HB

We paid Meah even more.

Washington

They sign personal services contracts with NIL and are deemed to be independent contractors. They get 1099s for tax purposes rather than W-2s. Would not be subject to public disclosure of salaries. Once the Universities are paying the players directly--soon--I would expect a legal challenge to the players' status. And perhaps compelling payment info.

I believe yes. Things have been changing dramatically with NIL over the past couple of years. Prices escalated substantially. Last portal season that happened to a large degree in just the few weeks of the portal season. That is, from the time Gary and Williams signed their deals, to the time Meah and Berke were signed. Agents were figuring out leverage, and perceived desperation drives up prices.

Of course, you can't. And you won't. Even when the University makes it's own spend in the near future, you won't hear what each individual player is getting. Not sure if we'll even know how the roughly $22 million is allocated among the programs. And feel free to be skeptical about what you see thrown around on message boards, because a lot of it is indeed wrong. But sometimes the info comes from people close to Fred, or the donors, or the NIL leaders, and is pretty accurate. Hard for the reader to parse out who might be just throwing out inaccurate hearsay, and those who know some stuff.

They got there's tonight. St. Johns whupped their ass. Love it.

Got bad news for you. Meah and Berke were more than a combined $1M.

We have donors very willing to donate to basketball NIL. The problem there aren't enough of them, and many of them are constantly getting hit up on all fronts--football, facilities, etc. It's "hey , we have an interior lineman from Notre Dame and we need a hundred grand from you (or your business) to get him." Then it's "hey, we have a post defender we can get but we need a hundred grand from you to do it." These relatively few individuals and entities are the "usual suspects", who do pretty darn well and resist donor fatigue pretty staunchly. Fred has the support of these folks. We just need more of them, as there's only so much they can do.

Affirmative on getting tossed. Final game? I'll believe it when I see it.

Me too, Bugs. Remember it like it was yesterday.

As a buddy said, he certainly gave the other teams a sporting chance to win. Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't mean to diminish the award, and I think that sportsmanship is still important and deserves to be recognized.

Well deserved.

Wow, looks like Jones and I against the world. This year was not progress. Our roster sucked. It was not athletic, and we couldn't shoot the basketball or handle it well. Our portal acquisitions as a whole were really bad. Man, the standards on here are low.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on that. You state the better year as fact. Hardly. A complete regression and failure of a year.

I'm not comparing making, or even winning, a bowl game to making the NCAA tournament. I'm comparing it to not even making the conference tournament when 15 of 18 teams get in. Abject failure.

Feel free to keep piling on football, which cracks me up when this board does that, given the life long futility in basketball. But if it makes you feel better, pile on football. If you want to make the "one or 2 baskets from" argument, that can be done with football. One catch (Neyer), one throw (Raiola to Linderman vs. Illinois), bad calls (Ohio State). Face it, basketball went backward this year, and football went forward, from the previous seasons.

Ultimately who cares about the opponents' records? We finished 7-13 in conference and didn't even make the conference tournament, 17-14 overall with a bunch of patsies in the win total vs. a winning record and a bowl win. Maybe in some hyper-technical sense you can try to make that sense, but in the big picture, failure vs. progress.

We need to remember that there are 2 pools to pay players going forward. One is the $20-22 million the University can pay players in all sports. The other is NIL. Nebraska will pay the maximum amount allowed and has it funded. The question is how it gets divided among the sports. NIL is unlimited. So revenue sources to the University won't affect what we can pay an individual basketball player. Until they clamp down on the wild west, the teams with big NIL will thrive.

You're being really kind to Connor.

No way. We didn't make a conference tournament when 15 of the 18 teams make it. Abject failure. No other way to describe it. Certainly it was described that way when we didn't make the Big 10 tournament in baseball.

On the other hand, it could be stated that with a 37-82 conference record, and not even making a 15 team conference tournament in year 6, it's a weird time that other than some message board fire, there isn't a groundswell to fire the coach. I'm not on the "fire Fred this year" team, but it isn't outlandish for people to be on it.

Yeah, the last 2 year portal acquisition of point guards was a disaster. Gotta do better there. Agents for point guards in the portals will be able to hold us this year.

They already do. But it's the same people getting hit up for football, other sports, facilities, etc. It's not that easy to get enough people willing to write big checks to directly pay players. Wish we had a broader group of well-heeled college sports fans. But it's always easy to tell others what to do with their money.

Most if not all of the donors who would write such a check like Fred, and most know him personally. However, if we suck next year, it all becomes more obvious.

Douche thing to say in the midst of a 5 game losing streak, and 6 of 7, or whatever the hell it is.