Greg Schiano stepped to the front of the lavish recruiting lounge in the south end zone of SHI Stadium, still soaked in sweat after coaching Rutgers to a September blowout victory. Often, the Rutgers head coach spends the time immediately following home games trying to convince fickle high school prospects that his football program is the best place to continue their careers.
But there was a more pressing matter.
On this Saturday night, he had to preach to the congregation. Romps over punching bags like Wagner are welcomed, but Rutgers had brought Schiano back to the parish because he once had taken a laughingstock program to the promised land of big-game upsets, a national ranking and bowl wins. And now, as he stood before roughly one hundred of the most influential of the Block R flock, he whittled his sermon to the two needs facing most evangelists: Faith and money.
Faith in him to deliver as he had before, and the money — lots of it — he needed to do the job again in the evolving and exorbitant era of free-agent college athletes.
Rutgers football was in serious trouble, he told them. He predicted a slew of its most hated rivals, waving fistfuls of cash, would invade New Jersey to poach his team’s best players. He also warned that if Rutgers had any chance of contending in the Big Ten Conference, he would need more talented — and more expensive — players.
Dig deep, Schiano implored them.
“If we don’t have more new money coming in to support his effort to get the players he needs, we’re going to have an uphill battle against other programs that have that financial support,” said Pete Hendricks, a longtime Rutgers football booster who was at the event. “We need more men and women to donate, otherwise we’re going to have a very, very difficult future. That was his message.”
With athletes now free to receive compensation, Rutgers needed piles of cash, Schiano said. The Scarlet Knights were about to be left behind as bigger and wealthier schools dominated the new world of Name, Image and Likeness, he cautioned. But the truth is, Rutgers was already far behind.
It’s an age-old problem at Rutgers: Chasing money — for better facilities; larger recruiting budgets; to bring Schiano back to a failing football program, pay him well, and stack his staff with high-priced assistant coaches. The cry for cash is constant. Rutgers’ admission into the Big Ten has driven the athletics department deeper into debt, and now there’s a new financial reality that demands even more money: Players must get paid, and many — especially the most talented — are choosing schools based on how much they can earn.
Here’s how the new arrangement works:
Players can earn money by signing autographs, striking endorsement deals and profiting off their social media accounts and more. They can market themselves or hire agents to find ways to make money. Companies can sign college players to contracts to make appearances or promote them, just as pro athletes do. A car dealership, for instance, can hire a Rutgers player to appear at the showroom or make a commercial. The companies decide how much to pay athletes. There are no guidelines on how much.
In addition, donors can give money to collectives, which are run by third parties, often boosters. The collectives can enter agreements with companies looking for athletes or they can dole the money out to athletes as they see fit.
Currently, schools can’t be directly involved in distributing the money — but the NCAA isn’t really enforcing that rule, so coaches secretly could be telling collectives how much to distribute and to which players. That murkiness makes some schools, like Rutgers, queasy. Others see it as an unpoliced opportunity.
“I’ve learned that if you don’t like it, you have two choices: Either change it or change the way you think about it,” Schiano said in July. “So I’ve changed the way I think about it, and I’ve changed the way I do my job, because that is what is necessary right now.”
The transition isn’t going well at Rutgers, however, and here’s why:
NJ Advance Media interviewed more than two dozen people inside Rutgers athletics and eight people with intimate knowledge of the department’s fundraising efforts. The four-month investigation into Rutgers’ NIL activities reveals a cautious, scattered and chaotic approach, putting them well behind the athletic powers in their conference. Several of the Rutgers insiders requested anonymity to speak candidly about the NIL efforts. Rutgers officials did their best to put a positive spin on a worsening situation, but the majority of insiders offered a bleak outlook.
“I have no confidence at all that Rutgers is going to be in a good place with NIL,” one of the program’s multi-million-dollar boosters said.
A prominent fundraising expert with knowledge of the school’s NIL bankroll was even more soberingly succinct: “Rutgers is in deep s - - -.”
Who’s to blame?
In June 2021, when the NCAA allowed athletes to capitalize on their fame, wealthy alumni at big-time college football schools didn’t wait for a coach to beg for money. They immediately started writing big checks. Rutgers was caught flat-footed, insiders said.
Rutgers never has been able to enlist the number of deep-pocketed boosters who fund other athletic departments and lure the best athletes with amounts that can run in seven figures, and the athletic department compounded that problem by being slow to build an NIL infrastructure, critics said.
Many point the finger at Pat Hobbs, accusing the athletic director of not being aggressive enough for a resurgent football program that needs out-of-the-box thinking and audacious fundraising.
