One Question Mailbag: NIL, RevShare, & Distribution Of Resources

First off, please note that my brain is currently in "refill the tank" mode. It's why I've written one article (last Thursday) since the season ended. After my near-meltdown in 2021 (as in, my brain was on the verge of melting down in March just like the basketball team playing Loyola, and yes, the two were connected), I've been very careful to not get anywhere close to empty these last five years. I scared myself (a lot) that month and I never want to get close to that line again. 2021 was The Big Lesson.

Which is why I wrote about how I was decompressing and then got caught up on other things (including, you know, life) this last week. With so many weekends filled from September through March (this year, April), my wife and I will take full advantage of these next 4.5 months. She's an absolute saint for dealing with my "if we don't do that in October during the bye week then the next time I have a weekend free is February" for two-thirds of the year. Seeing our kids in St. Louis this past weekend without my laptop anywhere in sight? Absolute necessity.

OK, enough about that. Let's get to today's topic. Here's a very long question from Slack and my very long answer:

Robert:

When it comes to the players, they now get paid in two ways: revenue sharing and NIL. 

Revenue sharing is up to $21 million and it sounds like we’ll share the full amount. Then that amount gets divvied up amongst the teams. 

From the way Josh has spoken about it, it sounds like a large percentage of that (let’s say ~70%) will go towards football, another chunk (~25%) will likely go towards basketball, and the final ~5% split amongst the remaining programs. Give or take. 

Which makes sense. Football generates the most revenue, so it makes sense to share the greatest percentage of revenue with the football team. 

But here’s my question: 

When it comes to donors that make up the second bucket of resources that get passed onto the players through NIL, does it concern you at all that “we’re a basketball school”? 

Here's where I'm coming from: 

Nothing is official yet, but it looks like we’re going to retain many of the key pieces from last year’s rotation that still have eligibility (not cheap), we then landed Vaaks (also not cheap), and we’re still pursuing Blackwell (super not cheap). 

Which to me says the donors are ponying up for basketball. I mean, there’s a possibility that next year’s team costs twice as much as this year’s. 

At the very same time, we lost a heralded football recruit likely due to lacking resources. Of course, Michigan’s Michigan. I don't necassarily expect us to outspend them in football, but my larger point is: 

If we assume donor resources are not unlimited, is it at all worrisome that basketball could get a larger percentage of those resources than football? Is it possible that basketball success (making the F4, possible pre-season top 5 next year) hurts our ability to rally financial support (NIL) for football?

The answer is extremely complicated. I'm going to generalize here, so please save any "well, technically" responses for another day. I don't have time to get into all of everything today. With all of the unknowns right now, generalization is better. And it's going to take me a long time to get to your actual question but... these details are important.