Program Building in the Modern Era

Good luck predicting the next 10 years

Ever since I wrote the piece about Rodney Terry - RIP Terry Tenure¹ - I’ve been ruminating on why exactly it is I’m having trouble coming up with coaching candidates who get me excited about a change. There are good coaches out there who utilize myriad offensive & defensive systems, who have had success at their current and/or previous stops, who should be higher on my radar than they are. There’s also Sean Miller. (Only kidding! He’s fine.) The more I think about it, the more I think the reason for my general hesitancy in making a change has much less to do with the coaching options and much more to do with the various ways in which the tectonic plates of college sports are shifting right now; those shifts may be making who the coach is at the head of the program marginally less important. I’ll explain.

NIL

There may be no bigger cause for concern/celebration/consternation in college sports than Name, Image, and Likeness. Where a player showing up in a gold Trans-Am once was a harbinger of the death penalty, it is now openly bragged about and celebrated by fans. Texas football players have put more miles on Austin-area Lamborghinis in the last year than a CoTA driving experience has in a decade. Miami players are getting their hands on so many nice cars that they can barely keep possession of them. The money has mostly moved out from under the table, too, and with the upcoming House settlement this is only going to get further codified as legitimate.

(For those unfamiliar with the particulars of House v. NCAA and the impending settlement, I highly recommend reading Matt Brown’s Extra Points publication for any and all updates to how this is going down. He is all over this topic in a way I am not.)

The gist of the settlement is that NCAA schools who opt into the process - all power conference schools have to opt-in as part of the settlement, but it is optional for schools in other conferences - will be allowed to directly pay their athletes up to ~$20 million per year, with the number rising each year based on a rolling calculation. How each school divvies up that $20m is up to them as long as they still comply with Title IX restrictions. (This is why Texas will be offering 60+ scholarships to women’s rowing, among other things.) This is where it gets interesting, especially as it relates to basketball. To my knowledge, Texas has not yet announced how they’re splitting out the $20m. Georgia and Texas Tech have, with them setting aside $2.7m & $3.6m for men’s basketball, respectively. This both shows the divergence in spending between two relative contemporaries of Texas and serves as a rough guide for where Texas’ budget is likely to end up.

The settlement theoretically wrests some control back from the NIL collectives in three ways:

1. It cuts them out of the middle by allowing direct payments from the school to the players.

2. It restrains the market value for players somewhat, as every school who is opted into the program is working with the same ~$20m maximum for all of their sports.

3. It designates that third-party NIL deals must actually pay ‘fair market value’ for services rendered.

But how might one know what constitutes fair market value, you might ask. Great question! A group of 10 athletic directors are going to work with Deloitte to build a database of deals that allows them to figure out, for example, what a dealership might reasonably pay an athlete for a year’s worth of advertising. They will then use that to monitor/audit deals being made with players and fine or restrain the allowed spending pool of a school who runs afoul of these averages.

But that sounds very gameable, you might say. Great point! It definitely is! If the first year or two is third parties setting the market for deals, then if these companies are run by boosters - and they mostly are, if history is any indication - then it behooves them to make the deals they want early on to shape the market as they see fit & see what Deloitte is willing to reject. If the top 10 football schools have boosters who want to make sure they’re getting the best players, they can money-whip them on deals at the start to stress test the system and potentially make it tougher on smaller schools to keep up. Or if the bigger schools want to get creative, they keep the money more reasonable and just use the breadth of their donor base to sign these players up for a ton of similarly-priced deals. Yes, our starting point guard is signed up to advertise for twelve different car dealerships at the exact same rate for each one, that’s only like two more than Shaq is doing now, As Yet Unnamed Group of Arbiters. Motion to dismiss, your Honor!

Is this fair? Absolutely not, which leads me to the other issue: enforcement. The ADs are creating yet another enforcement mechanism - RIP IARP - to deal with the schools who are defined as too brazen for the NCAA, and I think we all remember how well that went in containing corruption & fraud. (Remember when Bill Self was in their crosshairs? Boy he sure paid a price for that, huh. Where is that guy these days, anyway?) The foxes are creating a committee of foxes to make sure other foxes don’t get into the henhouse. I’m sure it’ll be fine, I hear Condoleezza Rice is running things.

There’s another angle to this as well: imagine you’re a Big East school. You’re opted into this and have the same $20m pie, but - and I’m showing restraint by not typing in all caps - you don’t have to fund football.

You don’t have to fund football.

(That was technically not all caps.)

SEC schools are throwing 70%+ of their budget at football that most of the Big East schools can dip into for other sports to their hearts’ content. If you thought St. John’s was on the upswing before, imagine Rick Pitino with an extra 30% in direct payments available to the top players relative to his peers. It’s possible to see a path ahead where the Big East again becomes the dominant force in basketball. Hell, Big East baseball might become a huge player this way.

To put a number on this point, let’s split the difference between Georgia and Texas Tech and say Texas puts $3m or roughly 15% of their post-scholarship revenue towards men’s basketball. That means they’re probably putting somewhere in the range of $15m towards the football team; a Big East school like St. John’s (or Creighton, Marquette, etc.) has up to $15m of room that Texas (or Alabama, Arkansas, etc.) does not. If the St. John’s AD decides they want to play this game, they can easily double or triple the NIL numbers of any top-level SEC program for their basketball team with room to spare for women’s basketball, baseball, and so on. Imagine when Rick Pitino comes to the dinner table of a recruit Texas or Alabama offered $1m and says “Hi, I’m hanging banners and also hanging this $2m offer from your living room ceiling fan, let me know where you want to play ball”. Where would you go if you were that player?

I might be more fascinated by this part than anything else, it’s potentially a huge competitive advantage. Sean Miller might have made a bad career move by not properly weighing this angle!

