What’s your favorite thing about football? About college football?
Perhaps it’s the pageantry, all the beautiful colors and logos spread on a sea of green, complete with cheerleaders and marching bands, reminiscent of tribal warfare from a time gone by. The beautiful cardinal and white of the Arkansas Razorbacks juxtaposed against the orange and white of the Tennessee Volunteers. Ah, yes. Volunteers. Warfare. Hearkens to a particular time, doesn’t it?
Or maybe you adore how college football is the “kids” playing for “the love of the game,” free from that silly adult trap of being guaranteed pay for work.
On the other hand, maybe it’s the brutal violence. A man’s game, that football, full of risk, what with the life-threatening head injuries, some of which show themselves dozens of years later and can lead to substance abuse and strained relationships in the meantime.
Frankly, my favorite part is the business side. There’s nothing that really gets my red-blooded American masculinity on fire like the talk of revenue sharing, media markets and formulas. That’s what it’s all about, baby, right there!
Arkansas Wants What Tennessee Has
OK, so sarcasm is the lowest form of comedy. But I’m half-serious. With the Tennessee football program having what Arkansas wants and the two meeting this week just days after Razorbacks athletic director Hunter Yurachek put the real cards on the table, this topic is easy.
College sports, for the most part, are sports. They are not games. Games imply events in which the primary purpose is enjoyment alongside the competition. Sports? Nah. Sports had better make money. And the best way to make money is to be good at sports. The flip side, of course, is that for the better part of the last 25 years, you can’t be good at sports if you don’t make money.
The SEC isn’t the SEC because it’s loaded with great teams. The SEC is the SEC because it has the best TV deal in the history of collegiate athletics. With everyone getting a bite of the world’s biggest pie, even the Arkansases of the league can avoid being roadkill as compared to most of the rest of the FBS. Texas and Oklahoma didn’t join the league because of its competitive nature. They joined the league because of, well, this:
Arkansas is getting a bit of that money. But with a smaller fan base than most of their conference brethren, keeping up with the Joneses in the NIL era has proven difficult. LSU, Alabama, Georgia. These teams are some of the most monied in the entire sport. Tennessee, that No. 4-ranked team the Hogs host on Saturday, apparently had enough in the NIL coffers to pay $2 million a season to its 5-star quarterback. Arkansas picked up a part-time starter from Boise State.
Rank-and-file locals don’t want to chip in for a mediocre product – at least a mediocre product during football season – and athletic director Hunter Yurachek has been forced to walk a tight-wire when it comes to asking for donations while also extolling the program’s current state. The former task is easier.
Because of fans’ ambivalence and big-money corporations’ apathy, Arkansas is actually severely hurt by the way NIL agreements are currently set up. That’s part of why Yurachek, as much as anyone, is pushing for an end to the collective-style hierarchy/economy that exists in the NCAA right now. Razorbacks faithful are not only small in number (comparatively), but lacking funds. Or, at least, they’re lacking in the desire to give over funds, thereby hurting Arkansas Edge, the school’s athletic collective.
How Many Ways Can You Split a Pie?
The splitting of FBS – which isn’t guaranteed, but has been bandied about for years and appears to be inching ever closer – can’t arrive fast enough for Yurachek and Arkansas, apparently. Frankly, I appreciated his honesty at the Hawgs Illustrated luncheon last week: Arkansas football is an inferior program to those aforementioned LSUs, Alabamas and Georgias and, if things stand the way they are, will continue to be.
“If (the collectives) never (go) away, it’s going to be the same teams that you see right now ranked in the Top 10 that will be consistently ranked in the Top 10. It’s not going to change,” Yurachek told a group of people from whom he would love to solicit money.
To be clear, Yurachek still believes his team can win Saturday. It’s him saying that more often than not, his team won’t win the games like the ones on Saturday. Arkansas just doesn’t have the cash on hand to sustain winning at that level. (This isn’t a particularly unique circumstance, either. The same applies to TCU, which actually made it to the national title game two years ago, but whose success is more flash in the pan.)
Things are either so desperate right now for the Hogs or Justin Cole Moore just loves to call ‘em so much that the famous-in-the-country-music-world musician is donating all the proceeds from his concert in Rogers on Thursday night to Arkansas’ NIL collective Arkansas Edge. Hey, like his music or politics or not, the dude is a big fan of his favorite collegiate team. Still, Yurachek and Co. don’t want to have to rely on such gimmicks for long-term stability.
Cutting out collectives, Yurachek said, will hasten competitive balance. Theoretically, anyway. Through one particular, admittedly myopic lens, I see it similar to Major League Baseball. MLB does not have a salary cap, so the same big-market teams tend to outspend the others year after year. They find themselves more often than those low-spenders to be in a position for a World Series title.
But big spending is no guarantor of success, either. Shoot, the Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals – two of the most notoriously cheap franchises in the sport right now – swept through the Houston Astros and Baltimore Orioles, two teams that are far more valuable.
Big Ten-SEC Merger Would Help Hogs…With Money and Little Else
Yurachek has trickier waters to navigate when the split comes, though, than he seems to be realizing. The latest is that the SEC and Big Ten could join forces, leaving everyone else looking through the window like street urchins toward a Christmas turkey in a Dickensian television adaption. Or maybe – more likely, actually – winning doesn’t really matter as much as money-making does. If winning were more important, Arkansas would have left the SEC years ago. If the Razorbacks make the upper-most tier in an FBS split, they’re no better than mid-tier and, really, as I’ve argued previously, are more like bottom third. But the money will flow, regardless, apparently, as Yurachek told those people eager to listen.
If such a merger occurs, Arkansas is either getting someone like Purdue and Indiana on the regular and probably winning or getting Penn State and Michigan on the regular and probably losing. Pageantry, indeed.
“July 1, 2025, if the House settlement is approved,” Yurachek said, “we can take roughly, there’s a formula for all 70 power-four schools, but it’s going to be about $22 million that we can share from our Department of Athletics revenue that can go straight to student-athletes. We haven’t been able to share any internal revenue to this day.”
Now, I’m a Politics and Arts guy, not a businessman, so I’m not sure I follow. If every school in this New World Order of college football is getting $22 million (which is either the case or Yurachek is saying Arkansas’ formula would allow it to get $22 million and others may be different; it’s unclear) and supplemental income for players would still be gained through fan and corporate donations, how is the playing field evened if the collectives are banished? It isn’t.
The schools that have businesses willing to donate to the standard NIL pools (as opposed to the collectives) will outperform, generally, the schools that don’t or that, at least, have fewer.
And Money Is What Counts
Honestly, it all just sounds like a bunch of people wanting more money and little else to me. As long as a proportionate amount of money is going to players who actually allow the suits to make the money in the first place, go for it.
Something tells me, though, this being America and all, that won’t happen and instead we gathered masses can continue to watch our more athletic brethren hurt themselves for incommensurate compensation for our pleasure every Saturday in the fall all in the name of tribalism under the guise of healthy state pride.
ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL!?
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More from Yurachek on NIL starting at the 7:50 mark here:
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