It’s so annoying that so much of our fan base sees ourselves as losers who can’t possibly compete. There’s a whole lot of other schools out there besides the Bama’s, Ohio St’s and Texases of the world. No reason we can’t compete with the next tier of schools for recruits and actually try to make the NIL rules work for us.
It isn't about "trying to make the NIL rules work for us." There simply isn't a strategy JP can deploy that changes the fact that we have very low donations and AD revenue compared to most schools. Short of simply raising a **** ton more money, there's not really a strategy to make this work for ISU relative to peer athletic departments.
People that think this is going to be not much of a disadvantage or a marginal one are fooling themselves. It's already cleared for private NIL cash. That puts ISU at a disadvantage to other P5 schools, not just the bluebloods. The stage is being set for direct payments from schools one way or another. If nothing else, donors can be encouraged to provide NIL funds while ADs fund things with TV revenue that would've been at least in part supported by donor dollars. That also puts ISU at a further disadvantage off the bat to every Big 10 and SEC school, even the bad ones, barring a surprise boost in media dollars.
The bottom line is this is going to be a shift in disparity in competitiveness unlike anything we've seen. If anyone doubts it, look at how NDSU, SDSU have blown past UNI. A huge part of that is those schools offering total cost of attendance. And that is very small compared to what we are likely to see in an NIL world.
I don't like to mix the right/wrong of NIL argument with the impacts to ISU. I think they are two very different arguments. Unless something pretty drastic changes in terms of rules, laws, ISU media $ or ISU donor $, ISU football is going to devastated by this. My opinion is that eventually college football is devastated by this and the money starts shrinking eventually as more and more schools fall by the wayside. But we'll see.
