Razorbacks' Radio Voice Chuck Barrett on NIL, Hogs

It's not a good situation for Arkansas right now, lagging behind even Missouri on money

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — An awful lot of the talk around college football this week in Arkansas has been about all of this name-image-likeness thing. For the sake of readability, that's called NIL in future references, Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman pointed out Wednesday it's a problem.

Even the radio voice of the Razorbacks Chuck Barrett weighed in on Ruscin & Zach on Thursday afternoon on ESPN Arkansas. Listening to Barrett back in the days when he was doing an evening radio show statewide, you might want to pay attention because it's not just stuff he's firing off the top of his head. He talks to folks.

"I think what they're trying to figure out is how they're going to play the game," he said on the show that's carried over a large part of Arkansas and on HitThatLine. Then he dropped some interesting information about the top four teams in the playoff rankings now: Georgia, Ohio State, Michigan and Florida State.

"As certain as we are talking all four of those schools have NIL budgets in excess of $13 million annually," he said. "All of them do, I promise you. We're not anywhere close to that. You look at Alabama and some of the schools like that, we're not close to that. I hate to say it, but I'm not even sure we're close to Missouri right now. We're behind the 8-ball right here."

Pittman: Hogs' NIL 'Probably Not as Large' with Others in SEC

He's not prone to exaggeration on these things and that's the issue Pittman was talking about this week. The future of college football is that these job openings are not about how much the coach is paid, but how much the school has for NIL. It's more like potential coaches asking the schools about THAT before getting to what they get paid. Some simple-minded folks think these guys just want the money, but coaches don't think that way. Most of them want to win.

""People take that as excuse-making," Barrett said, pointing NIL is a completely separate issue from the coach. "If there's not more NIL money, the schools that don't have it don't have a prayer. If you don't think Arkansas and some other schools that don't have it aren't being out-bid every day you're nuts. You're absolutely crazy. It shouldn't be this way, but it is."

There is the entire problem in a nutshell. Nobody really knows for sure the exact number of all this stuff and they are hoping for regulation from Congress or somebody. That isn't going to happen. The courts aren't going to allow it.

Pittman referred to the NFL model and that is true in the early years of free agency. They were able to put caps on it because they have a players' union and a collective bargaining agreement. College sports doesn't have that and every player is literally a free agent with the transfer portal these days. Social media means they can communicate with other players and nobody can see it without violating privacy laws.

Coaches like Pittman talk about NIL not because they don't know how to handle it, but they don't make enough money to fund enough to compete for championships. There are some naive media people in Arkansas that still believe players want to be Razorbacks because they love the school and the state.

That's probably true to a certain extent. But not anywhere near enough to get the Hogs back to even the level they were at in 2010-11 when they won 10 and 11 games and ended up finishing third in their own division in the SEC after the final polls.

Don't blame Pittman. When he was hired none of this was in place. There was no transfer portal and there were still some rules and regulations in place. All that changed rapidly. With an athletics director still learning where the towns were in the state and a coach learning how to be a head coach, they didn't have the longterm relationships built on a decade of competing for a championship almost every year.

Pretty depressing stuff, huh? Athletic directors are going to have to learn how to raise money like politicians. The ones that can do it (or have a right-hand person doing it for them) will be successful. Relying on anybody to regulate it probably isn't going to happen for awhile.

HOGS FEED:

HAS EVERYONE REACHED THE POINT WHERE THERE'S LITTLE FOR RAZORBACKS TO GAIN PLAYING KJ?

FORMER RAZORBACK ALL-AMERICAN THINKS IT MAY BE TIME TO DIFFERENT DIRECTION WITH COACH

SAM PITTMAN KEEPING STATUS QUO IN PLACE AFTER 48-10 LOSS TO AUBURN AND NO BOWL GAME

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