I had intended to write a season preview article about the nexus of recruiting, the NIL issue, and the Texas Longhorns basketball staff, but given the last few weeks of NIL-related events and Mark Emmert’s jaw-dropping statement that the NCAA should deregulate & hand the reigns over to the conferences, this necessity of this piece feels more immediate. Also, hooray, one less piece to write this in September!

(I’m going to break this up into chunks and circle back to how Chris Beard & his staff are relevant at the end, there are multiple threads that will eventually converge; stick with me while I attempt to turn the pile of spaghetti in my brain into something more linear.)

I’ve spoken several times over the years about my belief that the pro leagues were coming to drink the NCAA’s milkshake, particularly in basketball. We saw increasing instances of this, from players skipping college to go to the Australian NBL, to the more recent G League Ignite team hoovering up players. There wasn’t much stopping the NBA from scooping up the top 5-10 players in each class as they could offer the players up to $500k and nearly limitless hands-on instruction from NBA coaching staffs as well as honing their craft against current & former NBA players. They didn’t have to go through any random sketchy handler to drop a bag, there was a paycheck and all the things a normal employee gets that were effectively unavailable in the college path; it was a good sales pitch from the pros and there are a couple of lottery picks this year who reaped the benefit. There still will be a few of these each year - it is an open secret Emoni Bates is likely headed down this path when he becomes eligible - and there are some secondary leagues trying to emulate this route like the Overtime Elite league. The Supreme Court pantsing the NCAA in NCAA vs. Alston and pushing the NIL to the forefront in NCAA vs. O’Bannon has changed the math yet again; ironically, the NCAA being humiliated by Justice I Like Beer & his 8 colleagues - Chief Justice White Wine, associate justices Silent Treatment, Gonna Die the Minute a Republican is POTUS, Bourbon Sommelier, Zinfandel Twins, If Skim Milk Was a Person, and Superspreader Nexus - has strengthened the bargaining power of their member institutions relative to the pros. There’s now a path to pay players above the table! So let’s talk about it.

Raise your hand if you know somebody who has paid a player to say something on Cameo.

raises hand

It took players about a nanosecond to setup online shops where they could endorse products, send birthday shout-outs to strangers, print t-shirts, tattoo a vape shop Venmo on their neck, or whatever else they could think of, and good for them. Across every sport, there are players cashing in on their fame in myriad ways, it’s a cash grab with immediate and profound impacts, and it has in significant ways leveled the field for college programs to compete against early entry into the professional world. A player than can clear a $2000-5000/month in endorsements is marginally less desperate to get to the next level to start getting paid, and for a famous freshman whose game/abilities may not be tailor-made for the next level - I’m thinking here of a player who might be a mid/late second-round pick in the NBA - it’s possible a program with the proper levers to pull with local businesses & boosters could drop an extra-nice endorsement deal in their laps to help tip the scales to keep a talent around 1 year longer than they otherwise might have. (This is technically not allowed in the current NCAA landscape, but we’ll get to that shortly.) The lottery picks are going to leave because they should leave to make seven figures, but the fringe NBA prospects are suddenly somewhat more persuadable to get on campus in the first place and possibly stay around a little longer. This is a net-win for high-major college programs, plus they got to watch the NCAA take it in the shorts in front of the world. Just an all-around great situation for everybody not working at NCAA HQ.

I have been around long enough that I’ve seen the NCAA playbook run through what feels like a million times, and it’s always the same. They harp on the nobility of amateurism, the players being unpaid as a noble value worth upholding, and any other tangential argument that keeps the status quo intact. They have been judge & jury as long as they possibly could, maintaining that they alone were the entity able to keep the perversions of money away from the virginal athletes who were god love ‘em just too young and dumb to handle being paid for their talents. And anyway, they’re here to promote young men & women getting degrees, that’s the real reason this multi-billion dollar enterprise exists. They get that for free, and all they have to do is balance being a full-time student with being a full-time athlete! It’s the best deal for everybody, right? Mark Emmert and the NCAA are supreme authorities in this realm, they will handle keeping everybody in line because that’s the NCAA’s strength.

We’ve all heard this and every cover band knock-off version of it coming from the power brokers in college sports, all of them straining their hardest to keep that fig leaf of amateurism covering the naughty bits of college sports. Most of us can recite this in our sleep because the tune hasn’t really changed much in the last half-century or so. So I don’t know if I can overstate how hard my jaw hit the floor when the guy in charge of the NCAA sat in front of reporters and their recording equipment and said something to the effect of “hey maybe it’s time somebody else handles all this stuff”. The NCAA is a handful of months removed from telling the highest court in the land that they alone can police college sports, and like a newly-divorced guy showing up to the gym with a convertible and a spray tan, they’re pretending they are somebody else now without offering so much as a smidge of explanation for what is less an about-face than Other Variant Loki pretending they’re the only Loki who ever existed. (Spoilers? I’m only a couple of episodes in, so if that ends up happening then…my bad.) The NCAA has spent literal decades dragging its heels on allowing athletes to make any money over the table and slamming allegations on (most) programs who are offering money under the table, and now they’re like ‘IDK this seems like your job now we’re just going to run March Madness’ before exiting the group chat entirely.

