Jamie Pollard preaches "Doomsday" about College Athletics and the NIL
- Thread starter ElijahMoore
- Start date
-
- Tags
- #nil
I meant what’s the total cost for the AD now. Curious if the school would discount and could waive the cost for the AD.
It's over $9M, probably pushing $10M after the next set of tuition hikes.
People keep making the counter argument that it hasn't ruined it because the TV ratings are still strong. But I think there is a lot of inertia at play here. Lots of college sports fans have been fans for a long time, and have dedicated lots of time and money to their passion. They aren't going to walk away cold turkey. Just like the separation between the P2 and the rest of the schools is an evolution and not one big bang.
I think the changes that have happened have already put us on the trajectory to peak college sports popularity and then the inevitable decline that follows. Now it is just a matter of giving the time for the consequences of these changes to play out.
As long as the non-(current)-P2 programs remain the big party, interest will stay steady, even if fans anticipate the days are "numbered." Even if we get contraction to Super League, it might require another generation before any significant drop-off.
The "gamble" for media/power-holders is thinking it's possible to grow enough following among younger people who might follow BiG/SEC without having any established loyalty to The Purged, to balance loss of interest from long-time fans.
That's only one way among many to view it.
Pollard is saying the athletic department budget can't absorb the revenue sharing plan. The P2 schools can absorb the cost through greater media rights, bigger fan bases, etc. For the non-P2 schools, some are funding the difference through tax money or student fees. Some are running deficits and will be forced to shut down. The best solution is for Congress to step in and grant antitrust waivers so the schools can regain some control of the situation. Iowa State's situation is complicated by the fact that the Board of Reagents could very well just decide to write off ISU in favor of the Hawkeyes. Neither Pollard nor the Iowa State president can solve the problem on their own. If we want to continue to have Iowa State sports as they are now, the fans and citizens will have to push for a solution, whatever that is. Our NIL director said the same thing. It's not unreasonable to say the whole thing is getting ridiculously expensive and we should just walk away. On the other hand, Iowa and ISU athletics are pretty strong economic engines and there is evidence that they increase applications and enrollment. So I don't know beyond the fact it's not the fault of anyone at ISU.
I think if the "Super league" is less than 60 schools, the drop-off in interest will be quick and dramatic.
If the total number is 40 or less, ISU is in trouble, if the number is 25 per conference, than 50 total I would guess we are OK, but its nervous time, 60 total and ISU is in for sure. The biggest problem for ISU is that the BOR and EIU would just as soon we were one of the schools that did not meet the cut and makes EIU the only P2 school in the state.
Looking at size of budget ISU is ranked in the low 40s, but many schools are getting millions of support from the state or university, while ISU took in $1.8 million from student funds. Attendance we are in the 30's or so. It comes down to how many schools that want to make the switch over and how many can afford it.
Yeah, I realize that - I used Perry as they are the closest and most familiar example, used as a microcosm of a greater issue. I believe you missed my point. There are much larger plants and industries that decimate a huge geographic area when they close. Detroit and other major car manufacturing cities were gutted when so much manufacturing moved overseas, and that is a far bigger and wider-reaching impact than our town of 50k and surrounding area. It also affected the US as a whole, similar to the college sports industry. There has been a 34% decrease in auto parts manufacturing in the US since 2000, with a US trade deficit in automobile parts in 2024 of $93.5 billion. In contrast, the entire college sports machine generates $17.5 billion.
So, with that, hammering on the point. This is not a unique situation in commerce. It sucks really hard, but this is the end result of the commercialization of athletics - that neither ISU nor any other schools had a problem with until it came time to pay the athletes.
You want to play, you have to pay. And if you want to play better, it will cost you. If I want some jewelry from Tiffany’s vs JC Penney’s, I am going to have to be prepared to shell out for the quality of that work. If I want a Lamborghini vs a 1999 Neon, I am going to have to put in the money.
Last edited:
Also, just for the sake of some data. The argument here is that, if we don't field a very elite team (which we haven't done up to this point), that the university, city, and region will all implode. That's a logical fallacy - just because we don't have the money of Texas doesn't mean that most other teams don't, also, so there will still be plenty of competition at that next level down. Which - that's the same level we've been at now, anyway. We don't have Bama or Texas or Florida money, so we're not getting our own TV channel or anything, anyway - so really the argument is moot.
But let's go ahead and pretend it holds water. If it were true, then surely the years when we were out here just absolutely sh***ing the bed, our enrollment and city size should have been directly affected the next year, right? Since it's a 1:1?
