1-on-1 with DP – 93.7 The Ticket KNTK - What Percentage of the Money Pool Should Go to Each Sport?: February 28th, 12:25pm

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

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You're listening to One-on-One with D.P. Sponsored by Mary Ellen's Food for the Soul on 93-7 The Ticket and the Ticketfm.com. Welcome back. Yeah, there are conversations that happen. Bach, it's the business of college athletics and specifically Nebraska athletics. It's a real, like if you ever wanted to do a real deep doc on it, there are ways, that Nebraska can and should be number one in all sports just because of financial stability and opportunity.

But I'll leave that for online sleuths to figure out how that works, but I can tell you the numbers were pretty incredible. Shout out to Nebraska's sophomore number 18. Huskers played their first of two today. They took on South Dakota State. They had to go to extra innings. They had to go. It was 5-5 through 7.

Jordy Ball came in and pitched the seventh and eighth innings. But the Huskers put up three in the eighth, top of the eighth, and then Jordy Ball shuts down South Dakota State in the bottom of the eighth. So the Huskers went at 8-5. They will load up again at 1230, right about now, to start again, and they will take on an elite program in Oklahoma State. All right, that's, you know, you're familiar. They knocked you out of the NCAA tournament a few years ago.

This is a good program, and it's happening. Nebraska baseball, 6 o'clock today in San Houston State down at Frisco, Fisco, Texas. Great complex, great ball. And, of course, the connection between Bolt and Harvel and Sam Houston State. The joke was that Harvel had recruited some of my players from John Cooper when I was in the Woodlands. And when he got here, I was like, oh, hey.

I had a pair of twins who both played at Sam Houston State. And good program. It's a great program. So it's there. I went through, I had to revisit mentally the NIL game, the Transfer Portal, in athletics and what it all means. And it means a variety of people. Remember that most people were talking about it

as they were being fed narrative about talking about it. We'll ruin college sports and that, and it's out of control. Well, why is it out of control? Like, ask the next question. That whatever you dislike about the transfer portal and about NIL, that it has some benefit. There's a reason for it.

A lot of the conversation was based on the fact that we had been told, everyone had been told that there was no money and that these deals weren't being done. These deals have always been done. These negotiations have always taken place in every sport for as long as we know. Go back to when Memorial Stadium was a baby. They were doing negotiations on how you were going to get the best players

to not only get to Lincoln, Nebraska, but to participate. That's always been the case, and no matter what the sport is. When you go back and think that Nebraska basketball goes back to 1897, 1897. I mean, you can go back to early 1900s and there's a 22 and 2 Nebraska basketball team that you're recruiting players from the YMCA, right? But how do you get that player to come to Nebraska

instead of still playing for the YMCA or going to Creighton or going anywhere else? And then you ask the question of how Creighton managed to go through a run where you had Bob Gibson playing basketball and baseball at Creighton. that wasn't done just out of simplicity. There has to be some mutual benefit for the program, the university, and the player student athlete slash parent.

And remember that we use student athlete way too loosely because that is not a term that goes back into perpetuity. That is a phrase that was set up so that when you talked about money and college athletics, how you defined it was student athlete. That wasn't really a thing, circa 1950. 1940, no. There were deals.

And before social media and digital tracking of payments and digital tracking of social commentary, you can literally go through recruiting has become digital, easy access, that every athlete in the country has access to every coach in the country, and vice versa, that every parent in the country who deems themselves a part of this particular vacuum has access to every coach at University of Nebraska.

Every coach at Creighton, every coach at Concordia, every coach at Wesley. So in the conversations, then you just have to say you need control over, or at least some standard for how business is going to be done. And the people who are in charge, that is my question to you. Bob, do we know who is in charge of NCAA athletics? They have a president. Right. So there's a president, right?

And what is that president accountable for? Overseeing of rules and compliance. That the rules that currently exist, not necessarily to change them. He's not good. He's not good at changing them. His job is he's really good at reminding people what the rules are, what the current rules are. When you change those rules, you change all of the communication, all of the operations, all of the financing. And for $20 million, since they're saying $20 million is the number that schools are going to put into their, for NIL and for, you know, their various rosters.

