Dark money

A reader has sent me down a rabbit hole with the seemingly simple question of how much the Oregon Ducks football players are being paid this year. I've now burned more time than it's worth trying to find out, and the answer is, funny you should ask.

Most of us agreed in principle long ago that college athletes should get a piece of the bajillions of dollars they earn for their schools, putting many players at great risk to their physical and mental health. And the government – courts and the federal labor bureaucracy – have ruled in favor of the students' being compensated. But the government edicts haven't spelled out how the system should work, and the athletic conferences and the central college sports governing body, the NCAA, have flailed around, making for a chaotic scene.

Now, I'm no expert on this, but at the moment, as best I can determine, most of the money, and we could be talking a billion or more a year nationally, is being paid to the "student athletes" not by the colleges, but by shadowy "collectives," which are alumni booster organizations not officially part of the schools. On paper, the students are licensing their name, image, likeness (a.k.a. "NIL"), and/or reputation, and they are supposed to be performing services in exchange for the money, like signing autographs, endorsing products, posing for selfies with fans, or posting who-knows-what on TikTok. 

But hey, let's be real here for a minute, they're essentially being paid to play their sports (mostly men's basketball and football, I presume) for the college to which the "collective" is loyal. For the U of O, the outfit is called Division Street, and its backers include folks like Phil Knight, the all-you-can-eat bucket of fiscal fries for Duck sports.

This system has a lot of political clout. Many states, including Oregon, have statutes governing the athletes' deals, and they seem to be pretty friendly to the whole thing. Just this past session, the Oregon legislature amended its law to try to make it harder for the NCAA to enforce its rules against schools that don't do as they're told.

Apparently the system is going to change over the next year or two, to one in which the colleges themselves will pay the athletes. At that point, the rich alumni will presumably shift out of the "collectives" and donate to their beloved university athletic departments, taking tax deductions all the way. Under the current system, some "collectives" say that they're tax-deductible charitable organizations, but I hear the IRS is not buying that line any more. The new system could make some tax issues go away.

In the meantime, one new NCAA rule, which just took effect at the start of this month, requires the athletes to disclose the details of any non-trivial deals to their schools. The schools are then supposed to sanitize out the names and report on the deals to the NCAA a couple of times a year. And so if the colleges obey the rules, they'll be capable of telling you who's getting what. But of course, they won't tell you. Even public universities will claim that the information is confidential under the federal student records law.

So anyway, to get back to my buddy's question, how much are the Oregon football players getting paid this year? $20 million? More? Less? Bill Oram of the O tried to get a ballpark number out of the Duck football coach, but he's not talking, and Oram probably isn't going to push the question too hard. If he does, the Ducks could freeze him out from future news scoops, which wouldn't be good for his employer, or for him.

There's a website called On3.com that estimates individual athletes' values for this purpose, but the site's methodology is kind of a black box, and they admit their numbers are appraisals, not hard information about actual deals. For what it's worth, they show more than two dozen U of O ballers with values greater than $270,000 a year. Here are the top 10 of those, with their appraised values:

1. Evan Stewart (WR) $1.3 million

2. Dillon Gabriel (QB) $1.2 million

3. Ajani Cornelius (OT) $626,000

4. Tez Johnson (WR) $526,000

5. Jabbar Muhammad (CB) $486,000

6. Jordan James (RB) $415,000

7. Josh Conerly Jr. (OT) $385,000

8. Dante Moore (QB) $341,000

9. Marcus Harper (IOL) $330,000

10. Kam Alexander (CB) $324,000

For those 10 gents alone, the valuation totals $5,933,000. Quite a chunk of change, although as I say, it seems those figures are just educated guesses. 

There are something like 90 other players on the football roster. And as I say, 20 of them are valued at an average of about $300,000. We're up to $12 million, with 70 more to go. And that's just football.

Anyway, I'm glad the jocks are getting paid, but it's pretty ridiculous that here they are, now legally classified as university employees, at a public institution, and yet we have no idea who's getting paid what by whom in exchange for what. It isn't exactly what some of us envisioned when we said that the hypocrisy of "amateur" athletics should be shattered.

The other thing you have to worry about with this young and impressionable group is who's managing their money, and who's keeping them from being robbed blind by shady agents and others. I'm sure some of them have their financial act together, and some of them do not. Transparency about what kinds of deals they've gotten themselves into might help protect the lambs, or in this case the Ducks, from the wolves.

There are readers out there who understand this better than I do. That's what the comments section is for. As fascinating as the topic is, I've got some other rocks to turn over around here.