Hobbs defends himself by saying that he has been cautious to avoid violating NCAA rules governing NILs while staying focused on raising money for needed facilities. He insists he has been an effective NIL cheerleader with the business community.
Meanwhile, boosters and experts, not persuaded by his arguments, make doomsday predictions. They say that Rutgers is already millions behind Big Ten powers like Michigan and Ohio State as other wealthier programs — UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington — are set to join the conference.
“Any school in the Big Ten needs to make this a significant priority,” said Doug Fillis, a New Jersey-based NIL expert who consults with Penn State, Boston College, Connecticut, North Carolina State and Utah as the founder of Accelerate Sports Ventures after being a senior athletics administrator at Rutgers. “If they’re not talking about it every day and have true senior leadership dedicated to it, they will fall behind.”
Some analysts estimate Rutgers is being outspent three to one, or more, in NIL by average FBS programs, and by even bigger margins by Big Ten powers.
“Fans should be concerned because it doesn’t appear like they’re getting any help from the athletic department, and coaches are left to do it themselves,” said Brian Dohn, national recruiting analyst for 247 Sports. “The football coach at Rutgers is asked to handle the NIL stuff while he’s also being asked to win games, coach his team and, by the way, you look around the country and the people he’s competing with, all their athletic directors are behind NIL and publicly stumping for fans to support the NIL.”
While other universities have clear-cut NIL blueprints and an army of financial and marketing strategists hired to lead those schools into the new era, Rutgers has a fraction of what its peer schools employ, a survey of Big Ten schools revealed. Rutgers has struggled to match other major universities in fundraising for the sports facilities arms race and now it’s revealing an inability to keep pace financially — and strategically — in yet another area.
There is a feeling among boosters, fans and NIL analysts that Rutgers officials are in a state of denial, paralyzed as they watch the college universe shift around them.
“Having conversations with our basketball coaches and our football coach and how much it’s really affecting them, trying to be competitive in that space is very hard,” Rutgers gymnastics coach Umme Salim-Beasley said. “And with Rutgers being a university that doesn’t really have a historical athletic-powerhouse presence, we don’t have a ton of people that are coming after us saying, ‘Hey, yeah, we want to give an NIL deal to your entire team.’
“It is a challenge that they’re having to navigate through when it comes to recruiting and trying to get creative in a space that has been saturated with a lot of high-end donors that are doing things that years ago would have been illegal and a death penalty. It’s still unchartered territory. Everyone’s still trying to figure it out. No one’s really regulating what’s going on, so it seems a bit like the Wild West.”
NCAA rules prohibit coaches, administrators and other school employees from directing or otherwise having any influence on NIL deals involving athletes. But it doesn’t prevent schools from, say, paying consultants to help set up the infrastructure.
When Rutgers failed to do this immediately, the void was filled by collectives such as Knights of the Raritan and Knight Society, which were formed and operated by alumni and supporters. For example, Knight Society was founded by former Rutgers basketball star Geo Baker and former Rutgers football star Eric LeGrand. They received little guidance from school officials, and the multiple collectives that popped up confused businesses and donors: What were the differences? Which one should they give to? How would the money be used?
As a result, Rutgers is discovering that being an underdog is one thing, but being an underfunded underdog is suicide in today’s environment. The NCAA prohibits collectives from being involved in recruiting, whether it’s prospective high school prospects or players in the transfer portal, but that doesn’t mean those rules are followed. Many suspect widespread tampering.
“I don’t know how you curtail it,” men’s basketball coach Steve Pikiell said. “It’s easier said than done. I felt like, before, when there was a sit-out year included in every transfer, there was some tampering. Probably 20 percent then. Now that you can play immediately, it’s 90 percent. Whether it’d be third-hand, fourth-hand or whatever, that’s what is going on.”
Many believe that having cash now to lure players could help Rutgers close the distance on Big Ten powerhouses. Money leads to better players, who lead to more winning, which excites the fan base and encourages even more giving. But it must start with seed cash now, backers say.
“If we had legitimate NIL money, we could surprise a lot of people and take the next step,” a Rutgers football insider said. Instead, Rutgers is seen as vulnerable.
Penn State stormed into Rutgers’ backyard in July: Its main collective, Lions Legacy Club, hosted a high-dollar NIL reception at the Avalon Yacht Club in Cape May County. “When you talk about the Jersey Shore and specifically Avalon, (it’s) huge Penn State country. So we thought we would come here and meet with them,” Penn State coach James Franklin said, via HappyValleyUnited.com.