But how would you, what percentage, let's reduce it to a million. For every 20 million, we're going to talk about one million. of the $1 million or the $100, how much of that you have anywhere from 20 to 26 programs, athletic programs? How many of those are revenue programs that have been deemed revenue programs by the people that matter? At least that Nebraska,

and it isn't usually, you don't get volleyball in there, but you get Nebraska basketball, football, obviously football first volleyball and basketball. So if you said because we're Nebraska, we want volleyball to be a part of the equation. But other schools will say, no, I'd rather have field hockey, or I would rather have lacrosse, men's lacrosse, or I would rather have ice hockey. Those things, right? The number that is still the same if you're going to play in our neighborhood. So if you want to be at the richest neighborhood in Nebraska, here are the rule.

you got to charge at least, you got to have at least $100 in a bet. They've said $20 million. To me, that seems like a weird number. Why $20 million? Why not $25? You tell them that Michigan doesn't have $25 million for football? That's what I think.

I think it's trying to make it as equitable as possible, which is what they keep trying to do is trying to make it equal, which is never going to have. Right. How is that going to be equal? Because Nebraska has sold out that building since 1962.

And why should it be equal? Maryland has not. You reap the benefit of being elite in having that feature, but why not have the elites play together? Why not? Now, we know that means that you'd have a bunch of teams from Texas

and everybody in Nebraska would boo that out loud that, well, wait, there's nine teams from Texas or 12 who have the money to play in the 20, million dollar pool. Right? You go to Vegas.

You know, they have the big card series. You get the poker series. Not everybody can play at the big table. Sorry. Can't do it. You don't have the resources? My bad. So how do you determine what that is?

Because that's what college sports is about to figure out. How do you determine whether who Nebraska, one, does Nebraska belong in the elite club, right? Especially with football. and then do you partner with them just for football or do you allow them to say we want to be a part of the the A league in football

A league for all of our athletics just put us in we're going to spend the most money we're going to put the most resources in it we're going to recruit the best player and then you determine how many schools can actually do that 50 75 100 100 yeah right and then you got another pool where okay

Dave Madison Richmond, you know, y'all go over here, right? Nothing wrong with it, but okay, right? You don't get to play there. League soft professional soccer has figured out that you can play yourself up and play yourself down. And Nebraska would have an issue because Nebraska would make sure you had played yourself out in the last 15 years, right?

Yeah. Still have the money, but the results have not been there. Of the $100, how much would you put towards football? Nebraska. From what I've seen is that most, most schools are kind of thinking around 80% for football. And remember, return on investment matters. Yeah. Right. So putting 80% behind of your resources behind it, if it generates 80% or 90% of the revenue, makes perfect sense. And it's, I mean, it's clearly, that sport is clearly steering the incident of late to where we are now, right? Everything that's happened is because of football. Otherwise, all this conference rearrangement,

it's not because of basketball. Basketball conferences were better off. Few years ago. Do you allow volleyball to suffer because it's not football? Or do you allow the 50 volleyball elites to play together? Well, like you said, then it comes down to what matters to you in these other sports, right? There's going to be certain, like, women's tennis. We talked to the women's tennis coach,

and there's going to be certain schools that that's one of, that's their volleyball. Like you said, rowing. There's everybody, if you're a pinnacle at that sport, then that's what's going to get a little bit more. Women's soccer. We know there's some powerhouses. We know beach volleyball.

There are people that that really matters to and whether you could do that. You could tell me that in the profit center of the athletic departments, if you're determining using that based on the profit center or the percentage of revenue generated by that program, there are 13, 14 programs in Nebraska that don't generate that kind of, they're not even breaking even.

But that does not mean. mean they don't have value to the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Getting the best athletes and best students to come to Nebraska because you offer high-level volleyball, high-level women's soccer, high-level women's tennis. It matters. So you have to pay attention. We don't know who's in charge, and we don't know how they're making the decision. But I'll say this, and this is why I got really funny to me, that Nebraska football has

the resources, access, and acumen. It's had enough financial success over the last 20 years that it should be at the top of all programs in football when it comes to success. And I think that's the plan now. I hope that's the plan. But for the amount of money that sits in it, 120 million a year, the revenue, expenses.

I would think it's fair to guesstimate them. Again, don't hold me to hold my feet to the fire on it, but to say that you're plus 20 million every year in football, and that pays for a lot of other things, that the more you put in, the more you get back, that's the way it works, especially if you're working from success. It's going to be pretty interesting to see how it plays out, Bach.

We'll throw it to break one final segment coming up before we handed over to the captain. And yeah, Murph, I'm going to get to that text on Vijay because that is 100% true. We'll talk about it as well here on the ticket.