OT: Charlie Batch straight offering $1M for Caleb Williams to EMU
"But you can't straight out offer NIL money to induce players to your school!!! RULES!"
The wild wild west is going to be fun. I don't know if Charlie has any association with EMU other than alumni. p.s. TJ Lang of Packers and Lions (and EMU) is backing this up as well.
Unless rules change if a player is a wildly successful freshman or RS freshman many will immediately hit the portal and sell themselves to the highest bidder. There is no salary cap and a lot of hungry investors.
What if ABC team had a billionaire with F*** you money (i.e $50M a year is chump change) who through back channels let CJ Stroud know $8M is the price if they want to move on over. Free markets are fun. It's happening... just not through the churches in South Carolina anymore.
January 6th, 2022 at 1:14 PM ^
Delayed, yes. Prevented, no.
People wanting more money is almost as old as dirt.
What's better is what happens next. Use the EMU example. What's better? $1M dollars to the athletic department for one year or $1M dollars to one player in one sport for one year? The end state of that model is EMU folding it's athletic department and a few players getting rich with no real ties to the school. That happens at enough places and the sports everyone on this blog loves no longer exist.
Every pro sports org, which has stood the test of time, has a structure in place to make sure the system doesn't devour itself. There is balance to how the funds are dispersed. I'm not saying the old way was right with players getting almost nothing, but this current new way is worse. There needs to be a measure of balance or the whole thing eventually implodes.
January 6th, 2022 at 1:29 PM ^
there's a simple reason this didn't happen: because of Title IX, if you pay some players salary, you have to pay every athlete in the AD the same amount . Although that would be great, there isn't money for that. So NIL outsources the pay to the private sector, who doesn't have to abide by Title IX.
January 6th, 2022 at 4:35 PM ^
No, that is not how Title IX works.
January 6th, 2022 at 8:53 AM ^
You’ve got that right ERdoc. This is the beginning of the end of college football. The insanity will eventually destroy what was the game I think most of us fell in love with. This idea of free market is just going to help the rich get richer and most programs will be left in the dust. Basically another monopoly of a business. I think a few years down the road there will be plenty of stories of 18 year old kids chasing money who never made the league, have no education and nothing to fall back on. Throwing stupid money at a problem isn’t always the answer
January 6th, 2022 at 12:24 PM ^
I think everything many fans love basically died this offseason.
Players arent going to give a shit for their school anymore, there's not going to be pride in growing and developing as a person.
It's gonna be "fuck you, got mine"
Which, fair, but, ya know, I'm not gonna watch.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:35 PM ^
NCAA is a joke, they can't enforce anything.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:43 PM ^
What's there to enforce? The NCAA punted to Congress to make the rules. Congress isn't going to do that. Hell, Congress can't concern itself with governing, let alone making rules for colleges.
There are no rules.
January 6th, 2022 at 8:44 AM ^
They would enforce this.
But their goal wasn't to recruit Caleb Williams with these tweets, it was to get free publicity for EMU. MAC level recruits may remember these tweets and think there is some money to be made at EMU or WMU, Bowling Green, etc.
Can't punish a random person for tweeting something if it doesn't happen.
January 6th, 2022 at 9:38 AM ^
The NCAA had decades to figure out how to regulate or oversee the NIL or payment aspect of college athletics. They were content to do nothing all those years while racking in millions and millions of dollars off the backs of these athletes.
I have no sympathy for them or the "college football is forever changed/now a business/just like the NFL" crowd. It's always been this way, with schools using money or benefits to entice recruits and now it's just transparent instead of under the table. If the NCAA wanted rules, they had all the time in the world to do it.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:35 PM ^
Just a small Batch of money for his services.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:35 PM ^
If you’re good at something never do it for free.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:44 PM ^
If you find something you like to do and get paid doing it, you’ll never work a day in your life.
January 5th, 2022 at 11:11 PM ^
I dunno. That summer I spent as a gigolo in Mississippi sure felt like work…
January 6th, 2022 at 12:45 AM ^
Stop whining. I had to spend a summer as a gigolo in Harlan County. I mean...the high point was having a Bourbon with Boyd Crowder and his neo Nazi buddies.
January 6th, 2022 at 11:17 AM ^
Just because you like to do it doesn’t mean you’re good at it and doesn’t mean it’s gonna pay the bills.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:36 PM ^
EMU should probably work on their facilities a bit before making such offers.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:37 PM ^
This is crazy but you had to know once they let the genie out of the bottle anything could happen.
