Hi everyone, I hope you had a great Fourth of July weekend. Just as a programming note, my wife and I are expecting our second child at the end of next week. I’ll be taking some time off from writing around then, but I plan to be back for the fall.
As I look over Gator fans on Twitter and multiple message board communities — I keep my eyes out for story ideas beyond just sites I write for, even as I fully endorse Gator Country — the controversy around NIL keeps raging. I guess Miami landing a somewhat surprising commitment from a 5-star will do that these days.
One thing I’ve started to see is less griping about NIL itself, though plenty of it exists, and more discussions about why people do or don’t contribute to Florida’s NIL efforts. It’s illuminating for me to see what people say, and I think there are some major themes to it.
Misunderstanding what UF can do
By rule, schools can’t be involved with NIL dealmaking. They can talk generically about how wonderful their fans are in supporting NIL, but they have to stay out of it.
Allowed: “Come here and our collective will take care of you.”
Not Allowed: “Come here and our collective will give you $20,000 with potential for escalations.”
UF has brought the Gator Collective into the fold as much as possible by making it an official sponsor. Go to the list of sponsors and look in the Service category. It’s there.
Scott Stricklin and various coaches have endorsed the Collective and told fans to go there to support the NIL effort on many occasions. That’s about the limit that the athletic program can do. The people in charge have told you, the fan, to go give to the Collective.
Because in the end, the program can’t be a part of negotiations in any way. Some folks seem reluctant to join the Collective because it’s separate from the university. NCAA rules, and I believe Florida’s state NIL law, require it to be so. It’s the same everywhere. No collectives are part of the program they support.
Uneasiness with the Gator Collective
If there are two things consistent with the history of the state of Florida, it’s these: hurricanes, and financial crimes. Being suspicious of institutions asking for money within the Sunshine State is always a good idea.
The Gator Collective is an LLC run by former Gator baseball player Eddie Rojas, his wife, and a business associate of theirs. Both pieces of that make some people queasy.
It’s for-profit. How do we know they aren’t running it for personal benefit without financial disclosures? And a small, close-knit group is running it. How is that good governance? If there is a problem with those running it, is there any recourse at all?
These are fair questions. I don’t have great answers for them. What I can say is that if you look at collectives around the country, most are for-profit LLCs. Few are attempting 501(c)3 status, and even fewer of them have actually been granted such status.
Rojas, for his part, has said in interviews that none of the founders has drawn a salary from the Collective, and they only pay an administrative assistant and for legal stuff. You’ll have to take his word for it. There are a lot of former players involved with the Collective, so you’ll have to decide how much their endorsements matter to you.
A lack of apparent results
The Gator Collective, by all reputable accounts, is following both the letter and spirit of the rules. It’s signing up current players but not talking with recruits. So, you can drop the dream of blockbuster NIL deals for recruits right there.
Also, the current players will talk in vague terms — “they’re taking good care of me”, and similar — but they won’t speak publicly about specifics. So, fans have no way to know the scale of Florida’s NIL abilities.
It’s like this everywhere, by the way. No actual players are disclosing their earnings. Nick Saban talked about Bryce Young, John Ruiz has disclosed deals, and Mike Caspino brags about contracts and negotiations. But the players themselves? Not a peep.
As long as everyone connected with Florida is respecting the players’ wishes, no one will know exactly what they get. And with the Gator Collective not having to disclose any of its financials, it starts to feel fishy. How much money is there? How much is going to who? Why are they paying that guy? We have to just trust them? And so on.
Frustration with underperformance
As with every major program, Florida has asked fans for increasing financial support over the years: rising ticket prices, increased required “donations” to buy season tickets, incessant fundraising messages, etc.
At the same time, Gator football has seldom met expectations. Since 2010, I can only think of three seasons in which UF solidly exceeded expectations: 2012, 2015, and 2018. The 2016 team wasn’t far off the mark, and 2019 was pretty close too. That’s five times in 12 years, so not even half the time.
The football hires haven’t helped among the devoted fans. Many were so burned by Ron Zook that they wrote off first-time head coaches, which worked against Will Muschamp. Him being a defensive guy also didn’t help at an offense-oriented program. Jim McElwain wasn’t a splash hire, didn’t excite anyone with his quotidian offensive scheme, and wasn’t known as a recruiter. Dan Mullen was a polarizing figure (again, among the most hardcore fans, not broadly) because some didn’t like his personality from his time at UF and his work at Mississippi State was completely different than what you have to do to win at an elite place like Florida.
Now UF has a third former Saban assistant. He wasn’t a splash hire. Billy Napier is very different than Muschamp and Mullen, but is he really that different from McElwain? His recruiting reputation is much better, but his offensive reputation is, somehow, less.
And on top of all that, UF has seemed to be behind the curve in a lot of ways. It gave up on the spread for years after Urban Meyer used it to ascend to the top of the sport. Then right when Mullen appeared to have a fully up-to-date version of it in 2020, he turned the clock back 15 years in 2021 with predictably uninspiring results.
Plus the school was behind in facilities since the ’90s. Yet right as it’s catching up with the new one opening this year, facilities matter a lot less in the new NIL era.
It’s no accident that the places getting the most NIL money right now are places with optimism. Texas A&M thinks Jimbo is about to get the Aggies to Alabama/Georgia level. Tennessee overperformed in Year 1 of Josh Heupel. Miami thinks it finally hired its savior in Mario Cristobal. USC pulled off the Lincoln Riley coup.
And Florida? It hired a dude who, on the surface, is not that different than some of its recent failed hires and who, corners coach aside, didn’t hire many big-name assistants. No wonder tons of fans aren’t lining up to put even more money into football.
Pay-for-play
Even as NCAA rules say NIL can’t be used as pay-for-play, it’s transparently obvious that some places are using it for pay-for-play. After a century of amateurism being the rule in college sports, some fans just don’t want to participate in pay-for-play.
For others, they’d rather just see the player get money from the university with everything transparent. Doing it the present way with opaque collectives just feels icky to them, like it’s a legalized form of the slimy old bagman system.
Early days
To keep beating a dead horse, no one knows anything solid about the NIL world for how much bad information is out there. And little that’s going on now could prove to be sustainable in the long run.
If Napier and the Gator Collective are going to have to prove themselves to get the NIL cash spigot turned all the way on, there may be some time for them to do so without falling terminally behind. How much time, I don’t know.
The bottom line for highly engaged fans is this: NIL matters a lot, and the Gator Collective is the only option unless you can make (I assume) six or seven-figure gifts to the Gator Guard.
Lots of folks out there in the discourse about NIL at Florida agree that it feels dodgy or wrong for the reasons listed above and more, but they still give to the Collective anyway because it’s the only option for most fans. And it is. Maybe that’ll change, but that’s it as of right now.