(Also, how does a historically basketball-crazy school like North Carolina manage this? Do you want to be the guy to tell Bill Belichick - and his girlfriend, apparently - that he’s getting $2m less than his ACC counterparts because Hubert Davis needs a lottery big? Does Kentucky let Mark Stoops slide to the back of the pack to get Mark Pope better recruits? I have so many questions.)

If you tell me you know how a traditional college coach navigates building a winning program with all of this still in flux, I’m all ears. So much about what happens off the court is in such a state of upheaval that nobody really knows how this is going to play out yet. And I haven’t even mentioned the possibility of players unionizing and demanding a collective bargaining process, which is probably coming in the next few years when the labor climate is a bit more friendly to unionization. Most of the current crop of coaches have spent their adult lives learning the intricacies of pick & roll defense, not running payroll spreadsheets. I would love to see somebody throw the concept of amortizing a stretch-four at a coach in the Sweet Sixteen and watch their head explode.

SOMEBODY GET ME NORLANDER’S PHONE NUMBER

(Yes, fine, that was all caps.)

So if a coach isn’t the right person to sort all of this payroll management out, who is?

Roster Management

Roster construction today bears little functional resemblance to even five years ago; the elimination of the one-year waiting period and the advent of NIL have empowered players to hunt for the greenest pastures they can find. This is an unalloyed good for the players and long overdue, they can finally get paid for their valuable talent. That said, it means building a roster at the high-major level is now a year-to-year proposition at most schools; many of the biggest schools are utilizing the transfer portal as much as (if not more than) the high school talent pool, and these transfers come with price tags attached. Schools have various roster budgets and currently are at the mercy of donors opening their wallets; this means both a volatility in yearly allowance and a need for someone to manage this budget appropriately.

In pro sports, this is not what most coaches do on a day-to-day basis, they have General Managers & talent pipeline staff to handle this sort of thing, which is why you’re seeing more and more schools hire a GM of some sort. The actual duties of that role are evolving by the week and vary by school, but it’s probably safe to say the final role will be similar to what you currently see in the NBA or NFL. It’s not a stretch to imagine a situation where a coach lays out what kind of players he’s looking for and the GM and assistants go hunting for players who fit; it’s also not a stretch to imagine a situation where the GM starts to think they know what kind of players the coach needs and what the budget can provide, making a college basketball coach more akin to a NBA coach than what we traditionally think of. The days of college coaches dictating the roster design may be coming to a close at most places in the coming years; if the GMs start making decisions on the roster after consulting with the coach rather than the other way around, does the coach matter as much as they once did?

Circling Back

Let’s just say for the sake of argument that this mini-NCAA Foxes Guarding Against Other Foxes group bucks all of recent history and actually keeps programs somewhat in line.² You simultaneously have a relative flattening of the (direct) payment horizon between power conference players, and a potentially huge competitive payment disadvantage to one conference, and the constantly morphing math of which programs are deciding what sports to prioritize, and a limited ability to offset it with NIL collectives/third-party incentives, and you can’t just mothball a bunch of sports because you still have to meet Title IX obligations. One of Texas’ biggest strengths has been marginalized because it can’t (technically) go full robber baron with the collectives’ money.

So what do you do if you’re the AD of a school like Texas? Let’s state the constraints at play in this scenario:

1. Football will always eat first

2. The main money is limited by the House settlement and the FGAOF³ group/Deloitte’s bean counters

3. Title IX means your men’s & women’s programs need to equal out in aggregate

I see two main paths from here, and the presiding question is if you want to be a white-hat or a black-hat. Let’s take the white-hat first.

Fuck the Director’s Cup

(I suppose I could’ve made a more polite Moneyball reference here; white-hats are ethical, nobody said they were friendly.)

Texas fans want to win everything all the time - whether this is realistic is a conversation for another time - but when you press them for what matters, the majority want football titles first, second, and sometimes third. After that they usually want College World Series visits, swimming titles, & Final Fours, in some order. My suggestion is that not every sport can eat if Texas wants to abide by this new landscape, and that means you have to choose whether you want to be elite at a few things or decent at everything, with all the ebbs and flows that entails. Fund the scholarships to the (no offense) more ‘minor’ teams, but they can’t get much NIL. This will squeeze the more minor sports, which is unfortunate and means the end of Texas challenging Stanford for the Director’s Cup, but the extra cash going to the three or four (or one) highest-priority sports will help their chances. Honestly, this isn’t all that nice, it only qualifies as white-hat because you’re trying to comply with the rules of the game as currently constituted. But if you don’t care about complying…

Bring Back the Bags

It is not lost on me the irony that for a handful of years the NCAA actually managed to sideline the bagmen, only for them to regain relevance because the NCAA’s own aversion to admitting players were employees led to a court settlement that brought the bags back into the fold. If you want Texas to go full Evil Empire, the simplest answer is to introduce an off-the-books payment system. I imagine every high-major program is contemplating this, especially in light of the Big East’s enormous vat of football cash just sitting there to use under the new system.

Hey, maybe Texas hired the right coach after all.

In Conclusion

That was the first time I’ve mentioned a basketball coach’s influence in all of this in several paragraphs, which I think speaks to how the bigger picture influences the importance of any head coach in a sport that’s of secondary (or tertiary) importance at a given school. It’s plausible that if an athletic director nails the hires of the general manager and his or her analytics/budgeting staff, along with people in charge of keeping the NIL collectives (and/or the bagmen, if you’re going that route) in line, you don’t actually need a rockstar coach. If the backoffice infrastructure is optimized, simply hiring a competent coach might be enough to keep you competitive.

1. trademark application on hold!

2. I know, I know; humor me.

3. Not my best acronym, if I’m honest