January 6th, 2022 at 7:31 AM ^
I think eventually this will settle out where affiliates of the University end up raising "permanent funds" that they use to fund NIL deals. So a school like Michigan might end up with a $300M fund to pay $20M per year to the players, and they'll be on real contracts that are finalized during the recruiting process. It will probably look more like European soccer where certain schools have built-in advantages but the ground is always shifting (like, wow Stanford just increased it's permanent fund to $500M because Elon Musk decided he likes football now and donated $300M, or some centi-millionaire just died and left $50M to Miami but he said it needs to be spent in two years, etc...) Ultimately, it will be a good thing but it's going to need to settle out.
January 6th, 2022 at 11:02 AM ^
I agree with this, at some point boosters are going to get tired of giving NIL gigs to players and recruits, only to see them walk out and transfer the next year. It all has to work itself out, but at some point contracts will be involved that stipulate how much money is awarded to players that are actively on that team's roster. I would imagine they'll be loaded on the backend to "encourage" players to stay with the team instead of transferring.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:38 PM ^
Where does Charlie Batch get that money? Maybe he made $20M as a player, but it doesn't seem like thats enough to throw out $1M for a 1-yr rental to a small school. I assume there was also ad money he pulled in, but Good Lord...
I mean, more power to him for the offer. And more power to Caleb for earning the offer. I kinda hope he takes it. A big time P5 starter at a blue-blooded P5 contender playing for EMU would be fun to watch!
January 6th, 2022 at 11:05 AM ^
That’s funny….The Lions paid him more for three seasons than the Steelers did for eleven.
January 6th, 2022 at 11:35 AM ^
Sounds like the Lions.
January 5th, 2022 at 11:22 PM ^
I don't know anything about GameAbove Capital.
I should probably google it before I finish typing this, but where is the fun in that.
Since TJ Lang is tweeting about it, and both the Lang tweet as well as the Charlie Batch tweet mentioned "GameAbove Capital", I'm guessing it is more than just Charlie Batch putting up the money.
I agree, I hope he takes it too.
It would be fun to watch!
January 6th, 2022 at 12:56 AM ^
Game Above Capital is a subsidiary of Capstone Holdings. The President of Capstone is Keith Stone, an EMU grad from Flint. Charlie Batch is the Capstone Senior VP for Strategic Investments. I guess offering a million dollars to a freshman quarterback qualifies as a strategic investment.
January 6th, 2022 at 10:59 AM ^
Good to know, thank you!
January 6th, 2022 at 11:56 AM ^
His name is fucking Keith Stone?
January 5th, 2022 at 11:30 PM ^
A secret about money. The more you have of it, the easier it is to increase it. If he saved 10mm by the end of his career, he’d have over 40mm today with an S&P index fund. Each year, that would increase by about 6% adjusted for inflation. That doesn’t include any money he makes on the side for appearances, his broadcasting career, etc. and the investment income gets taxed at 15% vs normal income tax. Our system is set up to let the rich get filthy rich with zero effort.
January 6th, 2022 at 8:16 AM ^
Charlie Batch is the son of a Pennsylvania school teacher. The "system" allowed a middle class (at best) son of a school teacher with an absentee father to become rich.
Your suggestion that he did this with "zero effort" is insulting.
January 6th, 2022 at 8:31 AM ^
I don't think that's what he's saying. Turning the $10m to $40m required little effort unless that person is the one buying and selling the stock and doing the research for investments themselves. But even then, the return on investments is made possible by the labor of others within the companies that increased the asset's standing.
Getting to the point where you "merit" the large salary is where the hard work for the individual was put in.
January 6th, 2022 at 9:51 AM ^
That is exactly the point......
Earning the first million is always the toughest, from there the time (and effort) decreases significantly for each subsequent million.
I have told my sons this story multiple times....
In financing, they teach you the "rule of 70". The rule of 70 states that you can take any % annual return and divide it into 70 that that tells you how many years it takes for an investment to double in value (the math is actually closer to 72, but just round down to 70 for quick estimate)
For example, a 10% annual return means that any investment takes ~7 years to double in value. So if you start with $1000, it would turn into $1,024,000 in ~70 years (10 doubles). However, even a small contribution each month helps accelerate the first 5 double ($32K) and can reduce the overall time to just a few years thus reducing the ~70 down to ~35 years....
