bear2be2 said:
DallasBear9902 said:
bear2be2 said:
DallasBear9902 said:
bear2be2 said:
DallasBear9902 said:
IvanBear said:
Mitch Henessey said:
Ballo to Indiana. Not a shock, but the number of premier big men out there just shrunk by one.
ETA: Goodman reporting that Ballo's asking price for one year of hooping was $1.2mm
I get that was his asking price but do we think this is honestly what he gets?
You're talking teams like Arkansas setting aside $6m a year and they're near the top. It's insane to me to think someone's going to be willing to commit 20-30% of their NIL budget on one player.
Not insane. In NBA roster construction terms, the max players eat up between 25 to 30% of payroll for any given team (and that's with a cap system in place).
Max players eat up that percentage because there's a cap in place -- and because there are only 30 teams.
In an environment where there are 100-plus high major caliber programs and payroll isn't restricted, transfers and elite freshmen aren't going to accept being paid a fraction of what their teammates are.
In the NBA there is an aggregate team cap and an individual player pay cap in place precisely because the biggest WAR contributors would eat up an even higher percentage of the team cap without the individual cap.
Payroll is effectively restricted in the NCAA because no team has unlimited resources (yet). While there will be differences, at the end of the day, teams are distributing limited resources either from a practical perspective (NCAA) or mandated perspective (NBA). Unless there is some magic involved here, one would expect the behavior in both instances to converge and become very similar over time.
Finally, given that a typical team has an 8-9 man rotation, 20-30% of total spend to the rarest commodities is about right.
College basketball's recruiting/payroll dynamics will never match the NBA's because there are way more options for the players. In the NBA, even the biggest free agents may have five legitimate suitors in a given cycle and that cycle won't repeat again for those players for several seasons. In college basketball, guys can market themselves to more than 10 times that many schools and choose the one that bites at their desired price -- and then do the same thing again any or all of the next three offseasons.
It's an apples to oranges comparison.
I disagree. Markets are markets. There is nothing so special about college basketball that will make it materially different from every other observed athletic market place.
Behavior converges across markets with differences built into each market to address its specific needs.
NBA free agents can sign one year deals and college athletes can sign multiyear deals. Given the greater information uncertainty, younger college players have less negotiating leverage and will see reduced offers which guides them toward one-year deals with upside potential to reentering the market after one year.
NBA players choose to sign multiyear deals because the injury risk/reward calculus tilts toward locking in the massive amount of cash. The point is that the difference in behavior between college free agents and NBA free agents isn't structural but rather information based.
And while there are more suitors in the college market, each team is still subject to having finite resources. Which means they'll have to work within the constraints of a limited budget and you'll see their behavior be very similar to professional teams: the top of the line guys will consume disproportionately greater resources.
MLB is probably most instructive here (revenue disparity across clubs is similar concept to college sports, although the degree of disparity is not nearly as wide). MLB attempts to process 600 new domestic amateurs each year (via the draft) and probably a similar number of international players. 1200 new players into the system each year is pretty close to D1 basketball: in the domestic amateur draft, despite a team expecting to draft 20 players, the first round pick will get slotted for upward of 50% of a team's draft pool comp. And those amateur players have the optionality of college so conceptually they have similar leverage as college players (not exactly the same). MLB has perfected this system over a century and it isn't a coincidence that the statistical efficiency revolution started there. Everyone else followed.
College basketball will be the same. You'll see college teams spend 20-30% of their NIL on the rarest commodities, just like every other professional sports team does.
No one is denying that it's a market. It's just not a market that will mirror that of the NBA ... for a lot of different reasons.
The biggest is that there is far more competition for players' services and far more limited resources for each school. The first gives the players' leverage to pit more suitors against each other and the second forces schools to ration their NIL dollars in a way that allows them to build a competitive roster.
And unlike the NBA, which incentivizes tanking when not in a position to compete -- thus limiting the number of teams in the free agent market every year -- everyone is trying to build a competitive roster at the college level, and anyone with the NIL funds available to attract talent will use them.
Players aren't often going to settle for less than they can get in a wide-open players' market. And the ability to re-enter it year after year forces schools to re-recruit and pay their own players every offseason.
There will certainly be a discrepancy in pay between the best players and rotational guys, but rotational guys won't accept the same level of discrepancy that NBA role players do because they don't have to. They're perpetual free agents and they'll get paid somewhere.
No, this is incorrect and misreads history. You also have the economic relationship backwards.
The disparity between role players and projected stars in pro leagues was GREATER prior to the institution of salary caps (Sam Bradford and Glenn Robinson say hi!) and draft slots. The NFL AND NBA solved the problem by essentially allocating more of the money pot for non-superstar veterans (role players) in exchange for capping the earnings of superstars and selling out the rookies. The PAs (where role player vets have the real power) gladly went along with it. The current discrepancy in pro sports between stars/role players/rookies isn't "accepted" by the role players/vets, it is enthusiastically embraced by them because it is a much better deal than they would get in an unregulated system. In an unregulated system the value flows to proven superstars and high draft choices. That's why NFL and NBA owners went to war with their PAs to fix the problem.
Again, MLB is instructive because they've been doing it the longest. Guys that produce WAR get paid. Rotational/replacement level players don't get paid nearly as much. All sports are now a straightforward capital allocation game. It doesn't quite matter as much as you think how many allocators there are for a variety of reasons, but the market value of 1 WAR is the market value of 1 WAR.
Coaches are not dummies. The guys running NIL collectives aren't dummies. . They'll bargain basement hunt for role players/back end rotational guys and leave the bulk of their cash for the guys that produce value.
I also think you're getting the Econ backwards: 1 year NIL deals force teams to rerecruit and reset values for proven producers. But they also act as a dumping mechanism for guys who didn't work out. If the guy didn't work out, you cut him loose on the NIL deal.
Do you really think Caleb Williams didn't get a two-year deal with Dr Peoper and the NIL collective when he went to USC? Every single coach in the country would gladly give Donovan Cllingan a 2-year NIL deal right now.
The fact that there are more teams doesn't move the needle enough. Realistically, Kentucky isn't competing with UC Santa Barbera for any player.
Hell, Nick Saban said that less than a third of his players got money via the Alabama NIL collective which sounds like the role players/back end rotational guys at a powerhouse program have accepted the discrepancy.
Yes, there will be differences, but ultimately, the behaviors of capital allocators will converge because that's pretty much what happens across markets as people figure things out. Basketball teams will spend the bulk of their NIL on two or three key guys. College Football teams will spend it on QB,OT and pass rush.