Few thoughts (long)
It's NJ.com we're dealing with here. Take that with a metric ton of salt. Of course Sargeant has to bring up Rutgers' debt and subsidies for the 1000th time this year. It's the same garbage regurgitated over and over for the past 2 decades just to bait readers.
The news outlet that announces the McCord commitment to Syracuse as "5 star Rutgers legacy, joins team of former Rutgers coaches and players and spur hometown team blah blah" obviously knows that the best way to drive clicks is to be as negative as possible. This article is no different and offers little to no insight that isn't already known.
Let's just gloss over the fact that Rutgers basketball signed the #2 and #3 players in the country and Rutgers football didn't lose anyone to the transfer portal (so far) due to NIL. Devoting a few sentences to those achievement while highlighting paragraphs to the shortcomings is disingenuous. But it doesn't fit the narrative.
It'll be doom and gloom with these people forever. Rutgers could have the highest NIL and win a National Title and they will find a way to be negative about it. NJ.com (could be said of all media nowadays really) is more profitable when the world is a burning dumpster fire.
Oh, and somehow this program that keeps fumbling everything ended up in the most powerful and lucrative conference in College Athletics. More on that later.
Is Rutgers' NIL situation as good as Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan? Of course not. No one that follows college athletics would expect that.
The peer school according to them is Maryland. That comparison is idiotic given the Under Armour ties.
Pay for play is coming everyone. And once revenue sharing is a done deal every school in the B1G and SEC will immediately jump to the top half of Power Conferences.
Using the same metrics they bring up. If a $3M NIL for football teams nets every player in the 85 scholarship roster around 35K, think about what that will mean in the context of total compensation once revenue sharing is a thing.
The B1G and SEC will be able to offer that easier than the rest. So let's take Syracuse as an example since they're the flavor of the month.
Let's pretend Syracuse has $3M annualy in NIL to give (they don't) and Rutgers is at $2M (they're not either as far as I know). Once revenue sharing kicks into gear, the gap they have to overcome will be quite the task considering the B1G revenue is projected to be double, possibly triple that of the ACC.
In other words, NIL as it stands today is gonna be a flash of the pan issue and other schools better lobby Congress to take action otherwise the divide between the haves and have nots is gonna get ugly. (Relevant tangent: I think the days of the NCAA tournament are numbered. Hate to see it but I think it will happen in our lifetime).
Guess which side Rutgers is on solely because of the conference they're in. Schools can hire all the top recruiters they want. Money has already ruined the sport and it's only gonna get worse.
End of story.
Regarding KTR which are fantastic and do an awesome job.
I've had conversations to a few influential people within the RU community and many don't want to commit to collectives for a wide array of reasons. Collectives aren't everything they make themselves out to be, and the reason why they don't want to disclose anything (though there's some truth to it being for "competitive reasons") is because it opens up a huge can of worms that the article kind of addresses indirectly.
Without being cryptic. The true power players are gonna go to Hobbs not Danny Breslauer. No offense to him.
For NJ.com to think Hobbs is failing because he doesn't want to talk to them is hilarious.
Is Rutgers going to overcome or get to the level of the elites of the B1G? I doubt it. There's a cultural element that many of us have accepted that is too large to overcome.
But is the situation as bad as this article makes it out to be?
Absolutely not.
Don't let a collective tell you that.
Why?
In conclusion.
Because everyone has their heads in the sand and doesn't want to call a Spade a Spade.
NIL as it stands today is pay for play for 99.9% of athletes. Simple as that.
And once it gets to the true nature of term. Rutgers will be fine.
