Ja’Kobi Gillespie left the Bruins to go to the University of Maryland and its reported offer of $750,000 over two years.
Cade Tyson left for the University of North Carolina after having a reported seven-figure asking price.
Malik Dia left for the University of Mississippi and its wealthy name, image and likeness budget.
For head coach Casey Alexander, the era of constantly changing rosters means the chances of keeping stellar athletes such as Ben Sheppard and Nick Muszynski are gone.
“We're not even trying to compete with bigger programs. We're staying in our lane,” Alexander said. “We're playing that game, but we're not going to keep a kid from going to North Carolina and Maryland.”
For Belmont students, it’s disheartening to see the players they’ve come to love leave for better opportunities.
“As a Belmont student and fan, I was definitely disappointed to see Ja'Kobi, Cade, and Malik leave the team,” said junior David Sieck. “But that's just the reality of NCAA basketball these days with other, larger, NIL opportunities. It would be great to see stronger NIL support for Belmont student-athletes.”
Welcome to the era of NIL, where the once-amateur landscape of the NCAA has become a Wild West gold rush.
A high-major basketball program, such as a school from the Southeastern Conference has an average NIL budget of $3.5 million, according to an article by The Athletic.
Meanwhile, a mid-major basketball program, such as Belmont, has an average budget of roughly $291,667, it reported.
Belmont declined to disclose its NIL budget. It also declined the Vision’s request to interview a basketball player about NIL.
But that does not mean Bruin athletes aren’t making money.
Belmont did disclose that from Aug. 1, 2023, through July 31, 2024, student athletes were involved in 194 NIL transactions. But the values of these transactions weren’t released.
That secrecy is not inherent just to Belmont.
The Athletic, the sports journalism department of The New York Times, wrote an article interviewing college basketball coaches, agents and representatives who were granted anonymity to allow for full honesty regarding their situations.
The story detailed how the free-for-all nature of NIL has caused headaches for everyone in college basketball.
And with more alternatives for players to earn money, the confusion over NIL only worsens.
Some players get money from advertising and promotions.
Others get money from selling merchandise.
But one of the more dominant means of paying players comes from collectives, independent organizations that pool funds from donors to help create NIL opportunities for student-athletes.
With the rise of collectives, regulating NIL seems to become more challenging for everyone involved.
Opendorse, a company that tracks the NIL market, estimates 80 percent of NIL revenue will come from collectives.
“Talking to these collective agents, at our level to be good, I think you need like $300,000. To be really good, $500,000,” one mid-major coach told The Athletic.
For Bradley head coach Brian Wardle, whose team is also in the MVC, the rising costs of NIL need regulation before they become impossible to control.
“I’m a former player. I'm all about finding ways to pay the student athletes, especially when you're seeing the money that's being made in TV deals. I love that student athletes get a little something back now,” Wardle said during an interview with college basketball Podcast Three Man Weave. “But hopefully it gets regulated one day because it's pretty crazy. There is a lot of money being thrown around out there right now.”
But instead of being regulated, collectives have only grown in popularity in college athletics.
Belmont hasn’t publicly mentioned a collective, but plenty of other schools have.
There are currently over 225 collectives for Division I programs, willing to hand out money to ensure their schools field the best teams.
The University of Texas, The Ohio State University and Louisiana State University have all raised over $20 million for their collectives, according to the NCAA.
The University of Tennessee also recently added a “talent fee” on its 2025 football season tickets to help fund NIL.
The results are players getting benefits added to their NIL deals.
“One of our guys got $600,000, an apartment and an Uber account,” one coach said in The Athletic article.
Another coach mentioned luxurious gifts such as cars, airline vouchers and airline tickets.
A perk of the money coming from collectives is a tantalizing promise of making millions.
“The first time I got asked for a million dollars, I thought it was a joke,” one collective representative said in the article. “I said, ‘We might be out, but give me a couple days.’ The next day, he signed with a school I’ve been told has three boosters who’ve basically told the staff, ‘You have a blank check.’”
But with the blank-check offer comes promises that may never come to fruition.
“I’ve heard of coaches told by their administrators they have one number for NIL, and two weeks later, their collective guy will say, ‘No, that’s not true.’ Hundreds of thousands of dollars less, and they’ve already promised out the money,” a mid-major coach said in the article. “Now they’ve got to figure out how to raise it. ADs are telling the coaches to offer more than even what the collective’s got.”
The false-promise method has become so severe that one coach likened it to “a Ponzi Scheme” in the article.
And with the opportunity for players to make millions in college at bigger schools, teams in smaller conferences are now becoming used as the minor leagues.
Until something changes, senior Belmont basketball fan Camryn Moore said she fears players will break out at Belmont and then leave for a bigger school and a bigger paycheck.
“I think that Belmont basketball does a great job of setting up these players for success and getting their names out there. However, it is difficult to tell whether players will continue to leave with the uncertainty of NIL.”
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This article was written by Ty Wellemeyer
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