Per Isaiah Hole & Athletic: FB starter offered $1.75M to transfer from.UM
Hole quoting an Athletic article quoting an anonymous parent here, but this doesn't seem too far-fetched:
There is also an X rumor that Sabb got $2M to go to Bama.
It's amazing UM didn't lose more to the portal after Harbaugh left. This is also another data point that shows what kind of "NIL" game is needed to compete these days.
I'll let each of you decide if UM's program measures up.
One final point: Michigan won the 2023 football National Championship!
I was told NIL was a more preferable arrangement than the League of Extraordinary Bag Men. And yet every revelation like this makes it feel dirtier.
It's a dirty business, yes. I'll still take it over this:
https://www.bannersociety.com/2014/4/10/20703758/bag-man-paying-college-football-players
It seemed that UM was too queasy to play that particular game. Now, at least, we shouldn't have to worry about that as much.
One parent of a returning starter said, on the condition of anonymity, that their son was offered roughly $1.75 million to play next season at a different school — significantly more than the player was earning at Michigan.
I thought our whole thing was that we made sure to take care of the players we already have, rather than paying for them to come to Michigan. If that's the plan, it sounds like they need to do a better job at it.
At the same time, the guiding point seems to be that this was an unprecedentedly crazy amount. What was the price tag for OSU's NIL roster said to be? $13-14M? $1.75M for one guy seems patently nuts, almost unbelievable, until you remember the crazed nature of some of these other fanbases. It's not a game of the haves and have-nots now as much as the haves and the delusional-really-haves.
I mean insiders were making a big deal about a potential donation in the "high 6 figures" so that kinda shows what numbers Michigan is working with lol
And yet the player didn't leave...so sounds like said player feels he's getting more by being a wolverine than he'd get by transferring.
It's nuts to expect UM to get into bidding wars with every booster in the country for every player that just happens to get an offer that may be a significant outlier. Doing so would absolutely destroy team chemistry.
The issue isn't UM being cheap its an industry that basically makes little sense.
Semi-pro sports do not fit a universities charter. Its a square peg, round hole problem.
Seems like Sam says Michigan's NIL took care of Michigan's starters to make sure we kept everyone here. Even if you assume we get a bit of a home town discount for the guys, that's quite the payroll if you assume starters are getting 6 & 7 figure offers
Yeah, the math around all of these numbers simply doesn't make sense, which is why I generally call BS on these purported offers that inevitably get made by unnamed sources concerning unnamed players.
If a starter on this team was offered $1.75M, my guess is it was someone like Graham or Johnson, with a heavy lean toward the latter because his dad is quoted elsewhere here and there were substantial rumors about him being sought after in the transfer portal. Presumably that's more money than he's getting at UM now because if you're not Michigan you gotta offer something beyond starting spot + championship pedigree because he's got that already. But then Sabb, a backup safety (already a less valuable position than a starting defensive tackle or corner), is purportedly getting $2M AND a clear line to a starting spot. So I'm to believe that someone offered an All American shutdown corner, one of the hardest things to find in CFB, $250k less than a pretty good third-starting safety who wasn't going to beat out two guys ahead of him? Seems unlikely. Moore and Paige are likely getting paid highly as well or else they'd have been plucked away, and then you apply the numbers and situations across the roster and you suddenly get a single-year NIL number in the tens of millions, to say nothing of recruits, transfers, etc. Maybe that's happening but the big OSU drive was for something like $15M a year in NIL; that wouldn't come close to covering the totals purportedly doled out both to retain guys plus pull in a bunch of transfers if this scale was real.
I'm sure guys are getting paid but the raw numbers simply have to be lower than the random ones thrown out in the media.
Sounds like the NCAA isn't even going to try to police this anymore. From r/cfb:
According to a letter from NCAA president Charlie Baker sent to member schools, the NCAA is pausing and not opening new investigations involving third-parties/collectives for NIL-related activities as a response to the TN-VA lawsuit.
Here’s the letter obtained by @YahooSports. pic.twitter.com/CQyN1mN7QH— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) March 1, 2024
Are we going to get the media embed button back?
And in classic Michigan fashion we're gonna play within the old rules even when the new rules allow for rule breaking
The last court ruling makes it pretty clear that there aren't even rules against inducements, tampering, etc. now. Not that most elite teams cared before, but now even any semblance of structure is just crumbling.
Sabb may have transferred primarily for playing time, but he would be silly to turn down $2MM guaranteed, especially if Michigan was only ("only"...geez) offering $X00 K.
Nowadays, if you want to buy players and have the means, it's all above board. It's the NFL with no salary cap.
No cap and no contracts. It's not sustainable, but it's wild to watch.
There is a reason revenue sharing is advocated by Harbaugh... That being said, I don't be blame anyone leaving for life changing money, which 1.5 million definitely is.
