Auburn basketball's new practice facility is "on hold", per Bruce Pearl

Bruce Pearl wants Auburn to take care of the NIL space first.

Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl spoke to the media on Monday morning before teeing off for his "Bruce, Barkley, and Basketball" Golf Classic at Robert Trent Jones - Grand National. 

And his comments made more waves than a tee shot into adjoining Saugahatchee Lake. 

Regarding the development of the basketball practice facility, Pearl indicated that there were concerns that had to be addressed before the practice facility would be built. "Here's what we've got to do: We've got to take care of the NIL space first — in all sports. First, that's got to be one of our commitments and our objectives," Pearl said when asked about the facility. "We've got some other things to take care of before we take care of the practice facility."

After "name, image, and likeness" rules were passed by the NCAA last summer, college programs have been racing to build out bigger and better NIL programs, both marketplaces to connect student-athletes with endorsement opportunities and "collectives" to funnel donations to student-athletes. Auburn has launched the "SPIRIT Exchange" to do the former and has seen numerous permutations of an NIL collective to accomplish the latter, most recently On To Victory, which launched over the summer and has advertising featured prominently inside Jordan-Hare Stadium on game days as well as behind Coach Bryan Harsin for his press conferences. The new collective has reportedly surpassed their first-year funding goal in less than two months.   

The basketball facility was approved by Auburn's Board of Trustees in February, and architectural Goodwin Mills Caywood was hired in April. A detailed explanation for the change in priority was not given, but Pearl indicated that the facility was not immediately required for the success of his basketball program.  

"We've won sharing the practice facility with the volleyball team and the women's basketball team and gymnastics being in there. That doesn't transition to winning. Would I love a better teaching space? Would it be easier on our student athletes to be able to, you know, have us not have to share time with everybody? We're making it work. But when we do it, we're gonna do it right."

Once the new facility is complete, it would serve as the primary practice space for both the men's and women's basketball programs, as well as being available for overflow from Neville Arena. Currently, both basketball teams, volleyball, and gymnastics all use the existing Neville Arena playing surface and practice facility, as well as providing access as required by the SEC for road basketball teams who are in town to play the Tigers, so scheduling conflicts are frequent and disruptive.  

Pearl made the point that the priority on NIL was more than just basketball. Most sports at Auburn, similar to the rest of the NCAA, are not revenue positive.  We reviewed Auburn's 2019 Financial Reporting System report to the NCAA, obtained through FOIA Request, and learned that of the $31.5M in ticket revenue earned in 2019, over $29M of it was football, with men's basketball bringing in just under $2M, baseball bringing in just over $500k, softball drawing just over $200k, and gymnastics bringing in $119k. No sport outside of football ($5.2M) and men's basketball ($752k) earned enough from ticket sales to cover the cost of just the scholarships for participating athletes, never mind the full expenditure on travel, uniforms, nutrition, etc. required to compete at the Power 5 level.  

NIL is particularly impactful for "equivalency" sports, like baseball, where scholarships are not allocated in full to each player by rather divided amongst the entire team and NIL funds can help cover the cost of tuition for participating athletes. Only football, basketball (men and women's), volleyball, women's tennis, and gymnastics are "headcount" sports where full scholarships are awarded to each athlete. Every other sport on campus is considered "non-revenue" and therefore subject to the equivalency method for distributing scholarships - baseball has 11.7 scholarships to divide amongst the entire roster.  

While there is hope that scholarship restrictions for equivalency sports may be revised in the future, NIL is a crucial part of Auburn's goal of competing for championships across the entire athletics department and truly being an #EverythingSchool.  

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