Washington State president Kirk Schulz believes the current NIL landscape is going to make football the main priority in college athletics, while women’s sports take a backseat and not receive the same amount of attention.
Schulz says he’s worried “we’re just going back to 1980.”
“My wife played tennis at Virginia Tech when we went to school there,” Schulz said, via 247 Sports. “And if you ask students back then who gets the resources, they’d say football gets everything. If they need anything, they get it. Then we have Title IX come along and start making sure that facilities and all this are fantastic for women’s sports. I worry that we’re just going back to 1980; we’re (just) doing it a different way.”
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Schulz specifically spoke about the situation involving Jaden Rashada, who reportedly signed a contract with a former Florida-focused NIL collective for a whopping $13.85 million in total over four years.
Schulz noted that women are not getting anything close to that dollar amount.
“You don’t see a women’s golfer going to Florida and getting a $20 million dollar NIL offer,” Schulz said. “But there was a quarterback that they tried to put together an offer for that was out there in the media.”
Back in December, Washington State football coach Jake Dickert shared his thoughts about NIL. He believed that there’s more going on behind the scenes than we think.
“There’s more tampering going on than you could ever imagine,” he said.
Dickert continued: “We’ve had guys contact our players’ parents. We had a coach from another school contact one of our players and offer him NIL — a coach … You can’t even imagine the things that are happening right now to try and pry our players away from this place.”
Last October, Washington State women’s basketball coach Kamie Ethridge, along with various coaches and athletes, spoke to university stakeholders about their perspective on NIL.
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“We’re in a different arena in the sense that people in our league are wildly ahead of us in what they are providing for their student-athletes in our respective sports,” Ethridge said. “And we can either engage or try to continue to compete or maybe not compete at the level that we are right now. And I think that’s a real struggle for all of us at this point.
Men’s basketball coach Kyle Smith told stakeholders at the time that he spends almost half his day on NIL alone.
“NIL’s real. It’s a big deal. It’s not going away,” WSU baseball coach Brian Green added during the October town hall. “The doors are opened and the coaches are out, we spend half of our day, every day, on NIL, because if we don’t, we’re not going to compete the way we need to compete.”
The NIL Deal’s Steven McAvoy contributed to this report.