It is a sincerely stunning turn of events that I never thought I’d see happen; I expected the NCAA to keep their claws sunk into the notion of amateurism until their dying breath, and while the actual restructuring may end up differently the fact remains that the guy in charge of the whole goddamn thing is openly floating trial balloons for the conferences largely governing themselves. It’s possible the allegations in front of the IARP right now - Louisville, Kansas, etc. - may be the final punishments the NCAA ever doles out, though it seems more likely those die on the vine if the NCAA is really trying to exit the enforcement game. Time will tell, but man, this is going to get weird as hell.

If the NCAA is in fact ceding authority to maintain compliance to individual conferences, we’re fully in Westworld territory here, because if you think the SEC is interested in punishing Kentucky or the Big 12 is interested in knee-capping Kansas, boy do I have some news for you. It is against their literal vested interest to keep the member schools from pushing this arms race into the next dimension; we’re more likely to see a US Senator turn down a free trip to Belize from Northrop Grumman than to see Bob Bowlsby tell Texas to tone it down on coordinating Lexus sponsorships for <insert lottery talent name here>. Speaking of..

I’m going to make a necessary disclaimer here that I am giving my opinion of things rather than asserting them as fact, because I am operating off of stories I’ve heard over the years but did not witness first-hand. You’re free to not believe any or all of this.

With that out of the way, there has been a recurring refrain from recruiting & coaching circles throughout the last few years that Chris Beard’s programs were more than willing to bend the rules to land recruits & transfers. While I have not personally witnessed any of this happening - you’re going to be stunned to hear I’m not hanging out with the Tech or Texas staff in my off-time, considering how super-popular I am with everybody at both schools lately - the stories are at a high level similar enough and repeated enough over the years that it sure feels like there’s a lot of there there. This isn’t a unique phenomenon in high-major coaching, most any coaching staff who is landing top talent has a network off in the background taking care of things in some form or another, generally far enough removed from the staff that it maintains plausible deniability. That said, even by the metrics of high-major schools the number of stories about Beard and his programs is pretty significant; I’ve heard more about his programs’ alleged shenanigans than anybody this side of Kansas or Kentucky. The assistant coaching staff he’s assembled since coming to Texas features a guy the NCAA has on tape in their Kansas allegations, another guy named by the NCAA in SMU allegations, and a coach who was magically able to get Canadian prospects to the state of Texas - a pipeline that dried up after he was gone and reopened this week when Marcus Carr agreed to come to Texas - so even if Beard is perfectly clean, he sure seems to like to employ coaches who don’t exactly project that image. The fact that Texas managed to rebuild into a top-5 roster on the fly - beating teams like Kansas & Kentucky for their services - when these guys showed up is…well…convenient.

But does being clean even matter?

If we’re looking at a landscape with limited or no NCAA rule enforcement, who exactly should Texas be afraid of here? What is stopping Texas from going full Kentucky, some salty tweets from other fanbases? If the arms race is really on across college sports at the level I suspect it is, playing by the old rules actually puts a program like Texas at a competitive disadvantage if they’re trying to win titles. Chris Beard comes in with very high expectations, in a landscape where players are more able to monetize their abilities than ever, and an oversight arm that looks like they just started burning PTO before they retire for good. The incentives to go get players in whatever manner it takes are massive and the downsides to skirting whatever rules are left have never been smaller. It’s possible that Beard is the perfect coach to capitalize on this specific situation, and he’s got CDC funding a staff seemingly built for this new reality. If Emmert’s stance is borne out in the upcoming restructuring of the NCAA, Texas could be as well-placed as any school to benefit. I don’t particularly care if players are getting paid; I’d rather it happen in the daylight as part of a contract so they can do things like (when did I turn into my parents) build their Social Security earnings statements and put part of it in a 401k, but these young men & women deserve to make money off their unique talents. If you’re not a college sports romantic who believes in the sanctity of unpaid labor (now that I think of it, that’s probably not very romantic) and your primary/sole focus is stacking wins, this seems likely to work out well for you. It’s very possible Texas will reap major rewards from betting on the future being less & less about enforcement and more & more about revenue. In the meantime, maybe the Texas compliance staff could learn how to Photoshop edits for players?

BWG’s writing tunes provided by Bailey.