If you feel bad you’re shortchanging the non-revenue sports by eschewing donations to the university athletic fund in lieu of donating to pay for play NILs, don’t be.
Football and basketball pay the bills; they are the sole reasons the school is in one of the wealthiest conferences, and their success lifts the boats of all those other sports.
Donating directly to the school (assuming like many it’s your only donation of the type), unless you are a Tepper, your 3 or 4 figure donation to volleyball, Lacrosse etc is not going to have as much positive impact to those sports. It feels nice, but that’s all.
Whereas, collection of ALL sports donation money into a football/hoops pay for play collective, and channeling it directly to the best football and basketball players to come to Pitt WILL have significant impact on volleyball and lacrosse.
The added revenue to be derived from the success of those teams will go much, much further than your isolated individual little donation to the non revenue sport.
But might the collective be a sham, rife with corruption risk, no accountability, etc etc…yeah. Totally.
But, the schools made this situation.
It’s tawdry and dirty but much like having to embrace so many transfers that pooped in Pitt’s mouth 3 years ago, you might hate it but you have to put perceived and real negative feelings into perspective, and to be smart about it. It feels better to cut a check with the school name on it to go to chick volleyball, but far far more impactful that your token money gets added together with hundreds of others to entice in a world class WR. It’s too bad but that’s where it is.