ESPN sportswriter Max Olson published a deep dive Tuesday on the Texas Tech football transfer portal class. That widely acclaimed group of 17 players is the third-ranked class in the nation on the 247Sports composite index.
It has local folks picturing great days ahead.
One of Olson’s findings: The Matador Club, the donor collective that supports Tech athletics, is shelling out more than $10 million to bring general manager James Blanchard and coach Joey McGuire’s wishes to fruition.
Might have taken the rest of the college sports world by surprise. Not the guy sitting at my keyboard.
The NCAA first agreed not to fight athletes profiting off their name, image and likeness back in the fall of 2019. We wrote at the time it was a great development for Texas Tech, whose donors have a long track record of supporting the Red Raiders, financially and otherwise. Back in the 1970s, when schools could legally enlist alumni to aid in recruiting, Tech supporters played their part in helping Jim Carlen land the players who won 11 games in 1973 and 10 games in 1976. It’s still the best recruiting staff Tech’s ever had.
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More recently, Tech supporters helped finance hundreds of thousands of dollars in facilities. The writing was on the wall, then, that Texas Tech, if its supporters chose to get into the game, was poised to be a big winner through the combination of NIL and loosened transfer restrictions. The Red Raiders have been, overwhelmingly, not just in the past couple of months and not just in football.
Texas Tech men’s basketball, track and field, golf and now softball teams are all better off for NIL and the end to transfer restrictions, which were never defensible anyway. Any other student can transfer at the end of any semester; why should athletes be arbitrarily constrained?
That’s why April 7 looms large. On that day, federal judge Claudia Wilken can give final approval to the House v. NCAA settlement proposal.
If you root for Tech, you should hope she doesn’t. One of the things the settlement would do is curtail NIL spending. Donor collectives would be kneecapped and with it, the free market for athletes’ talent.
Most seem to think Wilken will give final consent to the settlement proposal, but there’s still hope for it to turn out otherwise. USA TODAY Sports’ Steve Berkowitz noted that by the Jan. 31 deadline, more than 35 formal objections or comment letters had been filed.
One of the most substantive objections: The per-school cap on pay for NIL use replaces one illegal restraint on compensation with another. Also, with terms of the House settlement proposal expected to extend for 10 years, it will apply to athletes coming into college whose viewpoints weren’t represented.
So it needs to fail.
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You knew doing away with amateurism and ushering in unrestrained NIL was potentially good for the little guy when coaches like Nick Saban at Alabama, Dabo Swinney at Clemson and Lincoln Riley, then at Oklahoma, opposed it.
They were on top of the college football world when the biggest brands, the biggest traditions and the biggest stadiums were the keys to winning. Outside spending in the form of NIL payments was a tool others could use to shake up the power structure. And so it’s been. Among Alabama, Oklahoma and Clemson, none are as formidable as in the recent past from a football perspective.
Texas Tech’s fortunes have made a turn for the better.
With NIL spending and transfers unrestrained, that could continue.
Without it, the old pecking order is likely to come storming back. Roll Tide, Boomer Sooner and all that.
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