Same here. If the $ figure is correct, Sabb would be crazy not to take that offer. There's no guarantee he'll have a long NFL career.
I bet it was Graham or Johnson
I will Grant you that bet! 😁
I dunno, Harbaugh said Doman has the best leg he's ever seen ...
A back up safety is worth $2 million on the open market?
Come on now. Don't do that
Sabb is clearly a very good player and NFL prospect. He's a "backup" bc of the depth and talent UM has at safety.
I'd say the thinking embodied by this post is a bit misguided - at almost any program not named Michigan, he's not a 'backup'. Hence being brought into a likely lucrative starting role at Alabama.
Had either Paige or Moore opted for the draft, Sabb would be starting here.
Zero chance Sabb got $2M.
All these numbers are inflated. Also, there have been plenty of reports of NIL "offers" not being what actually ends up being received.
If someone did receive an offer of anything close to $2M, I would have zero issues with them leaving (unless Michigan was offering similar, which I'm sure we aren't). That's life changing money. Already having a National Championship makes it even easier to move on for the payday. If they turned down a net of anything close to $1M just to stay at UM, they should make it public so we can build a statue of them in front of the stadium. That's commitment, especially when the majority of the coaching staff just dipped.
Yeah nobody is clicking "player offered 500k" its just not juicy enough. Its like cheeseburger = scandal but enticing/tampering with the top portal target with $$$ is fine if self reported.
Its rules and media set up to punish teams that arent Georgia, Bama, and OSU.
Someone please explain how you can be bullet proof while collecting more talent then the bottom 100 teams combined? This blind eye towards the talent hoarding programs is wild.
$1.75M buys quite a few cheeseburgers.
Yeah, I will once again caution people to take all of these reported numbers with massive grains of salt. "My son was offered $1.75M to leave Michigan BUT HE BLEEDS MAIZE AND BLUE!!!" sounds great, but without context we have few ways to corroborate and validate these claims. We also don't know what UM's counter-offer/payment is to this player, which perhaps unsurprisingly is not included here. So it reads like this player turned down $1.75M to stay at UM while my guess is it's more along the lines of he turned down $1.75M to play at, say, Indiana and instead stick around at UM for $1.65M. Yeah that's a real money difference but not nearly as pronounced and many people have likely had situations where we've turned down a potentially more lucrative job to leave because the money's close and there are non-financial/comfort reasons to stick around at your current spot.
I do think this article, for whatever truth is does contain, points to a strengthening of UM's NIL system, one I'm sure was already pretty strong (note how few UM guys have left over the years) but is an easy hobby horse to bang on when fans want to complain about stuff because it requires little intellectual effort and is hard to disprove. I've implored this site for years to provide any numbers behind the off-repeated "UM's NIL program is lacking" narrative and have not seen them, but the fact UM just stared down the barrel of basically every major CFB team taking a run at their championship roster and emerging with just Sabb leaving (and I can promise you he ain't making $2M at Alabama) is big news and a hugely positive sign for the NIL collective work.
Nobody on Michigan is getting anything close to $1.65M. They listed themselves on the $1M-$5M tier on their NIL slideshow. Even JJ was rumored to have a total NIL figure of <$1M, and that was including his deals with Bose, Dunkin, MDen, etc.
First off, that one slide (which I believe you've cited to me before) is, in my opinion, dubious for a number of reasons. For one it claims Louisville and Missouri are spending the same as ND and OSU, and yet Oregon is nowhere to be found. MSU is somehow paying between $5-10M and yet lost tons of guys to the portal basically every year under Tucker and brought in few impact guys. We've heard numerous stories about Clemson being all-in handing guys money, and yet they're at UM's level? Tennessee and Oklahoma, two schools with very recent examples of handing out money, aren't included either.
It's quite likely that the slide, being shown to boosters you are trying to get money from, might be light on facts and high on salesmanship. While we again don't have numbers, this Crain's Detroit report shows some semi-realistic numbers for key players UM's football team. If you just add up the totals here for the 5 guys listed here (which doesn't even include any defensive starters) we're at $3.9M, which either means the rest of the roster is pulling in less than $1.1M total OR that slide is, again, sorta BS.
But beyond that, you're sort of proving my point that these numbers are made up. Do you honestly believe Alabama offered $2M to Sabb (which per your terms would be more than double than JJ McCarthy, future first-round QB, made last year) and apparently other guys stuck around despite being offered $1.65M (again, twice as much as McCarthy) because they love Michigan so darn much? Or are these numbers all bullshit and chances are UM is doing perfectly fine on the NIL front and this fanbase just likes to complain about it because blaming the athletic department for any real or perceived flaw is easy?
