The Josh Innes Show - Matthew Sluka and the NIL Mess

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Matthew Sluka was the QB at UNLV. Until yesterday, most of us had never heard of him or cared what he was doing with this life. I mean, he plays at UNLV. Who cares? Well, this dude left the team because the school didn't pay him his $100,000 he was promised to transfer to the university. We all need to acknowledge that NIL is broken. But, there is nuance involved here that so many people ignore. Much like politics, so many people choose a side and argue til' the death defending that side. Here's a little nuance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spring is here and you can now get almost anything you need delivered with uber eats What do we mean by almost you can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered, but you can get chicken parmesan delivered sunshine No some wine. Yes get almost almost anything delivered with uber eats order now alcohol and select markets. See after details so I was Listening to my buddy matt yesterday And I listened to him pretty often. We're uh, he's among one of my best buddies and I've known him for 100 years and I think he does a good job on the radio. And I was listening to him talk about this Matthew Sluka

who is now the former quarterback at UNLV who decided to leave school and use his red shirt. You can apparently use a red shirt after three games so if you play three games you can still red shirt right so the guy decided to leave due to the fact that he didn't get his if you want to call it nil payment but i don't even know what nil is anymore because nil is supposed to be name image and likeness which means you as a player at a university should be able to do your own deals or the school will help you get deals done like they have people that help you find NIL deals. But your name, your image, your likeness can make you money.

Therefore, you don't have to live off of ramen noodles and water anymore in college. Well, I don't even know what the fuck NIL is anymore because it's not that. It's just pay for play. It's the same dirty, corrupt shit they've always been doing in college football. It's a slimy business. So now it's about collectives and it's about luring people to And Barry Odom and an assistant coach, really the assistant coach is the story, offered $100,000 allegedly for this guy Matthew Sluka to come to UNLV. And now they've won a couple of games, whatever.

Well, the story is, and I guess it really just depends on whose side you believe. It's a he said, she said. It's two sides of the story. But I guess the story that most people are going with now is that this guy, Matthew Sluka, was promised $100,000. And so far has only received $3,000 of that. And he is leaving because he didn't get his money. And people are viewing this in different ways, of course. First off, the most important factor in this is there was no contract signed.

Like, what are you doing? Now, sometimes contracts aren't worth the paper they're written on or the ink used to write the numbers on them, but the guy didn't even have a contract, so of course the school can get out of that if they want to or not pay you. There's no paper trail.

There's nothing. But here's my problem with the way this story has been covered, and particularly the way my buddy Matt covered the story, because I think that he's combining two eras of college football to try to make a point. And he's using certain things, and people that do this, like Matt, are using certain aspects of old college football and new college football. And I think they're doing them wrong. Thus, it's impacting the way they cover the story. So my friend Matt, who I was listening to the other day, loves to use the term kids when referencing college athletes. Well, basically, let me tell you his main argument. His main argument was these coaches have been able to job hop and go everywhere they want forever with no real repercussions.

Now people are getting angry when the kids are finally getting money. And this might be their only chance to ever make money because they're not going to go to the pros. Therefore, the kids doing the same thing as the adults. And now we're celebrating the adults but, the kids doing the same thing as the adults, and now we're celebrating the adults but not the kids and all that. My biggest issue I take from this is referencing college athletes as kids. They want to be treated like professional athletes. They want to be paid. When you are paid to do a job, that makes you a professional. When somebody pays you, you're not an intern.

You're not doing it pro bono. You are doing it because you're getting paid. When you get paid to do a job, you are a professional. Yet somehow, when something happens to a college athlete or a college athlete gets stiffed on his payment, it becomes, oh, the kids. Oh, the kids. Well, that kid chose UNLV because UNLV offered him $100,000. He didn't go to UNLV because he likes Las Vegas and wants to go over to the

casino and play the Buffalo casinos. He didn't do that. He didn't want to get the buffet over at Binion's. He went to Vegas because Vegas paid him $100,000. He is a mercenary like most of these college athletes are. And I'm not against it. You want to go somewhere and get a contract and do it, go for it. I had a good job in Nashville. My contract was coming up. St. Louis offered me a better contract and it was a better opportunity in my mind at the time. I left Nashville to go to St. Louis. These guys should have the same right to do that. That is not wrong. You shouldn't be married to one place for five years because you made that commitment. This isn't a fucking marriage. It's not ruining somebody else's life. If you go somewhere and you don't get enjoyment out of that,

