Utah’s collective is handing out pickup trucks to all — or at least 85 — of its football players. The tricked-up trucks, priced out at 60 grand each, are leases given to athletes as long as they keep their scholarship and play for Utah. If they transfer, they lose the truck, so the reward serves multiple purposes. It remunerates players, it lures in more players, and it keeps them here because who among them wants to give up their cool whip?
Maybe only those who can get a cooler ride somewhere else. I saw a quarterback at an SEC school picking up what looked like a Mercedes AMG G-Wagen, which, at last check, is a vehicle worth in excess of $200,000. There’s always someone somewhere who has something of more value than what you have.
That’s life. It’s just as true in college football now as it is in the real world. And college sports are now realer than real.
Questions that will answer exactly where you stand on this development, this new NIL world: How did you feel when you heard that Ute players were getting $6 million worth of trucks? Were you happy for them? Were you angry? Were you jealous, looking back at your days in college when you were taking 16 credit hours, working 20 hours a week bussing tables or cleaning toilets or painting houses or working construction while driving a beat-up B-210 Datsun with 300,000 miles on it? Did you mourn the loss of amateurism in college football, wishing that those guys for whom you root or root against were playing for things as simple and noble as an education and the glory of their school? Or were you worried about how your favorite school/team is going to keep up with the Utes, what with them getting pretty much what every college dude craves more than any other material possession — a Ram 1500 Big Horn with the blacked-out Night Edition package?
As it works in the NIL era, donors will handle the costs of the truck leases and insurance.
So, how you hanging on, where are you?
Best it is to just deal with it because this is the way it is. Be thrilled for the Utes and hope whatever team you’re passionate about can follow suit. And know that that following will be a challenge for the reason already noted.
It really is genius that Utah’s collective came up with this idea. The story about the pickups was “picked up” nationally, being posted at news and sports sites here, there, everywhere. Fantastic publicity for a Utes program that wants two things — to be a top football power and to draw in the kinds of athletes it has to have to achieve that goal. For Utah to get out in front on this likely caught the attention of not just thousands of great high school players, but also players at other colleges, potential transfers, who are bouncing around their current town, from the dorm to the practice facility, in their dad’s old Kia Soul.
What in the world is BYU, or some other Big 12 school, going to do … have their respective collectives contact a Bentley or a Porsche dealer and order up 85 Flying Spur Azures or 10 transports full of 911 GT3s?
I don’t know precisely what they’re going to do, but they have to do something. They have to keep up with or surpass their competition. Gifted athletes aren’t stupid. They know what’s going on and no matter how dedicated to or focused on football they are, no matter how much they adore one school or another, one coach or another, in many cases the first thing that captures their attention is … a sweet ride.
What other benefits, other than cold-hard cash, would be as appealing to young guys as that? Computers? How many of those does a kid need? Jewelry? Maybe. Trips to Vegas? Barbados? The Amalfi Coast? Perhaps. Houses? It’s been done before. Gulfstream G650s?
I’ve always thought, going back decades, three things pertaining to college sports: 1) amateurism, and the glorification of it, was and is a joke, an excuse for institutions to avoid expense and liability associated with using people to get gain; 2) athletes should get more than what they’ve gotten, what with so many others making bank off their services, and 3) the whole of it, football at least, could handle the extras involved in making sure the athletes were remunerated.
Watching the process at present, with donors being called on to fork over big bucks to get the athletes necessary to win, I’m not certain where the ceiling is. How much will boosters pitch in? How much is too much? How important is it to them and/or the businesses they own or run? Will the expenses bleed over to the fans in the form of increased ticket prices?
And here’s an interesting one that I believe will happen, and it’s already started: Companies will “buy” football programs. Not literally buy them, but buy into, connect themselves to programs in a manner that is unmistakable. The Utah Utes will be maybe exclusively the Ram Utah Utes. BYU will be the Apple BYU Cougars. Ohio State will be the Budweiser Ohio State Buckeyes. Michigan will be the General Motors Michigan Wolverines.
Maybe conferences will be bought. Who knows?
But money has to come from somewhere and corporations and investment firms don’t usually just sit on their assets, they look for ways to expand. You think with the popularity of college football being what it is that it’s not being looked at in new ways in terms of huge dollars?
The Utes, then, will be spotted driving around town in their sparkling new trucks, with smiles on their faces and gratitude deep down that they came along to play college football now rather than 10 or 20 years ago, back when such trucks or other bennies would have had to come to them in clandestine, under-the-table ways.
Watch to see what the players at other schools will be driving or possessing. Exactly what it will be is uncertain. The one certainty is this: It will be someone having something from somewhere that will be of great value, something someone else wishes they could have.
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