Williams & Blum: Recapping a crazy 10 days

[Clonefan32]

Although retention in football may decrease, basketball is the real risk of suffering hierarchy changes

Williams and Blum kind of touched on this a few pods ago. It's like some of the big-money guys have realzied the "bang for you buck" exists in basketball. There are just so many guys needed to be a competitive football team that it's harder to build through the portal. But in basketball, if you go big on 2-3 prized guys you can have yourself a Top 5 team.

 

[CloneJD]

Disagree wholeheartedly. Majority of these schools already have more money than us, and recruiting hasnt suffered

Well now instead of just being short in nil funds we’re short in revenue sharing funds. Paying kids less then the entire big10/sec and at least some of the big12 and acc will absolutely matter.

 

[RagingCloner]

Well now instead of just being short in nil funds we’re short in revenue sharing funds. Paying kids less then the entire big10/sec and at least some of the big12 and acc will absolutely matter.

Would shock me if any of the b12 are able to max out in the first couple years tbh. TTU might be the first one, but even then i bet its not for the first couple years

 

[fsanford]

Would shock me if any of the b12 are able to max out in the first couple years tbh. TTU might be the first one, but even then i bet its not for the first couple years

TCU announced they would. I think BYU will.

 

[alexssdean12]

TCU announced they would. I think BYU will.

Houston did as well. They made 34 mil less than Iowa State did in 2024. Not sure how they can pull that off but if they can there is no reason ISU can't

 

[fsanford]

Houston did as well. The made 34 mil less than Iowa State did in 2024. Not sure how they can pull that off but if they can there is no reason ISU can't

Pollard is an accountant/finance guy, he is going to be conservative in his approach.
Nothing wrong with that, but I think he is still thinking more changes are coming

 

[nhclone]

Why is Campbell driving the bus or negatively impacted by cutting costs of non-revenue sports?


Staying competitive in non-revenue sports should NOT be on the table. And shouldn’t have for at least 15 years. That’s both operating costs and infrastructure.

Gut the non-revenue, cutting two sports or male scholarships in non-revenue sports if needed.

Delay any infrastructure costs that aren’t for facilitating revenue generation, which for the most part they have.

Be political and get the views on how the state, and State, support college athletics. But being charismatic and swaying others isn’t exactly a strength of JP. He’s not that kind of leader.

Borrow against the future. I mean, does anyone really think the Iowa AD is going to pay off all of their liabilities?

It was hyperbole, but the point was you can’t just wipe out support staff and not have an impact on the programs.

 

[DGC]

After listening to the podcast this morning, I have a question that maybe someone with more legal expertise could answer.
The way things are heading the SEC and the Big 10 are working towards a monopoly on college athletics. They will control everything from the top talent, tv, ect.
Blum mentioned towards the beginning of the podcast about congress working a bill to prevent the schools from getting sued. Would this bill prevent some type of antitrust against the SEC and Big 10 in the future?

 

[Cydewayz]

It just stinks that all of this still has the feel of "it's up to the fans to step up" in many ways.

I could see little things being added to gameday experiences to raise revenue (general parking increased say $5 for football, etc)...but that just passes it along to fans.

It seems if i understand WeWill will exist, but more as a way to connect athletes to businesses for true NIL type deals.

I do wonder as it'll be "internal" based on revenue sharing if Learfield will find ways to creatively step up with selling of our rights, etc. Definitely think the department shouldn't be afraid to think outside of the box and obviously will need to trim where they can budget wise now (and in the future).

 

[Jkclone15]

Houston did as well. The made 34 mil less than Iowa State did in 2024. Not sure how they can pull that off but if they can there is no reason ISU can't

Tillman Fertita.

 

[Tailg8er]

Houston did as well. The made 34 mil less than Iowa State did in 2024. Not sure how they can pull that off but if they can there is no reason ISU can't

I could have sworn some podcast a few weeks ago (thought CW but maybe not) said the Big 12 announced that they anticipated most, if not all, of their schools WOULD be maxing out the rev share. I've either imagining that, or things have changed fast over the past month.

 

[agrabes]

Again with these false dichotomies.

Gutting the non-revenue does not mean cutting the support staff for things like someone driving the football bus, which is undoubtedly already under the football expenses

If we’re truly spending that much on things like WBB, then either Pollard has done an awful job splurging on non-revenue sports, or it is that simple

This isn’t a new problem. He’s been spending too much on non-revenue for at least 15 years, when it became apparent that college athletics was changing.

I don't really have any interest in discussing your feelings on Pollard. The topic here is how do we get from today to a place where we fully fund the revenue sharing limit?

