Venerable writer Mike Waters penned a piece this week reflecting on Syracuse’s new $50M NIL initiative. He joined “Orange Nation” to discuss his article and painted a disappointing picture of how SU walked into the NIL world naively. He explained that Syracuse wasn’t forward-thinking enough to bring in a staff dedicated to fund-raising and organizing the NIL project. Instead, the school dumped it at the desks of employees with other full-time duties.
“In some cases you had people at the university who were tasked with overseeing NIL,” says Waters, “and it was just something that was just added to their duties.”
“It’s not like you hired someone… hired for their ability to organize a fund-raising organization,” says Waters. “If they had a sports background, it was just gravy.”
It’s incredibly disconcerting to hear that the school apparently thought NIL was just another daily task for the current staff to navigate. It is the single biggest driver of talent in college sports. To think you didn’t need a dedicated and experienced group to oversee it seems extremely naive.
When you look at this year’s roster and results, it’s not hard to see how this approach caught up to the program. Granted, the on-court issues can be attributed to coaching, player mistakes, and some unforced errors too. But seeing the press release last week about SU’s $50M NIL initiative did feel two years too late in the world of big time college basketball. And The Fizz wondered aloud whether that target number is even realistic for a school like SU.
To be fair, Waters says there were plenty of schools who are also caught in catch up mode. He mentioned big schools like the SEC who seemed poised to take advantage of the new financial realities, and look no further than the polls where SEC schools dominate. Big sports schools in the south always, ahem, had the infrastructure to pay players. Now they just had to mobilize it officially within the school’s payroll.
But Syracuse is apparently scuffling along with some of the bottom feeders at their level. Waters was asked where SU stands compared to its NIL counterparts.
“Not in the top half of the schools where you want to be,” he said. If Syracuse was in MLB, he compared their finances to the Reds or Brewers. Ugh.
“Ya gotta close the gap,” says Waters. He mentioned how now Alex Kline is on board to run the program as a GM and they are more prepared to target the right guys in the transfer portal. But he’s not sold on surefire success there.
“We’ll see how they do. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
While this season is a lost cause, the arrival of Kiyan Anthony should give everyone hope. That being said, Syracuse needs to have a more modern and thorough approach to the new landscape of college sports if the school is going to field winners.
