Opinion

Wolferetti: Will the new NIL landscape hurt NC State’s ability to upgrade their facilities & hire new coaches? Does it matter?

Published

5 months ago

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I’m going to go ahead and address the elephant in the room.

NIL is causing a problem for schools like NC State.

There’s only so much money to go around and donors are having to choose between donating to their alma mater for facility upgrades, coach salaries, and scholarships, or donating to these NIL Collectives which pool money to eventually pay players in hopes they can be convinced to come or stay.

This is the reality now. The time for being an old man and arguing against the concept is over. It’s time to figure out how to operate in this landscape.

Let’s take KC Concepcion for example.

He’s the best freshman receiver NC State has had in a long, long time. Heck, he’s the best receiver NC State has had in a long, long time. But this isn’t 2018 anymore. Concepcion is about to have some options. He’s going to have schools knocking down his door, offering him life-changing money to switch schools. If that’s the path he wants to take, he won’t even have to sit out a year. So how does a school like NC State compete?

Well, first off, they need to match the money. It’s a bidding game in almost every case. So, they need to pay him close to the going rate. And how will they get that money? Well, they’re going to be relying on donors…the same donors that NC State’s Athletic Department has been relying on for coaches salaries and facility upgrades for years and years.

But the economy isn’t exactly thriving right now, and these donors don’t seem all that willing to simply keep their university donations AND add on NIL donations, so there is a choice to be made.

Just yesterday, Dave Doeren took some (unwarranted) heat from the editor-in-chief of ‘The Athletic’ for asking donors to pitch into the NIL collectives before the portal opens this week.

But what do you want the guy to do? His job depends on winning, and the only way to win is to get-and-keep good players, and today, the only way to get-and-keep good players is to pay them.

So without many other options, that is what NC State Football is going to be forced to do.

That said, I personally know a few big donors who aren’t too thrilled with having to weigh these options. One of them refuses to donate to the NIL because he doesn’t believe players should be paid. While the other is pulling his funding from the university and sending money solely to NIL Collectives.

The latter is what NC State is bracing for behind the scenes.

If NIL continues as it is going, the player asks are only going to rise and to stay competitive, donors are going to have to foot that bill. Like I said, there is only so much money floating around in Raleigh. For schools like Texas or UK this might not be an issue, but if we’re going to be honest, in Raleigh (and most of the ACC) it will be.

Meanwhile, NC State needs a major upgrade to the Murphy Center and its weight room. It was a state-of-the-art facility when it was built, but it’s 20 years old now and needs an upgrade. At the same time, the university has been dying to get enough funding to extend the upper decks at Carter-Finley and close in the horseshoe.

And while the football team’s practice facility is just about 9 years old, it’s not long until they’ll want a pro-level, all-encompassing facility, like the mega-programs are building. Here is what Texas is about to build…

Once you understand this scenario played out over years and years, you start to understand why it looks like these schools and conferences are panicking. They need to find a reliable source of money going forward, and right now the focus is to increase these TV deals and milk every cent they can out of them (that TV deal money can’t be touched by NIL).

But how sustainable is that? I don’t know, and by the looks of the way it’s playing out across the NCAA, they don’t know either.

So either the NCAA gets some kind of control of the NIL situation, or schools like NC State are going to have to get creative.

And that might mean a host of things, but in the end, they’re going to have to start operating a lot more like a true business, leveraging assets and land that they may have, to create revenue that, right now, they aren’t accessing.

Meanwhile, us fans, we’re going to have to understand this, because decisions will have to be made that change things from the stats-quo we’ve grown accustomed to over the years.

It’s adapt or die right now in college sports and schools like NC State are the ones who are walking a razor-thin line. There is a way for them to flourish, take advantage of the system, and come out on top. But because there is not an unlimited pool of money here, there is also a way for them to mismanage this situation and fail.

The coming years will go a long way in letting us know which side of that coin NC State ends up on. But for the time being, there isn’t a clear message coming from the university on where a donor with a fixed budget should allocate their money.

The best we have right now is the football coach, Dave Doeren, letting the fans know that the NIL Collectives needs it the most right now, and fans and donors seem to be listening.

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