One Group of Elite College Athletes Is Really Missing Out On the Flood of NIL Money
A version of this story appears on last week’s episode of Slate’s weekly sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen.
In the Ivy League men’s basketball tournament final last month, Brown blew a 6-point lead in the last 27 seconds and lost to Yale, 62–61. One of Yale’s best players that day was 7-foot sophomore Danny Wolf, who had 9 points, 13 rebounds, and four blocks. For Brown, 6-8 sophomore Kalu Anya scored 12 points and pulled down seven boards.
Since then? Yale, a 13-seed, took down 4-seed Auburn in the first round of March Madness. The two aforementioned players entered the NCAA men’s basketball transfer portal; Wolf committed to Michigan, while Anya hasn’t announced his destination. And two more top Ivy players ditched the league: Ivy rookie of the year Malik Mack left Harvard for Georgetown and Penn freshman Tyler Perkins defected to Philly rival Villanova.
Those four players were the Ivy League’s two best freshmen and two of its best sophomores. Six others with Ivy eligibility also are in the portal, which as of Sunday included 1,875 players, a record. The total out of the Ivy League is up from just three last year, when Penn’s Jordan Dingle, the Ivy player of the year, joined a parade of transfers to St. John’s. It’s the biggest talent drain ever from the league—and another canary in the coal mine for college sports.
The Ivy League has tried to position itself as above the money-driven free-for-all that recent major changes to college sports have engendered. Attending one of its eight member schools, the mantra goes, is a 40-year decision, not a four-year one. After Mack entered the portal, a Harvard spokesperson told the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson: “The choice of Harvard for varsity athletes is one that prioritizes the quality of the education and degree they earn. The network of alumni, Harvard name, and the education received are among compelling reasons to be a student-athlete at Harvard.”
But the exodus of top players demonstrates that there are hundreds of thousands of compelling reasons not to be an Ivy athlete—that the diploma and cachet aren’t priceless if you possess a marketable skill like playing basketball well. I talked to Richard Kent, a Connecticut lawyer who develops name, image, and likeness programs for schools and also calls Yale basketball games on the radio. He said that Mack, Wolf, Perkins, and Dingle are banking mid–six figures a year each from their new power schools, with Mack at the high end of the range, in addition to free tuition, room, and board.
So how much did Harvard, Yale, and Penn, which have combined endowments of more than $110 billion, offer to keep these academically qualified and athletically gifted students on their picturesque campuses? Apparently nothing. The money from the other schools comes from NIL collectives—groups of boosters, alumni, and companies that pool money to compensate athletes. There are 32 NCAA Division 1 basketball conferences. According to the online tracker NIL-NCAA, in 29 of them at least one school has a basketball collective. The only outliers: the Northeast and Ohio Valley conferences, which are among the weakest in the nation in men’s and women’s basketball, and the Ivy League, which is not.
The Ivies’ sports exceptionalism extends beyond collectives. The league refused to grant all of its athletes an extra year of eligibility because of COVID; on Friday, Dingle and Chris Ledlum, an ex-Harvard player who also transferred to St. John’s, sued the NCAA in New York state court seeking a fifth year because the Ivies canceled the 2020–21 season. The league doesn’t let graduate students play even if they retain NCAA eligibility, which is why nearly 40 men’s and women’s basketball players who could have stayed another season are in the portal now. (And why three Ivy grad transfers fueled USC’s deep run in this year’s women’s tournament and another lifted Northwestern’s men to the second round.) The league doesn’t even award athletic scholarships; it’s being sued in federal court over that. And the league isn’t supporting another effort to unshackle athletes: the Dartmouth men’s basketball team’s vote last month to form a union.
The Ivy schools have done little to help athletes secure NIL deals, mostly hiring companies to set up the equivalent of bulletin boards where students can match with potential sponsors, usually alumni. And they all appear to have informally or explicitly banned collectives. Princeton’s NIL guidelines state: “Compensation continues to be prohibited for or as a direct result of participation in intercollegiate athletics (‘pay for play’).” Last year, when a group began soliciting money for a Harvard sports collective, the athletics department sent an email distancing itself from the effort, saying, “Harvard athletics has not directly or indirectly sanctioned or supported this group.” The school didn’t articulate an explicit position, but it didn’t need to; the fundraiser appears to have quietly died. “Attempts to find the would-have-been collective’s leaders were not successful,” the Washington Post reported last month.
No other public efforts to form collectives have emerged, which, given the obscene wealth and deep sports connections of plenty of Ivy alumni, is at the very least surprising. Ivy athletic departments get millions in donations from rich ex-jocks and sports-loving alums. Brooklyn Nets owner and Yale lacrosse walk-on Joe Tsai, Class of 1986, funded a $13 million, 35,000-square-foot lacrosse field house. Private-equity billionaire and Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Devils, and Washington Commanders managing partner Josh Harris, Penn ’86, gave $10 million to the Wharton School. Harris could shake out his right front pocket for a Quakers basketball collective. (Full disclosure: As a Penn alum and basketball fan, I’d be fine with that.)
