As president of KTR and having worked on this for more than two years now this article is a pretty accurate picture of where we are right now.
We have enough money to keep our football players but not nearly enough money to be aggressive in the portal. On the hoops side, it is easier to make an immediate impact given the fact that you have fewer players and more outside sources willing to do deals with truly special players.
The decision to be made going forward is purely based on aggressiveness. If you are not aggressive from the top down then fans will assume you're fine with how things are going.
People ask me what I mean when I say "aggressive." The schools that are good at this have a clear strategy led and communicated from the Athletic Director on down. They promote the issue and encourage folks to give and make it easy for them to do that. To date that has not been our experience but our hope is that will change and we are working with staff to do that.
As a fanbase we have to decide how aggressive we want to be. If we are happy with not being able to compete for difference making grad transfers then that's where we will remain.
As a collective we can only ask for money so many times before folks get sick of us and we go down the NIL argument rabbit hole for the millionth time.
We will continue to come up with fun, unique ways to entice folks to get involved. We hopefully we collaborate more with athletics who can help us reach more people because they have the most direct way to do that.
But ultimately we're all only as good as the money we can raise or the companies we can convince to get involved. It really helps if we are all aligned but we will continue to do our best.
Folks can continue to believe what they want to believe and engage in "he said, she said" about who is to blame, but until there is a commitment we will continue to be behind others.
And in the next 3-5 years when the game changes again Rutgers as an institution will have to decide if they want to pay to remain in the upper level of athletics.
Jon
We have enough money to keep our football players but not nearly enough money to be aggressive in the portal. On the hoops side, it is easier to make an immediate impact given the fact that you have fewer players and more outside sources willing to do deals with truly special players.
The decision to be made going forward is purely based on aggressiveness. If you are not aggressive from the top down then fans will assume you're fine with how things are going.
People ask me what I mean when I say "aggressive." The schools that are good at this have a clear strategy led and communicated from the Athletic Director on down. They promote the issue and encourage folks to give and make it easy for them to do that. To date that has not been our experience but our hope is that will change and we are working with staff to do that.
As a fanbase we have to decide how aggressive we want to be. If we are happy with not being able to compete for difference making grad transfers then that's where we will remain.
As a collective we can only ask for money so many times before folks get sick of us and we go down the NIL argument rabbit hole for the millionth time.
We will continue to come up with fun, unique ways to entice folks to get involved. We hopefully we collaborate more with athletics who can help us reach more people because they have the most direct way to do that.
But ultimately we're all only as good as the money we can raise or the companies we can convince to get involved. It really helps if we are all aligned but we will continue to do our best.
Folks can continue to believe what they want to believe and engage in "he said, she said" about who is to blame, but until there is a commitment we will continue to be behind others.
And in the next 3-5 years when the game changes again Rutgers as an institution will have to decide if they want to pay to remain in the upper level of athletics.
Jon
