Arkansas Athletic Director Says Running Program in NIL Era Has Been 'Terrible'

The man running the show for the Arkansas Razorbacks says that overseeing an athletics program in the era of NIL has not been fun.

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Arkansas Razorbacks Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek spoke at the Little Rock Touchdown Club on Monday, and of the many topics discussed, it was no surprise that Name, Image, and Likeness came up heavily.

Arkansas has been at the forefront of the NIL game with several billionaire alumnus including John H. Tyson of Tyson Foods, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, and the Walton family of Walmart, all of whom have been involved with the Razorbacks dealings in the NIL space.

Despite the fact that Arkansas has as many advantages as any other school in terms of financial backing, the job of an AD in this new era has certainly shifted in the past several years, and Yurachek spoke honestly about how he truly feels about running a program in the age of NIL.

"It has been terrible. It’s been awful," Yurachek told the Little Rock Touchdown Club. "NIL the way it was intended on July 1 of 2021, that if a student athlete had a value to their name, image or likeness and there was a business product or service that wanted to use a student athlete to market their business, product or service, well (the athlete) could receive valid compensation to do that."

Yurachek isn't exactly saying anything revolutionary here in arguing that NIL has veered far away from its original intention of allowing players to profit on their own brand and instead turned into buying teams, but it is rare to hear an AD speak so openly against what has become the norm in college sports today.

He would go on to compare his school's NIL collective 'Edge' to the 'Grove Collective' of Ole Miss, saying that the collective in Oxford has over 5,000 donors while Arkansas only has 1,000. Despite what Yurachek says, however, the Razorbacks don't seem to be taking a financial back seat to anyone in college sports right now.

Famously, Yurachek's basketball program had utilized the transfer portal, which now goes hand-in-hand with NIL, as much as anyone under now former head coach Eric Musselman. There's no reason to think that strategy will change much under John Calipari.

Managing it all is certainly quite the challenge for an Athletic Director, but surely Yurachek would prefer to have the funds and have to allocate them rather than struggling to make ends meet as a program as is the reality for numerous smaller schools across the country in 2024.