CLEMSON -- On a few occasions in recent months, Dabo Swinney has heralded the advent of revenue sharing with athletes as being great for Clemson's long-term football positioning.
Yet to date there hasn't been much explaining and clarifying of the details that provide that confidence. For the average fan, the whole enterprise of player compensation past, present and future is murky.
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That starts to change later this morning when Clemson will present its supporters with a detailed road map of sorts of how it will address revenue sharing when it begins this summer, and how it will navigate the next seven months with NIL still the dominant source of player compensation.
This announcement will be the public culmination of several months of considerable behind-the-scenes maneuvering and deliberation that began over the summer.
It's a highly complicated topic, but here's the best way we can sum the whole thing up as it relates to the football program:
Starting July 1st, Clemson will distribute the maximum allowable revenue of $20.5 million per year to its athletes. And Clemson believes the percentage of that $20.5 million it distributes to football will be among the highest nationally, if not the highest.
But before it gets to that point, Clemson is focusing its efforts on fundraising for NIL over the next seven months.
There's no way we can cover all aspects of this in one article, and the lengthy announcement from Clemson this morning will exhaustively cover a lot of the finer points.
But as we try to convey the important broad strokes in layman's terms, here are a few insights following our conversations with multiple contacts:
-- We anticipate Clemson will announce that all contributions to the 110 Society made between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025 will be eligible to earn IPTAY priority points. On top of this, we are told multiple anonymous donors have pledged to match all contributions dollar-for-dollar up to $6 million for the NIL initiative.
-- In recent months we've shared that Clemson, again trying to fortify its NIL coffers for the seven months that precede revenue sharing, has accelerated its push to fans. Where earlier in the NIL era Clemson was relying more on a small group of major donors to fund the large majority of the operation, of late they've shifted to soliciting support from the larger masses.
-- We've also noted recently that the head football coach hasn't really been a part of that messaging, for whatever reason. We anticipate that's going to change starting at his press conference today, where Swinney is expected to put his words behind the short- and long-term plans for player compensation. Of course Swinney has a pretty monumental game to prepare for this week, as this rivalry matchup is the biggest in at least a decade with implications including but not limited to possible playoff inclusion. But the NIL and revenue-sharing initiatives are that important.
-- Coming up with $20.5 million new dollars annually for revenue sharing is certainly a chore, and the cap is only going to rise over subsequent years as overall revenues produced by college athletics (media/TV rights, etc.) increase. The university recently approved a student athletics fee of $150 per semester that is expected to generate between $7 and $8 million in new revenue. There have been discussions of alcohol sales at football and basketball games, and we would be surprised if that didn't happen. Other possibilities are commercial logos on the football field and basketball court, and advertising patches on football and basketball jerseys.
-- The revenue-sharing model will also reduce and even eliminate some of the NCAA compliance entanglements that have made it difficult for Clemson to convert various silos of funds into NIL dollars. Some other schools out there have played fast and loose with these compliance barriers, effectively calculating that the NCAA won't police them on traversing the gray areas. We can tell you that Clemson's compliance operation is simply not messing around when it comes to permitting that, and thus the new revenue-sharing landscape is going to open up funding sources that haven't been accessible within the present NIL model. One of the big avenues is giving Clemson a substantial NIL presence, even in the revenue-sharing era, by introducing corporate partnerships, sponsorships, endorsements, etc., with athletes.
-- The cap of $20.5 million doesn't even include the cost of the scholarships Clemson plans to add. To comply with Title IX, the athletics department plans to create 150 new scholarships across all sports in 2025-26 at a cost of $6 million. This on top of the 275 scholarships Clemson already funds.
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-- It's important to remember that revenue sharing is optional. Thus, there figure to be plenty of schools (particularly in the ACC) that don't reach the cap of $20.5 million. There will also be plenty that choose against the expense of adding more scholarships for football (in large part because of the cost of matching those scholarships in women's sports to comply with Title IX).
Thus the traditional advantages Clemson has had over the vast majority of its ACC brethren in football resources will only be further accentuated in the revenue-sharing model. And as we said above, Clemson expects its football team to earn a higher percentage of the revenue share than most (and perhaps all) SEC and Big Ten schools.
-- Recently we've seen some subscribers share the difficulties they've encountered in trying to make NIL donations or just learn more about how they can help. We'll just say this: The lapses in responsiveness and communications have been noticed, and deemed inexcusable. That part is going to be addressed in short order, and the people we speak with are confident it will be rectified.
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So many layers to all this, and Tigerillustrated.com plans to explore more of them later today and through the week.
Yes, it's South Carolina week and of course there's lots of focus on that from us.
But the NIL/revenue sharing topic is pretty big, too.
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