My concern is - where do you find the money? It's already been pointed out that there is not a lot you can cut from the non-revenue sports. We can't just cut all non-revenue sports. Maybe if the rules change later on we can, but for now we can cut at most 2 sports.

The tone I heard from the podcast is that we're not just $1-2M short - we're several million short in the current environment. The point I (and others) are making is that if you cut the two "best case" non-revenue sports (assuming you can't touch WBB and Wrestling) you're not getting close to the money you need. So what do you do then? Start cutting out the AD administrative staff? There might be a few people you could cut, but cut too deep and other things are going to start feeling the effects. Obviously MBB and FB bring in the most money, but they have the most spending too. Does the football team now take borrowed city of Ames school buses driven by Grad Assistants to the stadium instead of charters? Bus instead of fly? The nonrevenue sports are already driving around in vans and flying commercial to their events.

Borrowing irresponsibly isn't the solution either. Maybe you do it if you are worried it all falls apart if you don't, but that's living on borrowed time and making a debt you won't be able to dig out of.

All I'm saying is - you can't squeeze blood from a stone.

 

[isucy86]

I could have sworn some podcast a few weeks ago (thought CW but maybe not) said the Big 12 announced that they anticipated most, if not all, of their schools WOULD be maxing out the rev share. I've either imagining that, or things have changed fast over the past month.

Would be curious if some of the rhetoric is differentiating vs. combining schools $20M requirement per House vs. a schools NIL Collective.

Aka a school has fully funded + if the school pays $15M of "House $" requirement and its donor funded NIL Collective contributes $15M?

 

[CycloneVet]

Why is there no talk of adding an NIL $$$ cap per sport? I am worried that D1 teams without a football program (Creighton, Gonzaga, etc) would have a huge advantage in MBB and WBB NIL spending. Maybe they already do, so not much would change.

If there was a cap, there would be the return of under the table payments

 

[Tailg8er]

Would be curious if some of the rhetoric is differentiating vs. combining schools $20M requirement per House vs. a schools NIL Collective.

Aka a school has fully funded + if the school pays $15M of "House $" requirement and its donor funded NIL Collective contributes $15M?

Yeah could be, I dunno. I suppose the collectives won't have much left after spending as much as possible before the house stuff goes down.

 

[FinalFourCy]

If there was a cap, there would be the return of under the table payments

Without the cap, there will be, as SEC and BIG schools aren’t just going to concede basketball after they tie up much of the $20+ million on football

 

[Cydewayz]

I did like Blum sharing some of the economic data using the COVID "no fan" year vs regular to show the true impact. I don't see a scenario where the university would pay any (given funding concerns overall for education). Would be interesting if somehow there could be greater support from Ames. Maybe some type of hotel tax type deal? Just spit balling

 

[SolterraCyclone]

I could have sworn some podcast a few weeks ago (thought CW but maybe not) said the Big 12 announced that they anticipated most, if not all, of their schools WOULD be maxing out the rev share. I've either imagining that, or things have changed fast over the past month.

I’ve heard that too. Shoot even South Florida said they’d be maxing out the cap. To me it’s non-negotiable, if we want to remain a P4 school, we have to max the revshare. If we can’t do that, we need to drop down a level.

There’s not going to be one big move we can make to generate $21M. It’s going to have to be done incrementally, and done both through fundraising AND cutting.

As Blum said, it’s going to have to be done creatively. I don’t think it’s a coincidence he was talking how much revenue Story county received from tourism as a result of ISU games. Do we go to the county for financial support? And it seems by cutting 2 sports we could save $4M annually, unfortunately one of those might have to be wrestling (I agree WBB is untouchable). I don’t know.

Also, I’ll say it again. Start freakin selling alcohol at the events.

 

[LarryISU]

I read that Yahoo Sports article that Blum mentioned. One thing popped out, the student athletes don't want the money they are getting to be called income. They don't want to be employees. (i.e., they don't want to pay taxes is how I took that). I can't imagine that would be allowed. If money is changing hands, the IRS is going to get involved. I have to assume all these so-called "NIL" payments the last couple of years have been taxable?

 

[ChrisMWilliams]

You have to question Pollard’s leadership if we aren’t maxing out.

I don't know. If you've been paying attention, we knew that the schools without a massive donor base would have to ease into all of this. Jamie saw all of this happening in 2020 when he started building CyTown - which will provide extra revenue to make up for it. Why I said on the show multiple times that maxing out as soon as possible should be the goal. It never felt like that would be realistic in year one.