Turns out NIL is impacting women's basketball recruiting too!
And everything else I'm trying to catch up on
Matt Brown
March 17, 2023
Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Earlier this week, I wrote about a few storylines and off-the-court talking points that I was anticipating ahead of the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament. You know, talk about the Flutie Effect, NCAA Tournament Units, etc.
I understand that not everybody will agree with me on this, but I also wrote in that newsletter that I didn’t personally consider upset victories from elite private schools to be underdog stories, even if they are significant athletic upsets.
The true platonic ideal of the March Madness Cinderella should not be the tiny Jesuit college with $85,000 a year tuition. Sure, it’s unlikely and impressive that a campus where every student got a 34 on their ACT could beat a massive Land-Grant in basketball…but then athletes will then graduate and enjoy virtually every other advantage that American society has to offer. It is structurally impossible for any story that involves Princeton to be an underdog story. I don’t care what the seedline says or what the athletic department budgets say.
So naturally, of course, Princeton beat Arizona yesterday. And let me just say, 15 seeds beat 2 seeds all the time, and it happens to all sorts of storied programs, and there is absolutely no shame in losing to a 15 seed whatsoever.
It seems @MattBrownEP was onto something choosing Furman and Princeton as examples in a recent Extra Points Newsletter… 👀
— ᴛ - ᴍ ᴀ ᴄ ᴛ ɪ ᴏ ɴ (@teemaction)
Mar 16, 2023
We’ll have to see what The Discourse looks like for Princeton after this sort of upset, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I don’t think the school really needs an influx of sports marketing attention to find a way to recruit an academically competitive freshman class next year.
I have to admit, I didn’t see the game. I’m still in Brazil, and finding a bar with basketball on has been a bit of a challenge… I struggle to explain what the hell college sports are in English as a professional writer, so trying to explain why Princeton has a basketball team that I want to watch in my exceptionally busted Portuguese is outside my grasp. Perhaps that will come up in a later Duolingo chapter.
Anyway, I did want to quickly highlight a few other quick things that maybe you’ve missed
The Athletic reached out to dozens of women’s basketball coaches to ask about NIL, a relationship that I don’t think has really been explored enough. Virtually anybody that follows elite football and men’s basketball recruiting will tell you that the process has generally become more transactional in the NIL era, especially for transfers. 44% of coaches interviewed said that NIL had changed recruiting by “a lot”. I think there are good quotes and some hard numbers here. I’d be very interested to hear more in the future from athletes and coaches in other sports, like volleyball, softball, or hockey…sports that are supported by Pay for Pla—-er, excuse me, Roster Value Motivated Collectives even less often than WBB players.
Sources directly tied to the Pac-12 conference office have mostly been pretty quiet about media rights negotiations and potential realignment. But a few Pac-12 presidents, i.e, the people who will actually sign off on the deal, have actually gone on the record recently. Arizona president Robert C. Robbins was candid in his conversation with The Athletic, admitted that his school has talked with Big 12 presidents and leaders, is confident that the Pac-12’s deal is coming soon, and that he believes that it will be “better” than the Big 12’s. There’s also this quote, on regular media speculation that the Pac-12 is about to fall apart:
I think Brett (Yormark) is a heck of a salesman, and Endeavor (a Hollywood agency working with the Big 12) is a good PR firm, and they’re working it. And you (the media) are buying what they’re selling.
I tell Brett this all the time, and I’ve got really good friends over the years who are presidents now in the Big 12 schools, I love you guys, but if the roles were reversed, I wouldn’t expect any of you to leave the Big 12 if you didn’t know what deal you were getting there. We’ve got to see what deal we’re getting, and then I’ll be able to make an informed decision.
Hey, on that note, here’s a reminder that I wrote a whole newsletter on how the sourcing for media rights stories typically works. A good question to ask here might be…why are Pac-12 presidents going on the record about this stuff now? Is it more effective than anybody from the conference office? Who benefitted from their silence?
Our sister publication, AthleticDirectorU, had an interesting interview this week on what sort of sports are being added across college athletics. One trend I hadn’t been paying attention to…it appears that esports sponsorship has begun to level off a little bit. It’s also too bad that P5 schools appear to be mostly uninterested in adding any sports unless the court system forces them. I’m not sure there is any way to really fix that without mandating changes legislatively, especially with so many long-term cost concerns.
And finally, this was a really good EP guest post from Boise State Law Professor Sam Ehrlich, on the legal history and precedent in Johnson v NCAA, and why maybe defenders of amateurism ought to be even more concerned about the legal future of the system.
We’ve got a few more guest posts coming next week, and I’m planning on some fun research projects for when I get back to America. You can support my ability to pay for guest posts and freelance stories by subscribing to Extra Points right here:
Thanks for reading and supporting Extra Points. Have a great weekend! I’m going to go drink out of a coconut and go look for a capybara.
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