s about to happen,” Belzer said, meaning revenue sharing.
But in the current model, where do programs stand? In talking to several experts, who were granted anonymity to speak about these issues, the consensus is that it varies by program.
Georgia is probably in the same group as Alabama as programs that have recruited well and won recently on the field, although Alabama faces a big change as it moves forward without Nick Saban. They have built a lot of facilities during the past decade, fundraising to do so, and thus many donors might be closer to being tapped out. LSU, Clemson and other schools that went fully into the facilities race are in that boat. Teams like Georgia, however, have the added “burden” of recent success, which makes fans wonder why their collectives need the money.
Sullivan’s reluctance speaks to what the Georgias and Alabamas are up against: the lack of panic.
“I guess it’d be a little different, would you give to get one of those championships,” Sullivan said. “But we just ended a 41-year drought.”
At Texas, Texas A&M or Tennessee (among others), programs and donors might have great facilities and such, but they’re incentivized to participate more in the NIL donating program because they want to get back to the glory days. There’s a desperation factor at places like Nebraska, which saw a huge influx of donations after snagging five-star quarterback Dylan Raiola away from Georgia in December.
Some programs are sneaky good at NIL, like Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri, which need that bump to get to a higher tier. Athletic directors and coaches have realized it’s a good tool, so they’ve encouraged donating. As in: Hey, this is a way to have a better product on the field.
When it comes to fundraising, school administrators have realized they need to adjust. Some are scaling back on asking for money for facilities and other traditional things, knowing even their big-money donors have only so much to spend.
“At the end of the day, NIL is probably the most direct line to being competitively relevant,” one administrator at a power conference program said. “The old adage in fundraising is to say: ‘Coach what do you need, how can I help you?’ It used to be, ‘I need a new locker room’ or something like that. Now, 90 percent, if not 100 percent, of coaches are going to say, ‘I need NIL money.’”
Ole Miss is among the schools that have felt that already: Athletic director Keith Carter said this week that it had “put on the shelf” plans to renovate the stadium, citing the current landscape.
But when it comes to fundraising for collectives, Ole Miss is an example of full buy-in, from the coach to the administration to the fans. The Grove Collective has been one of the most high-profile collectives, and Ole Miss followed up an 11-win season by getting key transfers.
“I think everybody understands that you’re showing proof of concept then you’ll probably be OK,” Jones said. “But the moment you have any downturn in success on the court or the field, you’re probably going to have some issues.”
That speaks to the sustainability of the current model. Schools can hit up fans for money for only so long. That’s what makes revenue sharing more attractive. It would have the benefit, if the money were going to the schools rather than the collectives, of being tax-deductible for donors.
But there are concerns about taking funds away from women’s and non-revenue sports. The worry is if a revenue sharing percentage is too high — 50-50, for instance — that athletic directors are going to cut sports like cross country, golf, tennis, etc.
That’s why Jones and others are in favor of getting ahead of the issue with collective bargaining with athletes for a percentage that keeps things viable for every sport. It would take pressure off the collectives to raise the money themselves.
“Right now everybody’s on the hamster wheel 365 days a year trying to make payroll and make money,” Jones said. “If you can have some pressure taken off your collective and your donor base, then I think everyone wins, including your student-athletes.”
What it all looks like is still complicated. The power conferences, especially the Big Ten and SEC, should take the lead on figuring it out, Jones said. It could mean directly paying the players, or it could be paying them through the collectives.
“We’re seeing a slow and steady push to common sense and acceptance of what this really is and where it’s going,” Jones said. “People fought it, fought it, fought it. Now I think everyone’s like, ‘Well, there’s no use fighting it anymore. We have to come to the best way to embrace it.’”
Freeman agrees the players deserve to be paid. He’s happy they are.
“I just don’t think it should be coming from hardworking middle-class people who have been donating to the school,” he said. “Especially when you hear about the billion dollars they’re getting from ESPN.”
And in talking to his friends and fellow season ticket holders, he is sure he’s not alone.
“The consensus is it’s not fair to the fans. It’s not fair to pile on and to give and give and give. And there’s no regulation or policing of it,” he said. “We’re just starting. When’s it going to stop? What’s it going to look like in five years?”
