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There are probably 10 levels of donors and fans for a college athletic program. Anyone from a 70-year-alum always a supporter, to businessman only for advertising, to mom & dad only while son is going there, to corporate CEO wanting a name on a building, to t-shirt fans who just like the Flying Worm, etc. At P4 schools when the AD says they need cash, usually someone Big or a lot of smaller someones steps up. At our level I think it's more difficult to predict the donors and level of donations. I think it's also more difficult to find donors willing to give blindly to a non-specific NIL fund than to a specific building fund.

Disappointed the game didn't allow us to see Mason, Cotton, and Vice.

Two more home games before students are back, then hopefully the athletic department is going all out to try to compete with last year's record-breaking numbers.

In traditional professional football, when teams pay players and have a losing season, the teams still make $$$ and turn a profit. Thus they can afford to continue to pay players. In today’s college football, when boosters pay players NIL and the team has a losing season, the boosters lose money AND they don’t get to experience the joy of being associated with a winner. Will those boosters keep donating NIL? Do you have to find new boosters? Don’t you eventually run out of boosters? Just don’t see how this NIL model is sustainable. Rich people didn’t get rich by losing money and I don’t see how you can keep asking them to do that via NIL. The revenue sharing model WILL work and it will be interesting to see what percentage of revenue is ultimately allocated to labor. The NBA gives 51% of gross revenue to players. The other major professional leagues give less. But why would colleges give players anything close to that? College players are infinitely replaceable. People root for their school and as a consequence of that, root for the players competing for that school. But if the Top 100 players in college football disappeared overnight, would the popularity of the sport suffer at all? I don’t think it would. Offer the players minimum wage, make them sign binding contracts with buyouts and non-competes (assuming you can still enforce those: that is another rabbit hole). NIL will still exist but won’t be as big of a deal because of the contracts and buyouts. If a players thinks he is too good for this system, they can start their own football league or wait until they are eligible for the NFL. Why wouldn’t this work?

I don’t know how much they care. It’s like monopoly money. Many of them are just borrowing from Uncle Sam and hoping they don’t have to pay it back.