then you get out of it. Really, it is the same with a marriage. If you two get married, you realize you don't like each other, you get divorced, shit happens, man. And the same thing can happen in college athletics. Same thing can happen in pro sports. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem I have is people still operate in this world where we talk about college athletics and college athletes like they're kids or quote unquote student athletes. Now that money is openly out there and people are making their decisions based on where they're going to get the most money, cut the shit with the student athlete. Don't even make them fucking go to class. This is just minor league sports at this point. There's no reason. Why keep up the charade? Why, if you're the starting quarterback

at LSU, unless you want to, you want to go to college, we'll give you a free education. But if you're the starting quarterback at LSU, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Auburn, why the fuck should you have to go to chemistry? Why the fuck should you have to go to an English class when you went to that school because that's where you felt like you had the best chance to make money. You're not there. We've always known they're not there because of their education for the most part, like the big time stars. Now that the dinky soccer player or the swimmer or the 17th string offensive lineman, those guys, the ball boy on the basketball team. Yes, this education will benefit them. And they know that they're exploiting this opportunity so they can go somewhere with

their degree later on in life. The big-time college athlete who chose your school because the NIL money was better, that guy didn't give two fucks about school, and you shouldn't give two fucks about school. His job, because this is what he's getting paid to do, should be to focus on football. But we still live in this world

where I think people conflate the two eras, and I think my buddy Matt, who's a very smart guy, is conveniently conflating the two eras. If you wanted to go 15, 20, 25 years ago and tell me kids and student athletes, when these guys are getting paid under the table and it's a dirty business and all that, I could get down with that. This is 2024. When you're talking about dudes who are 22, 23 years old who are getting paid six-figure salaries to play college football,

they are not student-athletes. They are professionals. And they should be treated as such. Like I've heard people say, I still don't like to be critical of college kids. I don't like to be critical. Like I don't boo college kids. Look, if DJ Uyunglele

has played at four schools and he's gotten paid to go to all of them and he sucks ass, boo his ass. I got my start in this profession at an early age because I had access to it. I started in radio doing actual over-the-air shit that people could hear when I was about 14 or 15. I was doing hockey. You've heard this story a million times. Baton Rouge Kingfish. And I got in because my dad worked at a radio station. He had a name in town. So he talked to the guys,

said my kid wants to do play-by-play. Can you give him an opportunity? These games are broadcast on AM 1300, WIBR, the sports animal, or whatever the fuck they called it. And I would do the second period. Did I have any business doing it? Probably not.

I was decent for 15, 16. It was kind of a gimmick. I wasn't horrible by any means. I mean, there are people who are worse that are adults that do it for a profession than I was when I was 15. But, you know, I was a dopey 15-year-old kid and I did it. And then I did baseball play-by-play. And then when I was in high school, I did a daily sports radio show. Did I know more than the average 17-year-old kid?

Sure. Did I know more than the adults that have been doing it for 100 years? Fuck no. So I would get my ass handed to me on message boards, and I would get criticized. And there was nothing I could do about that. And I didn't blame them because in their minds, I'm getting preferential treatment, getting paid, which I didn't get paid a ton to do it, if anything, to do it. But I did it because I wanted to do it. And I sat there and I got myself dumped on on a regular basis at 17 years old, 16 years old. I was told I suck constantly by people on message boards,

16, 17, 18. I dealt with it and I'm still here. If by here, I mean I'm laying in my underwear in my bed doing a podcast right now. Yes, but I'm still here. Those dudes, and this might come across, and this is if I'm trying to be the other side of this argument, somebody would listen to what I'm about to say. And they'd say, say oh because you're just jealous that a young guy makes more money than you absolutely not there's going to be a thousands of millions of young people that make more money than me or less qualified people I don't get into that fucking world I don't care I don't count people's money right but the fact that you're making money matters for how you are treated and how you are perceived by the populace. And when you're getting paid and you're making decisions to leave schools based on who's going to give you more money, and it's no longer NIL.

It's, all right, we've got collectives and our boosters have raised a million dollars and we want to get you here. You're a pro. You're a whore at this point. And honestly, you're no better than the whore coaches that bounce from place to place to place. But people used to love to shit on coaches because coaches would get a job at South Alabama and say, I'm here forever. And then a year later, they'd get a job at a slightly elevated school, like now I'm at Syracuse and now I'm at Auburn and whatever and people would shit on those guys for being job hoppers and because those guys got away with it for so long the big bad old men now it's easy for people to look at the players and say well now they're just getting their turn

well there's a couple of elements that bother me about this again very clear don't care that they get paid they should get paid. They're the reason why the money's coming in. Jaden Daniels is the reason why LSU was able to win nine games. He won the Heisman last year. Joe Burrow won the championship for LSU. So did Jamar Chase, Justin Jefferson. Those guys deserve that money.

