A new NIL era is coming, with eight-figure salary caps and massive rosters. How will Maryland sports survive?
If college athletics were a person, they'd be a teenager, awkwardly tromping through an unwieldy phase of unpredictable day-to-day changes. But the picture became clearer with the house settlement allowing schools to pay athletes like employees. Given its personality traits of amateur competition and playing for school pride, real and romanticized, college sports' transition to a full-on business with paid labor is one of the most radical structural changes in sports history. The advent of NIL has already brought pay-for-play unofficially, but soon there will be no wink-and-nod required.
Will the new NIL landscape leave the University of Maryland in position to contend? Can the Terps football program survive in an exploding marketplace dominated by blueblood schools in the Big Ten and SEC? Will the men's basketball program have the resources to bring in the next Derik Queen?
There are no definitive answers, like most questions during this transformational moment, because little is definite from one day to the next. We do know, though, that Power Conference schools will be allowed to directly negotiate with and pay athletes beginning in the 2025-2026 seasons with a salary cap of $20.5 million. That payroll will come from existing revenues, so while Maryland is fortunate to be raking in big money from the Big Ten -- about $60 million last year -- there's no big funnel of new money coming in for them to pay players with.
At schools like Ohio State and Michigan, the money will be easy to find. The Buckeyes raked in more than $251 million in revenue last year, the highest amount in college sports. Maryland, at about $107 million, ranked 43rd nationally and 16th among the 18 Big Ten members. So for OSU or Michigan, the only problem with that $20 million cap is that it's not high enough. For Maryland, the issue is finding the money and generating more.
Still, I'm told Maryland is planning to spend the entire amount. How will they do it?
"Lots of dollars moving around, meaning Big Ten [revenue], having vendors pay into the collective and [Kevin] Plank," a source with direction knowledge of the athletic department's planning told IMS.
So that's good news. The bad? That's not the only cash needed. Well-funded programs will continue to associate with collectives that have been making deals with athletes, extending well beyond that $20 million cap, which, by the way, will progressively climb to more than $30 million within 10 years of the new deal's start.
"I think that schools are approaching the future of their collectives in a couple of different ways. Schools that have enough resources and money to pay that much, I think, will keep their collective around to exceed the cap through outside collective dollars," Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports said. "NIL dollars like athletes have been receiving. Schools that don't have the resources to meet that cap will probably not need that collective and will shut it down. And I think in a lot of instances we'll probably see that happen."
That some could be spending $30 or $40 million, maybe more, on athletes beginning next year. Maryland has scraped by largely on those kinds of private donations to the collective. But you can only shake the same trees so many times. And the trees are bigger and more plentiful in Columbus and other locales where everyone supports State U.
"It's still primarily the same donors for years and years [at Maryland]. We have done a better job trying to get corporate sponsorships and the athletic department actually has been helping us with it, but if you look at College Park, there isn't a car dealership, there's a couple bars and some franchise-type restaurants," Harry Geller, who operates Maryland men's basketball's Turtle NIL collective, said on IMS Radio (his interview begins around the 15-minute mark below).
"But there's really, it's not like Columbus, Ohio or Lawrence, Kansas or State College, Pennsylvania, where you have a whole community just based around the school. So, getting corporate donors is always a little more difficult and then you're fighting with other elements within the school, the arenas, you know, they want to get corporate donors to put signs in the arena and help sponsor some of those things that way. So, you're always competing against those types of things for NIL dollars."
If other Big Ten schools continue to raise and spend significant money beyond the $20 million through outside deals, Maryland will have to find a way to keep up or face a competitive disadvantage. Other schools have received help from their state politicians, too; Ohio recently got ahead of the curve by making it legal immediately for universities to directly offer money to and pay athletes. At Missouri, it's no coincidence the football program has been thriving after the state enacted a law allowing high school athletes to receive NIL as long as they're committed to a state university. Maryland could use similar forward-thinking assistance from the state government.
Those are far from the only competitive disadvantages many schools will face. Scholarship limits are expected to rise from 85 to 105 in football and 13 to 15 in men's basketball. So, schools will have to face the challenge of finding the money to fund scholarships for those extra players. If they can't, a bunch of their opponents will have bigger armies than them. There's a reason football produces so many war metaphors; attrition is constant in both and so there's strength in numbers. It's unknown at this stage how athletic director Damon Evans plans to approach the scholarship issue.
It'll be easier to stomach in basketball, with just three extra scholarships to fund, and I'm told Kevin Willard will be more open to taking on a developmental high school prospect or two per year who won't need to help right away thanks to the increased roster size, almost like how NBA teams can take players and let them grow in the G League. Those kinds of players also won't take up as much NIL as big-time high school recruits and transfers. And in college basketball, you only rely on eight or nine players anyway.
