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Originally Posted by HerRealName
Michigan had a ton of momentum at the end of last season and weird Harbaugh has proceeded to kick himself over and over in the balls ever since. He immediately starts a public campaign for an NFL job and loses both Coordinators and his director of recruiting as a result.
It seems like UM has the same NIL collective as everyone else but they don't introduce it to recruits in the same way as nearly every other school. There's no way Michigan State should be able to outperform UM in this area. It's just complete incompetence.
Also, do we have to elevate the shitty half of the SEC. I'm not comfortable pretending like Arkansas, SC, Vandy, etc. belong in some kind of elite conference.
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I think there was a part of Harbaugh that was so angry about being forced to take a pay cut when he wasn't winning big games despite having talented teams that when he finally put it all together and got his system working, he decided to make a statement of some sort.
I'm not sure he ever intended to leave for the Vikings. But the second he took that interview, he lost everything. If it's just a one-year recruiting blip in the end, they have the talent to absorb it. If not, he won't be here to deal with the fallout.
My understanding of the NIL issue here is that Michigan will not offer recruits anything. They just say "come here and you'll have the opportunity to make a lot of money" while just about everyone else says, "the NCAA is dead, we'll give you money to sign that letter." Saban can even say it with a straight face while complaining that Texas A&M is somehow cheating by doing the same thing.
So, Wild West. And we're here because we've never really answered the question why college athletics should still matter if we drop the veneer and stop pretending college athletes are amateurs who "get paid" with scholarships.
Major college football is the second-biggest sports league in the world. Mostly made up of players whose goal (realistically or not) is to become part of the biggest sports league in the world. It's an apprenticeship where the apprentices are actually generating a lot of revenue. This is a unique situation and requires a unique solution.
I find it interesting that the colleges in the Ivy League, seeing the hypocrisy decades before anyone else did, got out of this business long ago. Now, decades later, you go into the Ivy footprint and sports is more like it is in the rest of the world - the pros draw all the interest and the colleges have amateur club sports. Go anywhere else, and it's entirely different.