Johnny Manziel recently did a podcast with Shannon Sharpe where he said in the Spring of 2014, his father went to Texas A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin and said that Johnny Football would stay for his last two-years at A&M for $3 million. That was 2014 when you didn't have to compete with the portal. So why is it so hard to believe that 10 years later $1.75 for probably one of the top 3 CB's in college football isn't believable?
I'm with you, ZERO chance the Sabb number is correct, and for as much as everyone likes to bash our NIL program, the 'One More Year' fund (and others) brought back everyone we needed and brought in a few guys who played a role in winning a national championship less than two months ago.
Yeah, I absolutely believe UM isn't on the cutting edge but Michigan has an approach that clearly works for them and far too often the judging of effectiveness is based on the Miami/A&M "throws bag of money at high schoolers and hope they sign" method, which is just one of many possible options.
Saab imo had more to do with Paige and Moore returning and wanting a starting role. Could he have slid over to nickel safety? But it's a big deal losing him.
Graham and Grant, Will Johnson all three could command big time dollars so who knows who offered. This is the part where it's tampering and ncaa is powerless to do a dang thing. But, bring the hammer for signs or cheeseburgers... and watch Warde finally step up and later fold.
"This is the part where it's tampering and the NCAA is powerless to do a dang thing. But, bring the hammer for signs and cheeseburgers."
And this highlights why I think(hope) the current lawsuit is going to be the demise of the NCAA as any kind of regulatory/enforcement body. If Team A can go outside the current rules to offer a player form Team B a big paycheck to transfer and the NCAA can't punish them, then the NCAA looks ridiculous trying to hammer Team C for cheeseburgers or asking fans to record games from the bleachers. The whole thing is absurd.
Must have been one of the guys in the portal, right? Because otherwise that'd be both tampering and misuse of NIL and the NCAA would be all over it!
I'm going to bet it was Will Johnson that was offered the $1.75M and it was probably what sparked the rumors of him going to 'bama.....
time will tell, but that's what i'm sayin'
I’d wager it was Graham or Grant. Will Johnson is a SE MI native who’s a legacy who will forever be a legend in his home state after winning a national title with an INT in both the OSU & natl title games. He’s already solidified himself as a top 10 pick next year. He wasn’t ever leaving
him not intending to leave would not prevent another team from offering him a chunk of change to try enticing him to..... in fact, thats all the more reason someone would offer that kinda cash.
Invisible hand of the free market bringing order to the world of college football.
1. I don't doubt it, given the type of boosters who are pros at giving money already down there.
2. I agree, can't believe we haven't lost more players and will be holding breathe in that last Spring window.
3. What is the best place for an alum to put their money right now if we want it go directly to NIL on football and basketball, not through Warde or does it have to go through Warde at some juncture?
Given the affluence, passion and generosity of our alum and fan base, no way we should not dominate the sport with this new set up. Excited to see what our new "GM" set up does and if it helps us catch up and moves Warde to a little more of a progressive and competitive place overall. Annoyed we didn't jump ahead when we had the opportunity (again Warde) but I guess we were too mired in sign-gate to chew bubble gum and walk. Frustrating.
"What is the best place for an alum to put their money right now if we want it go directly to NIL on football and basketball, not through Warde or does it have to go through Warde at some juncture? "
It can never go through the AD.
NIL collectives are private organizations, and the university cannot control or fund them.
Michigan still going with the - Nice Guys Finish First - philosophy. Something disproven since we all lived in caves.
Bob Axelrod disagrees. But he's from Michigan's faculty so I guess that proves your point.
Yea but Bobby Axelrod was right when he said "What's the point in having 'Fuck You' money if you don't say 'Fuck You' once in a while?"
What a crap show
i hate this Wild West bullshit
Same, but i'm choosing to think about it as growing pains, rather than an end result.
evolution is messy.
Spring portal is going to be brutal.
Is there any other sport where you, as a fan, are told you should help directly pay the players? Just seems so stupid.
That’s what I don’t get. It’s like the world’s worst United Way campaign. I have other financial priorities to consider. The NFL doesn’t ask their fans to contribute any more than the cost of game day and tv money.
No...it is stupid. MultiBILLION dollar TV contracts, facilities, administration etc and yet 'hand outs' for the players.
This can't be real life...
the revenue distribution model is fucked. but there's no chance of getting the networks to take smaller margins. and most P5 programs are already nearing or at the max that they can squeeze from fans insofar as seat donations, tickets costs, and monies spent in-person once at an event.
e.g. the B1G members currently pull in ~60m/yr from the broadcasting rights contract, yet less than half the athletic departments in the conference get above the red line on the financial ledger.
Probably true. However, when it comes to Isaiah, my general rule of thumb is to remind myself that he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground
My first thought when seeing "FB" was, 'who the hell else has a fullback these days?'