In a win-at-all-costs college football landscape, Arkansas consistently finds itself on the back burner of something that has taken over the sport: Name, Image and Likeness (NIL).
Compared to the rest of the Southeastern Conference and its rival foes, Arkansas already has several built-in disadvantages. The most glaring of which is in-state talent (or the lack thereof), and we all know talent is needed to win in big-boy college football. NIL money can be a pretty helpful tool in attracting and retaining prospects from all over the country.
The idea that players are being “bought” by collectives doesn’t sit well with most people, but it’s the reality now across college athletics.
RELATED: Where Arkansas’ NIL funding stands in the SEC
Instead of complaining about the morality of the situation, why not switch stations to a more positive tune? That’s been tough for Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek.
Being negative about the very thing a program needs to thrive seems counterproductive, whether the reasoning is justified or not. Yurachek continued to echo those thoughts Monday at the Little Rock Touchdown Club.
“It has been terrible,” Yurachek said. “It’s been awful. NIL, the way it was intended, the way it was intended July 1st of 2021, that if a student athlete had a value to their name, image or likeness, and there was a business product or service like one of these many businesses up here, that wanted to use a student athlete to market their business product or service, well they could receive valid compensation to do that.
“And that’s how this all started. Our student athletes in their first year did an incredible job going out and knocking on doors, beating the bushes and they generated almost $2.5 million in what I will call the most legitimate NIL agreements that they went out and got on their own.”
That $2.5 million for Arkansas’ student-athletes may have been impressive during NIL’s inaugural year, but it holds nothing to some of the numbers being reported now for players. Tennessee quarterback and former five-star Nico Iamaleava reportedly signed an NIL contract worth approximately $8 million with Spyre Sports (a Tennessee collective) in 2023, according to The Athletic.
Arkansas has its own NIL collective in Arkansas Edge, but it has failed to generate the hype and membership level that other teams’ collectives have. Some of that could be due to a lack of winning — although the football team is technically 2-1 since the collective debuted in November — but Yurachek’s comments on the “ridiculous” payouts some players receive probably don’t help facilitate growth, either.
“But in college athletics, we are our own worst enemy and we find the loophole to every single rule in the rulebook, and we found a loophole where we created these things called collectives,” Yurachek said. “Collectives are donors pooling their resources together to pay student athletes as collectives under the auspice of doing charitable work.
“Whether that was tweeting about a charitable organization or signing autographs or making public appearances. But, the amounts of money that were getting paid were simply ridiculous and still are ridiculous, and they just continue to be ridiculous.”
According to Yurachek, collectives aren’t paying market value for players, they’re just buying teams. Well, why wouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t programs take advantage of the lack of NCAA regulations — for now — to help win games?
With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Arkansas finds itself behind the eight ball in NIL support and fundraising efforts, according to Yurachek.
“We’ve finally gotten our footing at the University of Arkansas in the NIL world, but we’re not where we need to be,” Yurachek said. “I’ll tell you, the upper echelon of the SEC in football is probably spending double of what we’re spending on our football program right now in the NIL space. That’s reality.
“You can blame that on Sam Pittman but it’s not Sam Pittman’s problem. It’s his problem, but it’s a money problem, right? Because if someone is spending double of what we’re spending, they’re going to have a corner on the market.”
Remember Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss? Rumored to be a candidate for Arkansas’ head coach opening in 2019, Kiffin is now reaching for the stars with the Rebels. His top-five Ole Miss squad is full of top transfer talent, the majority of which was funded by a well-marketed NIL collective — The Grove Collective.
RELATED: Yurachek on Arkansas’ NIL funding: ‘We need a grassroots effort’
“Ole Miss, everybody loves that Ole Miss is in the top five, right? No, we hate it,” Yurachek said. “We hate it. Ole Miss has about 5,000 members in their football collective. 5,000. We have about 1,000 in our football collective right now.”
Those numbers paint the picture of where Arkansas sits in the SEC football hierarchy today. Unfortunately for the Razorbacks, they sit in a chicken-or-egg conundrum. How does a program raise NIL production without winning games, and how does a team win games without a solid NIL stream?
Yurachek proposed an “easy” solution to the touchdown club crowd in Little Rock on Monday, one that is well-intentioned but might be too grandiose for a program led by a head coach who boasts a 25-26 record.
“I’m going to make it so easy for you,” Yurachek said. “If we can get 10,000 households across the state of Arkansas to give $100 a month all year along, we would be in the NIL game from a football perspective. It’s that simple, but we can’t say, ‘The Tysons, the Waltons, the Stephens, the Hunts, hey they’ll take care of it.’ Because they’re not.
“They are so incredibly generous and they’ve done so much for our program. But if we’re really going to get a handle on this NIL, remain competitive, we need to rally people across this state and we really got to take some pride in the Razorbacks.”
Up next, Arkansas will face off against the Auburn Tigers (2-1, 0-0 SEC) in the Razorbacks’ SEC opener at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Alabama. The game is set to kick off at 2:30 p.m. CT and it will be broadcast on ESPN.