Get as much as you can get. Get the bag, as they say. Do it all. But cut the bullshit NIL. Because the idea of NIL was you're going to go to a school, and because you go to LSU, Texas, Auburn, Florida, Alabama, your name, image, and likeness is now worth so much more because of that that you're going to be able to go out and whore yourself out and do appearances and get endorsement deals. Now schools are obviously helping them. If you watch the LSU documentary on Amazon, they've got whole groups of people dedicated to helping athletes find deals with NIL. It's a cool deal and I have nothing

against it. So I have nothing against the idea of you making money off of your name and image likeness. I also have no objection to the idea that you're getting paid to go to a school if they just paid you outright. That's what I'd actually prefer. I'd prefer that we just be open about it and say, hey, let's let the school pay the guys and give them a contract. Let's let them get a contract from this collective or whatever. Not this weird world where we still throw out NIL like that's the way these dudes are all making their money. Some of them are, but when you're getting guys, especially in college basketball and football, football in particular, and you're trying to get a big time quarterback and you're throwing out contracts, make them sign contracts. What's wrong with the idea? Like I have to sign a

contract. Contracts suck. You're beholden to them. I can't leave a job in a year. They can fire me, but like it happened here. I had a three-year contract. I couldn't have left that contract, but they could fire me. It sucks. That's the way of the world. It blows. My problem is nobody has to have any form of actual commitment for any period of time. There's no punishment for abandoning ship

for coaches or for players. It's just throw it against the wall. Let's go. And that's the part that I think is the most annoying about it is like you see these guys that go from school to school every year chasing money. And I'm all for that. But shouldn't we have a situation where you're forced to have some sort of penalty or punishment if you break a contract early? You know, like even a college coach, if he leaves a situation early, he's got a buyout in some instances. Maybe he's got a buyout, a school will have to pay a buyout. There are punishments.

There is no punishment for guys anymore. So of course it doesn't build the mindset of learn to stick with something. And I'm not trying to be overly naive here. But when we've created a world where it's as simple as you go to a place and think you should play. You don't play as much as you think you should or you don't get the money you think you should. So you just bounce to the next place. You have to face no adversity. You can just tuck tail, leave, go to the next place. It doesn't work out at that place.

Tuck tail, leave, go to the next place. And before you know it, you've been at five different universities. You've done very little for your career and you're done. And it was all because you were chasing a couple of bucks. I can see both sides of it. To me, this is not a definitive. Oh, the kids are getting screwed. Stop calling them kids. They're paid to fucking play. They want to be treated like pros. They want to be treated like NFL players and NBA players. Then treat them as such. They're not kids. I don't know how old this Matthew Sluka is because I can't find his age.

Somehow I can't find this dude's age on the internet, but I know he's been playing college football since 2020. So this dude's probably 22, 23, maybe 24 years of age. He's 22, 23, 24 years of age. Dude was getting a hundred thousand dollars a year to play football at UNL via school that nobody in the fucking world cares about. He ain't a kid cut the shit and stop making the story, like making a sympathetic story about kids, kids, kids. A kid is a seven-year-old kid playing peewee football, an 11-year-old kid in middle school. A kid is not a 22, 23-year-old man playing football, getting paid to do it. But that's my problem is people pick a side in this and they sound stupid because they

can't look at it with any nuance. Oh, the college coaches get to leave, but the kids don't. Oh, fuck off. There's still nuance involved in this. The system, the NIL system is broken. It is obviously broken and it is not doing what the intention was. The intention was to pay dudes basically for endorsements, name, image, and likeness. The intention was to not have people with collectives writing big contracts for people to come to their school. And to kind of defend UNLV a little bit here, first of all, there was no contract.

It was a handshake deal. Hey, come play with us. Well, a handshake deal ain't worth a shit. That's number one. Number two, they're 3-0, but the quarterback's throwing 43%. He's completing 43% of his passes. He's a running quarterback. Go find another dickhead to complete 43% of the passes and don't pay this guy

a hundred thousand. Maybe they saw that and they're like, well, shit, this guy really isn't worth a hundred thousand. See ya. So if a player can just up and leave whenever they want, cause they don't think they're getting their playing time. Why the fuck can't a school say kick rocks? That's the world you've created because there's no

there's no uh repercussions there's no punishment there's no um sacrifice that you have to make so you can go to a school go there for five minutes think it sucks on to the next one look for more money look for more playing time it sucks there. You don't learn anything about adversity. And I don't know who I saw post this, but I thought it was valid. That there's a future of NFL to a large degree, mostly NFL, but also NBA teams that are going to start getting players who have no real coping skills at all, and they've never had to battle through adversity.

