On Monday, I wrote up an 1800-word newsletter regarding the mess surrounding Jaden Rashada. It was mainly looking at the report of ludicrous NIL numbers from On3’s Jeremy Crabtree and trying to make sense of it all.
Perhaps luckily for you, I had to delete it that evening after a different writer at On3 wrote something that was somehow both more wild and made more sense. So, thanks for that, On3 sports business and NIL reporter Pete Nakos.
It still doesn’t all add up, but this may be the best we get for now. The unclear parts are mostly logistics, like: when did Mike Caspino become the Rashada family’s lawyer? Jaden had been using a team of agents, one of whom was a teammate of Rashada’s at IMG apparently, to take care of his NIL negotiations. Sometime last week, the two were told to stop and then Caspino went boasting to On3 on Sunday about the deal he got for Rashada.
Now, if I was Rashada’s parents, I wouldn’t want a team of agents who are 19 and 22-years-old to handle a potentially seven-figure contract for my son. The article seems to want to make them into sympathetic figures, but c’mon.
Caspino apparently is still insisting that the Gator Collective — not the Gator Guard, the club of high-dollar boosters started by Hugh Hathcock, but the Collective — offered Rashada “a lot of money”, which is considerably more vague than the specific $11 million figure he claimed on the record at some point on Sunday. He also said Sunday that Rashada had taken an NIL deal; on Monday, he said that nothing had been signed.
Both the Gator Collective and an unnamed Florida football staffer sought to undercut Caspino’s claims. They both said that UF offered nothing to Rashada, despite the California-based lawyer and aspiring NIL superagent trying “multiple pathways” to contact the Collective. Nakos notes that other collectives have told him the same, though what exactly that means is left as an exercise to the reader. The staffer and the college-age agents had other unkind things to say about Caspino, and he denied all of them for what it’s worth.
It goes on from there. It notes that Rashada picked Miami because he wants to play there, so that’s probably not going to change. It then discusses the apparent rivalry between Caspino and Darren Heitner, the UF grad and lawyer who helped write Florida’s state NIL law.
The only thing I know for sure is that I feel bad for Rashada. Sunday should’ve been a day of celebration for him. Instead, a jerk of a lawyer decided to do some wildly implausible self-promotion and thereby turn Rashada into the first big NIL cautionary tale.
Caspino, after all, is the lawyer who leaked the famed $8 million-over-three-years contract to The Athletic months ago. Between that and claiming that his newest client was choosing between a $9.5 million offer and a $11 million offer, he’s clearly trying to send a public message that he’s the guy to go to in order to get a massive NIL deal.
Longtime UF media personality Bob Redman said twice on Twitter Sunday night that Miami offered $5 million for Rashada. I have no idea if even that’s real or not, but it is closer to the reality we know we live in. Nick Saban said before last season that Bryce Young had a million or so in NIL deals lined up despite the signal caller having all of 22 collegiate pass attempts to his name.
Should a recruit with no prior fame get more NIL money than the starting quarterback at Alabama? Probably not, but the market will reward or punish it if it actually becomes so.
The thing is, I really and truly don’t believe the Gator Collective (or Gator Guard, if it’s even up and running yet) is offering money to recruits who haven’t signed letters of intent. It likely would be a violation of both NCAA rules and Florida state law if they did. The former may or may not be anything worth worrying about anymore, but enforcement of the latter might actually happen.
Plus, UF hasn’t been a place to wantonly skirt rule boundaries since the probation in the ’80s. I made some people mad by saying on Twitter on Sunday evening that the school is “sanctimonious” about its carefully cultivated image as being a place that follows the rules, but the school brass will use just about any opportunity to tell everyone who’s listening that they do things the right way in Gainesville. It’s been that way for a long time.
The worry is that by playing well within the boundaries, Florida might be like a baseball player who refuses to use steroids in 1998. If cheating goes unpunished, then cheaters will prosper. Reading between the lines of several Scott Stricklin interviews from the past few months, I think he and the administration are concerned that a reckoning will eventually come. To continue the analogy, they don’t want to be named in some future Mitchell Report for NIL.
Will it work out? I wish I knew.
Florida does have the best ranked recruiting class in the state right now, and it has added its three most highly rated prospects in about the past week. That said, its best rating belongs to Isaiah Nixon, the No. 195 overall player in the 247 Composite. FSU and Miami each have two players more highly rated than him, and Rashada is a top 50 guy at No. 45 overall.
In other words, recruiting is a Rorschach test right now: you’ll see what you want to see. If you want to see momentum, it’s there. If you want to be down because of a lack of high-end talent, it’s there too.
But this NIL thing isn’t going away, and it’s going to be the angry elephant in the room that will just smash some walls when it feels like it. Having people like Caspino running around making noise before backpedaling isn’t going to help either. Just hang on for the ride and cheer for the orange and blue come September.