College teams are worth a half billion dollars?
The state of college football or maybe college sports in general is this. Get a money person interested in a program or whose significant other is an alum of a school and buy a quarterback. That is what Larry Ellison did. The 80-year-old Ellison, the fourth-richest man in the world and founder of Oracle, got his new wife, 33-year-old Jolin, a present. He threw money at Bryce Underwood, a highly-rated high school quarterback to change his mind about going to Louisiana State University, and with the help of serious money, Underwood will be playing football at Michigan. In a sense this nothing new in college football, there have been stories of golden handshakes and no-show jobs given to players for decades and there is one 1932 movie that sort of addresses the issue, the Marx Brothers starring in Horse Feathers where Groucho Marx’s character goes to a speakeasy to find two players so his school can beat a rival.
But there is more. Former Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry has claimed that he is actively trying to buy college football and basketball teams. Lasry says certain colleges could sell a 51% stake in their teams for somewhere between a half billion and three quarters of a billion dollars and then use that money for NIL and facility upgrades. How that will work is not yet known because many of the colleges are state schools not private institutions which means that individual state legislatures may have to rewrite college statutes to perhaps bend rules to sell off a piece of municipal property which are college sports teams. The NCAA is looking to Congress to regulate the college industry in terms of having a uniform federal law concerning payments for names, images and likenesses. It will be interesting to see how many free-market politicians will limit the college athletes payment market.
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Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