I went ahead and pulled the data, and went ahead and made a chart. HERE is the enrollment data, the football win records (each of which I multiplied by 3000 so that they would show on the chart), the basketball win records (each of which I multiplied by 1000 for the same reason), and the last three censuses for Ames. I did all of this back to 1996. In the year, you'll note that there is an asterisk (*) any time we got to the NCAA tournament, and a tilde (~) any time we went to a bowl game.
And... wouldn't you know, there's just absolutely zero correlation. Arguably, after dual successes in 2000 (most especially with the Elite 8 appearance), 2001, 2005, 2012, 2017, and the past couple of years, we should have seen skyrocketing enrollment the next year... and there just wasn't. In fact, several of the years, they went down the next year. So one might think that perhaps there's just not that big of a correlation between the success of an athletic program and enrollment at large?
And also, population just keeps growing, regardless of wins altogether.
Nobody wants us to be knocked down a peg in our athletics, but creating false narratives to try and elicit panic are not the way to avoid it.
I don't think the argument is that the correlation is 1:1, or that we even have to be winning, it's that there has to be a chance of us winning. People don't go to games only because the team is going to win, or they have won a ton of games (although that can help or hurt, but not the only factor), it's because the big 12 are teams who was somewhat able to compete with each other. The idea is that if this extrapolates in the way that it has, not only would we need to incur massive debt to keep up, but we wouldn't have access to the caliber of players that any other team has. The comparison of our money to other states like Texas or Florida kind of proves our point, because we were all on an even playing field regardless of money. The extra money that they had over us wasn't able to go into the pockets of the players to influence them to join those teams. So by allowing that change, the teams are now able to use the money advantage they have on us to further that gap. I also don't think population is the marker you would use for measuring the influence on the city, it would likely be revenue related, but I am not sure how you would track that so I'm sure it's a good proxy.
Actually, the argument has been a 1:1 in earlier posts in the thread that kids come to ISU because of seeing us win games, but not to belabor that.
That is again a false narrative about the needing a crazy amount of money to keep up or just not competing with anyone. There are very, VERY few schools who are going to be able to do that - Pollard himself said in your interview that U of I had to borrow, what, $60 million during COVID? Iowa has a lot deeper pockets and bigger donors than we do, and if they couldn’t keep up during that short time, then a good number of schools will not be able to take the $20 million hit year over year. So you will have mostly the same 10-15 teams competing for championships year over year… which is what happens now.
And, not to point out the obvious, but those same schools already are the schools with the most money. First of all, it is incredibly naive to think that schools weren’t paying players, there were a ton of them under the table (even in more furtive ways like Reggie Bush). But that money still affected the players’ experiences in net positives - crazy amazing facilities, upgrades to dorms or other living quarters, elite trainers and staff. The top shelf donors brought visibility and opportunity. A player at Texas (to continue the thread) had a grossly different experience than someone at, say, Missouri or Illinois.
There are no metrics that specifically identify the gross income generated by college athletics of our area, but population is a decent (and more easily identifiable) indicator.
Also, your claim that the ability to be competitive greatly affects attendance also just isn’t really true, at least not in Ames. Here is the football attendance by year:
total. Game
2011 6 321,880 53,647 Rhoads
2012 7 386,917 55,274 Rhoads
2013 6 332,165 55,361 Rhoads
2014 7 365,377 52,197 Rhoads
2015 6 339,113 56,519 Rhoads
2016 7 367,899 53,557 Campbell
2017 6 347,586 57,931 Campbell
2018 7 392,072 56,010 Campbell
2019 7 418,561 59,794 Campbell
2020 6 55,017 13,754† Campbell
2021 6 364,221 60,704 Campbell
2022 7 401,411 57,344 Campbell
2023 6 362,305 60,384 Campbell
2014, by your claim, should have had ridiculously low numbers - we had one of our worst years in recent memory, there was nobody hoping we would win. But there were as many fans for that year as there were in 2023. Yes, certainly there is some effect, but ISU fans are not as fair-weather as all of this would like us to believe. (We may be an outlier here, but as we are specifically the conversation being put forth as a warning, it is important to note our actual trends.)
Sorry, none of the actual data supports these claims. At least not at ISU. And again, even if there were any supporting data - if the US can withstand the implosion of much larger industries like auto manufacturing, I think that more disparity in college sports isn’t end times like is being painted.
