GoldandBlack.com’s Three Thoughts from the Weekend column, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind. In this week’s edition, a new era of athletic spending, the future of walk-ons and Daniel Jacobsen‘s big week.
ON ATHLETIC SPENDING
In the wake of the House settlement, which will bring revenue-sharing to NCAA sports, the Monopoly Money Era of athletic spending may be ending.
May be ending.
Are coaches going to stop making $6 million (or whatever) a year?
You’d think, but no. Not when there are Texas A&Ms out there setting the market.
But with high-major athletic departments now reportedly able to, and effectively required to, dedicate roughly a fifth of their revenue to their athletes, there’s no way around traditional spending being affected. COVID was probably a worthwhile test run for ADs’ ability to run tighter operations, and things must change. Unfortunately, people will probably lose jobs now.
Now, there are details about this yet to be determined or at least made public. For example, the definition of “revenue,” and what streams might be insulated. They’ll hide money if they can, a different kind of tax evasion.
But the old model — built around bringing in millions and millions, but spending like drunken sailors for the purpose of keeping margins tight enough to be able to say there was no money to give the athletes — just got dropped off at Goodwill.
This is still a competition and there are still high stakes and seas of money continue to hang in the balance, so people are going to spend, but make no mistake here: There is very little distinction now between these long-time “amateur” (lol) sports and professional operations.
Staffs may not be as gigantic from here on out and facilities may not get upgraded as often as you or I shave. College sports can now stop pretending to be anything other than businesses and proceed accordingly.
It’s OK now to run profit, though it may a bit harder to do it.
ON PROTECTING WALK-ONS
Again, much is left to be determined here, but what do these roster-limit changes mean for walk-ons, the salt-of-the-earth types who are so much more important for programs than people realize?
They need to be preserved, especially those currently on rosters.
These are professional sports now, or at least semi-professional, but at the end of the day, these are still college kids and those who are willing to pay their own way and make tremendous sacrifices to live out a dream for very little in return (free socks aside), those are the sorts of things that college sports must never detach from, nor should anyone want to.
Walk-ons — and I’m painting with a broad brush here — make teams better.
Just think: What if Purdue football doesn’t have Aidan O’Connell or Devin Mockobee? I’m not going to go so far as to say that Purdue basketball wouldn’t have reached the Final Four without its Carson Barrett– and Chase Martin-led scout team, but it certainly contributed to historic success. There would be a conversation to be had over that hypothetical
That’s just Purdue. There are stories like this everywhere.
The NCAA just got torn down to its studs to be rebuilt.
But the point has always been to provide opportunities.
That doesn’t have to change.
ON ANOTHER POTENTIAL GREAT PURDUE BIG MAN
Insofar as a 7-foot-3 dude can, Daniel Jacobsen snuck up on people.
After reclassifying from the 2025 class, the towering center was a late add to Purdue’s 2024 class, a commitment that should have come with more fanfare than it did. Players that tall and long who move and shoot the way he does, they often have a fifth star next to their names and don’t play college basketball very long.
Now that Jacobsen is obviously standing out at USA Basketball trials, based on reports out of Colorado Springs, it should be apparent Purdue may have its next entrant to its awesome lineage of outstanding centers.
Long way to go before October, but there’s not a ton of reason right now to think Jacobsen can’t help Purdue right now, and probably should be given every opportunity to accelerate his development.
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