Miami mega-booster says NIL will soon slow down: 'I have to get a bang for the buck'
John Ruiz, the Miami businessman who has helped distribute millions in name, image, and likeness to Miami Hurricanes student-athletes, says he expects the NIL wave sweeping through major college athletics to start to slow down soon.
Ruiz held a webinar on the topic of NIL on Thursday, during which he said the thing many have been speculating about for months: donors are going to want a return on investment, and that could eventually lead to a smaller market than what we see now for NIL deals. According to SI’s Ross Dellenger, Ruiz said he “may scale back” on his NIL investments.
“I have to get a bang for the buck,” he said.
Miami businessman John Ruiz, who has distributed ~$7M in NIL to athletes, is holding an NIL webinar. As he told @SINow in June, he re-emphasizes that NIL is likely to lose value after Year 1.
“The market will not be the same. I may scale back. I have to get a bang for the buck.”
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) September 8, 2022
We’ve seen NIL issues quickly spill into high school recruiting. Prospects who have yet to play a down of college football are earning, in some instances, million-dollar NIL packages without any way of knowing whether the investment is worth it or not. It’s one thing to find ways to compensate an established star for a college team to ensure they stay happy with that college team; it’s an entirely separate set of questions to commit major dollars to a player who could sit on the bench and transfer before he makes an impact.
Quarterbacks are securing big-money deals, but 5-star quarterbacks on the high school circuit aren’t guaranteed to become stars at the college level.
“Do we want a new weight room or do we want to spend it on a 17-year-old who may or may not pan out?” ESPN’s Greg McElroy said to Dellenger for a story on the subject earlier this summer.
Seemingly every major football university has some form of booster-led collective at this point. Those collectives, in several cases, are popping up at odds with the university they’re intending to support.
At USC, the Trojan athletic department partnered with a media company to create a first-of-its-kind NIL operation that could be an official partner of the university, help USC student-athletes capture NIL deals, and offer USC assurances it would be staying free of the NCAA’s ire. That entity — BLVD, which has been pretty successful at securing partnerships so far — has been challenged recently by Student Body Right, a fan-led collective.
The Power Five commissioners recently sent a letter to Congress urging congressional action on the NIL front in college athletics. Coaches have been sending out warning signs for months.
“A lot of people voiced concerns when NIL came up that there had to be a plan for that, and instead we instituted NIL without any plan for that, so that’s why we’re at where we’re at,” Lincoln Riley said back in April. “I’m sure at some point there’s going to be a market correction, if you will, with recruiting. Hopefully, there will be because in a perfect world they stay separate. High school kid, his family, their state, whatever, they have an NIL opportunity. That’s great. College athletes, if they have an NIL opportunity, that’s great. We want them to do super well. It shouldn’t cross over. But, unfortunately, with the way the rules are set up, it has crossed over and it’s crossing over a lot right now and it’s totally changed recruiting.”
Ruiz, the Miami billionaire, is one of the most recognizable names in the space right now. And it sounds like he thinks that market correction is coming after a year.