A Soccer Powerhouse’s Struggle
Decades after Santa Clara cut its football team, success has never been more difficult than in the NCAA’s modern era.
frontofficesports.com
Although Santa Clara doesn’t have football, I think there are a lot of parallels with Pitt football really not contributing financially to other sports programs.
Some points I found interesting: He reached out to “billionaire” alumni for NIL funding and apparently didn’t receive a warm welcome. He no longer goes after 5-star recruits because NIL makes it impossible to land them. He is focusing on upper class transfers because they might see a graduate degree from a highly respected academic institution like Santa Clara as more important to their future than a 4 figure NIL payment.
NIL clearly is impacting the non-profit sports. He lost his leading scorer to Duke and then Duke lost its top recruit to FSU two days before signing day for more NIL money. Then, the player turned pro and didn’t enroll at FSU either.
I wonder how much this will impact soccer programs like Pitt which rely heavily on foreign players. Remember, many of those players have played for what are essentially pro programs in Europe where they did get paid.
We clearly are going to have to get out the checkbooks and pay big money to keep the stars on the volleyball team.
