Florida football recruit D'Antre Robinson buys his mom a house. Why does that upset people?
A video of a Florida football recruit was posted this week. It will not make some people happy.
It shows D’Antre Robinson, a defensive lineman from Orlando, giving his mother quite the Valentine’s Day surprise.
“Welcome to your new house, Ma,” Robinson says as she walked through the door.
He’s dangling a set of keys in his mother’s face, and the tears and hugs flow. She wanders speechlessly around a freshly vacuumed room for a minute, then says, “Better take your shoes off.”
You’d need the heart of an IRS agent not to be moved by the video. It fully captures a dream shared by countless millions coming true.
Mom sacrifices to raise kid. Kid grows up, hits it big, buys mom a house.
Nice, right?
Not everybody is seeing it that way. To them, the video fully captures the dollar-driven decay that has descended on college sports.
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A sampling of their social media thoughts:
“College football is no more. It’s another version of the NFL. Our education system is a joke.”
“We got high schoolers buying houses now?”
“He hasn’t even played a down. This is crazy.”
To sum up: NIL is E-V-I-L.
It is odd watching a kid who’s yet to graduate from Jones High walking around a big empty house he just bought. Robinson is shown tossing $1 bills all over his brother’s new room.
Such shocking scenes are indeed driving traditionalists crazy. I know since I’m a recovering old-schooler.
We were raised on the notion that guys like Robinson are amateurs. Room, board and a college education (and maybe the proceeds from selling their tickets) are rightful compensation for their football labor.
Paying them is cheating. And a video like Robinson’s should make us scramble to the nearest phone, call the NCAA and expect UF to get put on 100 years’ probation.
Those days are gone. Fact is, they never should have existed.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh summed it up when the NCAA and its traditionalist conceptions got their clock cleaned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021.
“Enormous sums of money flow to seemingly everyone except the student athletes. College presidents, athletic directors, coaches, conference commissioners, and NCAA executives take in six- and seven-figure salaries. Colleges build lavish new facilities. But the student athletes who generate the revenues, many of whom are African American from lower-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing.”
It was an Emperor-Has-No-Clothes Moment. A scholarship was fair compensation 35 years ago, when SEC schools were getting less than $2 million a year.
Nowadays, that’s what a top-notch assistant coach makes.
SEC schools got $51.3 million in TV and bowl revenue this fiscal year. That number’s expected to balloon to about $80 million when a new TV deal kicks in.
“It’s foolish to think the players don’t deserve a piece of the pie,” Billy Napier said after taking the UF job and its $7.1 million salary. “If there’s no players in these stadiums, no one is showing up to watch and they’re certainly not sitting in their home watching it on TV.”
Kavanaugh, Napier realize the obvious. For all the old-school rah-rah, college sports are a business.
To succeed, businesses need to keep customers happy. That largely depends on recruiting, which requires making players happy.
Don’t be upset at the players for having such leverage. Be mad at yourself for letting your happiness depend on them being happy.
I don’t know what it took to make Robinson happy to sign with Florida. His NIL valuation is $111,000 based on On3.com’s metrics, though that’s just educated guesswork.
The thought of 17-year-olds having money to burn is worrisome. I would have bought a souped-up Trans-Am and sent Farrah Fawcett $25,000 worth of roses if I’d have been an NIL bonus baby way back when.
That’s just one of the unintended realities of the NIL world. Hopefully, kids will be smarter with their money than I would have been.
Robinson appears to be.
“He is awesome,” the realtor told Robinson’s mother. “He really is. I hope my son is like him.”
Before NIL, Robinson might have been able to buy his mother dinner and a Valentine’s Day card. Now she’s in the house of her dreams.
If that video doesn’t make you happy, maybe you’re seeing things the wrong way.
David Whitley is The Gainesville Sun's sports columnist. Contact him at dwhitley@gannett.com. Follow him on X @DavidEWhitley
This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Florida's D'Antre Robinson shows why NIL is not evil