Like I'm not going to blow you because you stay at a place for four years and miss out on money. Like, hey, you missed out on cash. But I will at least acknowledge that I think you learn something from staying somewhere and it kind of builds character and it teaches you how to grow as a human

and to deal with adversity. If you're some dude that signs a letter of intent, you go somewhere and in a couple of weeks, you don't think you're going to play there. There's more money being offered to you at another place and you just go and you're a mercenary that's chasing money and playing time. You're never going to fully understand what it takes to stay somewhere and earn something. I look at Garrett Nussmeyer, who's the quarterback at LSU. Kind of an all-world high school guy.

Dad's a high school coach. He's a college coach. One of them, he's a coach. And this dude had to play behind Jaden Daniels, a guy that they went out and got in the portal, who played for two years when Nussmeyer was already there. And Nussmeyer waited behind him and said, let's go. Now the dude's throwing.350 a game.

I'm not saying Garrett Nussmeier's going to get drafted or be a first-round pick. Maybe, maybe not. I don't fucking know what's going to happen. They draft some shitty quarterbacks in the league now, so who knows? But the guy's throwing for.300-plus a game, among the leaders in touchdown passes in college football, and he waited his turn.

I think there is some level of credit he deserves, and I think he learned something that a lot of other guys are not going to learn adversity does matter in life having to battle through things does matter I used to get advice like that all the time but I was always looking for the next big thing when I was in Houston the first time, I was doing the morning stuff with Mark and John, and then eventually they moved me to afternoons. But I was in there, and guys like Barry Warner, I'd talk to him. I'd go, Barry, man, I want to go to LA. I want to go to Miami. And all these people are kind of interested in me. And he would always say, you don't know what you don't know. And it's very to from afar to say this to people you don't know what

you don't know but to be one of these mercenaries that's at eight different schools over the course of six years like it's i don't i don't know what you learn from that like it's one thing to transfer once twice whatever but what i'm seeing dudes doing it every year, like DJ Uyunglele. And he ain't even good. And he's bouncing from school to school. So the whole point of all of this, and it all started because I was watching a video of my friend Matt. And I'd listened to this show yesterday, but the video had just popped up on my Instagram. And he keeps saying, kids, kids, kids, kids. And yes, in theory, you're a kid. You're a young dude.

You haven't lived a lot of life. But you're getting paid a shitload of money. And if you're 21, 22 years old and you're in the NBA or the NFL and you're making money, no one's going to call you a kid. They're going to say be an adult. When money is involved, it's time to become a grown-up. And you have to grow up faster than maybe you would want to. And when you're dealing with big money and you're getting six-figure contracts, in some case seven-figure deals to go play football somewhere, I don't view

you as a kid anymore. You're an adult. And people who call these kids kids are doing that because it's making their point. They want to live in this world. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to still live in the world where college athletics is truly about the competition and the education. It's just kids going out there and playing for the love of the game when you know it's bullshit. They're not kids. They're mercenaries. They're hired guns. They're professionals. So cut the shit. Stop acting like this is 1974 and you go to your local college because you're committed to it and because you've grown up watching it

and it's for love of the game. That's all bullshit. And again, I don't care. Get all the money you can. Do whatever the fuck you wanna do. But don't tell me I'm a bad guy because I'm gonna judge them and don't tell me I'm a bad guy

because I'll boo them at a game. Once you start getting big contracts, I can boo your ass. and don't tell me I'm a bad guy because I'll boo them at a game once you start getting big contracts I can boo your ass I don't care if you're 20 25 or 30 if I can boo Derek fucking car I can boo the quarterback at Georgia Florida and LSU because they're getting paid in some cases 600 million dollars and they're only at your school because they're getting paid so cut the shit and figure the NIL shit out. Like it's the Wild West again. Like it's broken. It's an obviously broken system.

Maybe there is no right system, but it's broken. It didn't take very long for the scumbags to figure out how to fuck that system. It is a, it's completely broken. I don't have the answer to fix it. Again, here's what you should do. Make these schools have to draw from their own fucking coffers to pay these guys. When you see that Texas makes 120 million in revenue, that money should have to go to paying athletes.

Fuck using boosters. Fuck using, if they want to still do NIL deals on the side, let them. But if you want to go get the biggest quarterback, you want Archie Manning or Arch Manning, then you should have to draw off a mere $120 million of revenue and figure out how to fucking get Arch Manning. Maybe that's the play. Maybe that will slow down some of the absurdity of this. Instead of finding these poor ass...

You know what's fascinating? Poor ass states like Arkansas uh Louisiana Mississippi that are poor as shit people living below the poverty line kids are fucking starving yet somehow there's boosters like there's enough boosters that have these collectives that have hundreds of millions of dollars that they can just use to pay dipshit high school kids that are going to leave next year anyway it's fascinating isn't it all right anyway I love you guys