Darren Rovell is a sham

His NIL argument makes no sense.

You all know Darren Rovell, the indefatigable sports biz bro currently plying his trade at Action Network. His frenetic tweets about anything and everything having remotely to do with the gargantuan and incredibly lucrative business of sports are … well, sort of impressive, if we’re being honest. He gets to a lot! That guy really has an engine.

What he lacks a lot of the time is a processor. Such is the case this week, as he’s decided to be offended by the fact that college athletes being allowed to earn money from their name, image and likeness has … resulted in college athletes earning money from their name, image and likeness.

More specifically, he is mad that athletes at the schools where boosters were already spending lavishly are now directly getting some of the profits.

Aha! Now you see where our headline came from. It’s a rhetorical device based on his tweet. Clever.

You can go ahead and read that story if you want, but I’ll summarize and dismantle his main argument for you:

But it’s one thing for boosters to set up business deals for incoming athletes. It’s another for boosters to set up a slush fund to lure certain players to the school under the guise of name, image and likeness.

And that’s exactly what Horns with Heart is.

A group of Longhorns boosters announced Monday a fund that will blindly give University of Texas offensive lineman under scholarship $50,000 a year to perform charity work for yet-to-be-disclosed charities.

A slush fund! Let that business jargon roll.

Blindly give! The fact that the coaches at Texas will spend countless hours evaluating and then wooing these players must mean absolutely nothing.

Rovell goes on to argue that this plan is a sham because it’s not based on what he believes the market rate should be for the name, image and likeness of a college football offensive lineman.

Why Rovell believes he should determine the market value of an offensive lineman instead of, you know, the people paying the money is anyone’s guess. Also a mystery: Why Rovell has appointed himself the arbiter of the “spirit” of a movement that has simply returned basic rights to athletes who never should have lost them in the first place.

Rovell sees the Horns with Heart plan as an illegal inducement, meant only to help Texas recruit better:

The very announcement of the fund that offers any Texas offensive lineman an automatic $50,000 is indisputably an inducement because, whether it is overtly mentioned or not, recruits who come to the University of Texas know that their scholarship is tied to a $50,000 a year cash windfall.

But here’s the thing (which Darren knows very well!): Boosters were going to spend big money on making their chosen teams more attractive to recruits anyway. They always have. It’s just that the money went toward things like hiring new coaches or building lavish facilities or outfitting those facilities with slides and barbershops and gourmet food options.

Or by establishing actual slush funds used for everything from $20 handshakes to moving a recruit’s parent into a better house.

Donors have been giving money to schools for this sort of goofy stuff for decades now, and the schools never stopped and said “Hey, what about maybe building a new wing of the library instead?” because … here it is … the football players they were going to recruit with those overpaid coaches and gleaming facilities brought tremendous value to the university, regardless of what their name, image and likeness ended up being.

Besides, you don’t think current recruits are already taking into account the possibilities for NIL deals as they make their decisions? They already knew that landing at Texas would create a better chance for a deal than going to SMU or Baylor or Rice. Codifying it changes nothing.

The abolishment of the idea that players shouldn’t be compensated for their name, image and likeness didn’t create some new possibility for boosters to influence the success of their schools; that’s always been the point of their giving. It just meant they could do so by directly compensating those actually playing the games.

Rovell has lived in the numbers underlying sports for so long that he seems incapable of understanding why the people with the money would see college athletes as being worth the investment, even if this is all something of an unknown. He just doesn’t get it:

The (awful) insinuation here is that Gatorade won’t get its money’s worth due to the injury and that this is a valuable lesson for companies considering investing in NIL deals. If Bueckers isn’t on TV getting buckets, how’s she ever going going to deliver on her “market value?!?”

Well, she has 948k followers on Instagram, and they’ll probably see her sip Gatorade as she doggedly works toward a triumphant return.

Rovell is sharp and usually understands what’s coming and how the landscape is shifting. This time, he’s simply missed it.

Here in America, it’s generally accepted that people should go ahead and try to get paid whatever somebody thinks they’re worth. Rovell’s spasm over college athletes came in the same week that news broke he had signed a new $2 million deal.

Good for him. The guy works incredibly hard and realized early on how important the sports business beat would be. I’m not about to question whether I think that’s “market rate” for any reporter anywhere. That’s not for me to decide.

So it is with the young men who eventually get those Horns with Heart deals. They’ve done the work to get recruited to the University of Texas, and a group of boosters there has decided that affiliating with them at the price of $50,000 per year is worth it.

That’s the market rate, and the players at the football powerhouses will be able to demand it, because that’s where the money is, just as it’s always been.

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