However, the second million would only take 7 years.
The third would only take a little over 4 years.
The fourth would take a little over 3 years and so on and so forth....
So the moral of the story to my sons is, live within your budget. Start your 401K right out of college and by the time your 59.5 (age limit to withdraw without penalty if you so choose), you can be a millionaire and retire comfortably....
For Charlie Batch, he worked hard to get into the NFL. Had an extended career, earned millions and with even a minimal amount of financial discipline is well ahead of the curve. So being part of a holding company (and being a VP, I'm sure he put some of his own money into it) is no more than a shell company sitting on a pile of money to shell out to prospective college players. The question becomes, where does the return on said investment come from?
So yes, compounding interest is inherently set up for those who have wealth. The toughest part is getting to that point. That's where the hard work comes from.....
January 6th, 2022 at 1:28 PM ^
Thanks Dad.
Actually, this guy sounds just like my father...
January 6th, 2022 at 9:27 AM ^
The system also has a bug that permits that wealth to disappear almost instantly if the economy takes a down turn.
These people aren’t Scrooge McDuck with a huge vault of gold coins. Their wealth is on paper. Wealth that can dissipate. It’s an illusory system to a certain point.
The other option is to give more of this wealth to the government, who in turn will squander it on bureaucracy, incompetence, and boondoggles. Governments brings in trillions annually yet people still want to throw good money after bad because they think they are the ones to finally make the system work efficiently. They never are. They are shysters who use the money to get wealthy themselves while those who need it the most are left with scraps.
January 6th, 2022 at 9:32 AM ^
Hey did you know that the stock market is open to everyone, not just the rich? Did you know that by starting to invest as a young adult you too could be a millionaire? Did you know that there is always a level of risk in investing?
stop acting like the world is so unfair because other people are smart with their money
January 6th, 2022 at 11:45 AM ^
This is easy advice to give on the heels of the longest bull market in US history.
January 6th, 2022 at 2:37 PM ^
lol "smart"
GameStop showed us that the system is, in part, rigged. It's bad enough that big enough swinging dicks get to manipulate the market in all sorts of devious, self-interested ways, but apparently commoners aren't allowed to fuse into one swinging dick to do exactly the same thing without the Goldman Sacks of the world tossing the chessboard.
"Did you know that by starting to invest as a young adult you too could be a millionaire?"
Kindergarten economics 101.
January 5th, 2022 at 11:53 PM ^
I'm sure only a small amount is coming from him and that he's just part of a syndicate that makes up GameAbove Capital. $1M is nothing for an alumni base to come up with.
I don't know why we haven't done a kickstarter here. Shit, we got Ace like $70k in a week. How much could we have raised to try to keep Hinton around? Or get Domani Jackson to sign? Or...
January 5th, 2022 at 10:39 PM ^
College football as we know it will be dead within 5 years.
January 6th, 2022 at 1:17 AM ^
They said that when coaches started getting paid a million dollars a year and stadiums started getting 100 million dollar expansions and locker rooms started getting waterfalls.
January 6th, 2022 at 11:59 AM ^
Why is this the death bell, and not any of the other changes over the past few decades that have increased the amount of money being pumped into the sport?
January 5th, 2022 at 10:43 PM ^
Michigan should offer the same to a D Line recruit/transfer.
January 5th, 2022 at 10:44 PM ^
The end of college football
January 5th, 2022 at 10:53 PM ^
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake
January 6th, 2022 at 3:22 AM ^
Birds and snakes and aero planes
lenny Bruce is not ok
January 6th, 2022 at 7:26 AM ^
Something, something, something, LEO-NARD BERN-STEIN!!!
January 5th, 2022 at 10:45 PM ^
If EMU randomly starts throwing around 7 figures and dominating the MAC it might not speak well for the “integrity of the sport.”
But it would be 100% awesome. They won’t get Williams, but it would be hilarious if *EMU* was the MAC team that started NIL-ing itself into a power.
January 5th, 2022 at 11:56 PM ^
Why does it not speak well for the "integrity of the sport"?
January 6th, 2022 at 6:11 AM ^
Because the money should be 6 figures, and doled out in payments delivered in McDonald's bags.
January 6th, 2022 at 12:01 PM ^
By "integrity of the sport" are you suggesting that only the biggest CFB programs should be able to offer this kind of money, and any smaller school trying to improve its outlook can screw off?