So what’s the problem? Many Ivy administrators and alumni cling to a belief that modernizing the league’s approach to sports would destroy what makes it special, or at least different. “I don’t want student athletes on our rosters who are only here because we’re paying them,” Princeton’s athletic director, John Mack, told the Daily Princetonian, the student paper, last week. “It’s been a means to attract kids to your institution, just because you are the highest bidder—that is never going to be who we are, is never going to be our philosophy.” The Harvard spokesperson quoted by the Crimson said the university considers athletics a “co-curricular or extra-curricular activity” that, as the newspaper put it, “contributes to a student’s development.”
It reminds me of the Looney Tunes cartoon where Bugs Bunny discovers that an abandoned baby is actually grizzled bank robber Ant Hill Harry, aka Babyface Finster. Bugs shakes the cosplaying Finster and says, “How many times have I told you not to play with the dirty money!” But don’t be fooled. The Ivy athletic departments, just like at other schools, all want to play with the money. They’d just prefer to use it for indoor tracks and lacrosse scoreboards than to give it directly to students. Why would Penn athletes need to get paid when, thanks to a $6.3 million gift from former linebacker and wrestler David Pottruck, Class of ’70, they can, at the Penn Athletics Wharton Leadership Academy’s Pottruck Center for Student-Athlete Success, “develop the mental, spiritual, and social skill sets that will ultimately position them to make significant contributions to the world long after graduation”?
There’s no clear reason why direct compensation and the desire for and opportunities afforded by an Ivy education are ipso facto mutually exclusive. That’s a con perpetrated on the league’s athletes—a little antiquated elitism with a dash of classism and racism. Because when it comes to predominantly white, upper middle-class sports like crew, lacrosse, fencing, field hockey, sailing, and squash, whose athletes often can afford the full cost of attendance, the Ivies recruit to win. The league’s website boasts that it has “showcased over 240 nationally-ranked programs over the past three years.” But to pursue similar greatness by giving a handful of predominantly Black basketball players the same athletic scholarships and NIL collectives money available at Duke or Stanford? Well, we can’t have that, now, can we?
It could be reckoning time, though. Ivy basketball coaches certainly aren’t happy about losing their best players, and without collectives, the departures are only going to accelerate. As Richard Kent told me, “You better believe there are some pissed-off kids out there saying, ‘My best friend is getting $125,000, and I’m better than that kid.’ ” Another lawyer I talked to said, “The schools are committing suicide by not allowing this to happen.”
You don’t have to be Billy Beane—or a Wharton MBA—to identify the market opportunity here. The first Ivy that goes all in could not only make regular runs in the NCAAs but probably recruit and retain players at a discount—because there certainly is legitimate appeal and lifelong value in an Ivy degree. “Ivy League schools could have some of the best collectives in the country,” college sports lawyer Mit Winter wrote after the failed Harvard effort. “Just have to get past their uneasiness with college athletes making money.”
There was one sign in the past few days that this uneasiness could be ebbing. On Friday, another star player from Brown who had entered the portal, 6-8 junior Nana Owusu-Anane, announced that he was returning to the Bears. A local news outlet reported that Owusu-Anane “received some significant six-figure NIL offers from some top-tier D-I programs.”
Did Owusu-Anane also get an offer from Brown? Richard Kent thinks it’s possible. “It’s curious that the only Ivy player to date who has gone back was a highly coveted, six-figure player,” Kent said on Saturday. “It’s my hope that Brown was able to locate some donors who helped out with this process.” (Kent said it also was curious that Brown’s first-team All-Ivy guard Kino Lilly Jr., the league’s top scorer last season, did not enter the transfer portal.) Brown men’s basketball coach Mike Martin did not respond to a request for comment.
If the Ivy dam breaks, good. Paying athletes who meet the league’s academic criteria, of whom there are plenty playing elsewhere, and fielding nationally competitive basketball programs would pack Ivy arenas like Penn’s fabled Palestra, generate revenue, and boost moribund student interest. Much more important, it would be the progressive and morally correct thing to do. As for top-level football, forget it; the Ivies play in the NCAA’s second tier and are right to avoid that sport’s structural, financial, and ethical shitshow.
But if tradition holds and no Ivy school takes the obvious step of permitting or even endorsing a sports collective? The quality of the league’s basketball will certainly deteriorate. More interestingly, though, it’ll start to smell like collusion. And that will surely mean another lawsuit seeking to force the NCAA’s most elite institutions to pay their athletes what the market determines they are worth.