In September, Ohio State AD Gene Smith released a video announcing The 1870 Society as “the premier NIL collective for Ohio State football’' and issued “a call to action for Buckeyes everywhere.” That same month Smith was part of a four-person panel testifying before Congress on the need for national legislation on NIL, bemoaning the system while telling the House Committee on Small Business more than 2,000 NIL deals have been struck by Ohio State athletes across all sports.
After Maryland hosted an NIL networking event in conjunction with its collective called “Secure the Bag” in December, Terrapins AD Damon Evans stressed the importance of working with the collectives on his weekly radio show: “I want to go out there and get the 3-, the 4- and the 5-star (recruits). And I know some of our fans may say that we can’t compete at that level. Well, we got to find the resources to do so. My job is to find a way,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Rutgers athletic department is focused on scholarships, facility upgrades and scraping together enough cash to pay everyday bills for a $159 million budget that’s already heavily subsidized by the university’s general fund. With the department running deeply in the red, Rutgers insiders fear there won’t be spare cash for NIL if the NCAA passes its recent proposal to allow schools to directly fund NILs.
Some of the school’s top financial backers put the blame squarely on Hobbs.
In two wide-ranging interviews, Hobbs conceded he’s received blowback from a few of the school’s top donors in recent months. But he defended his record, which includes more than $300 million raised toward capital projects to support Rutgers athletes since he took the job eight years ago.
“There are always people out there who want us to do more. We’ll do as much as we think we can possibly do within the limitations that we currently have set out there by the NCAA,” Hobbs said.
Rutgers boosters insist Hobbs’ failure to answer the starting gun will cost Rutgers ground it will never make up. With NCAA cops nowhere to be found, other schools are looting and getting rich, they say, while Rutgers takes the moral high ground and falls further behind in a lawless society.
Hobbs has been lauded for successfully cleaning up an athletics department that was given a two-year probation sentence by the NCAA for violations committed before his tenure.
“I believe that we’re doing everything that we can possibly do within the rules and the guidelines that we have to live with,” Hobbs said. “I would certainly welcome more clarity from the NCAA, but we have to be careful. We’re the guardians of the university as well and a lot of what I see happening out there, I think, is either bordering or crossing the line into employment status for student athletes.
“And those who really look at the way we’re approaching this, when they learn all that we do, the typical reaction is, ‘I had no idea.’ We’re doing a lot.”
‘The cost of doing business’
Future NFL stars like Brian Leonard, Jason and Devin McCourty, Duron Harmon and others said they came to Rutgers because Schiano’s word was gold. Today, even lesser players are demanding the actual gold.
“You’re seeing tantalizing offensive linemen, wide receivers and quarterbacks in the transfer portal, and the only way to compete in that world is to have enough money to compete against all these other schools going after these kids for quick fixes,” said Jon Newman, the president of Knights of the Raritan, one of the school’s main NIL collectives.
Rutgers basketball fans received a sobering glimpse into the NIL realities last spring. Pikiell’s rapidly ascending program — which has earned multiple NCAA Tournament berths — couldn’t persuade two of its most talented players to stay.
Guard Cam Spencer, who set school shooting records in his one season with the Scarlet Knights, transferred to defending national champion UConn. Paul Mulcahy, another starting guard, left for Washington. Money might not have been the only reason, but it was a factor for both players.
Still, the men’s basketball team will boast its best recruiting class ever in 2024, highlighted by Dylan Harper, the No. 2-rated player nationally. Harper, who officially announced that he has chosen Rutgers, signed a multi-year NIL deal with Fanatics, a popular retailer of sportswear, sports collectibles and iGaming. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Fanatics officials said the deal will feature Harper in trading cards and collectibles, beginning with the McDonald’s All-American Game next year.
The Fanatics deal, and the likelihood that Harper will leave for NBA money in 2025 lessened the pressure on Rutgers to deliver a huge pile of cash.
“Money was never the main thing,” Harper said. “The No. 1 thing is winning.”
While the men’s basketball program has bobbed and weaved to avoid an NIL knockout punch, the women’s program is in a total rebuild and doesn’t need big NIL money — yet.
“Quite fortunately for us, it hasn’t been the first thought — whether it’s our current or future players — but it’s another piece of the puzzle that has to be addressed,” Rutgers’ second-year coach Coquese Washington said.
The football program isn’t as fortunate.
Newman declined to divulge financial figures but said the collective has welcomed 900 monthly members in addition to securing 1,012 one-time donations since its founding in May 2022. But even he says, “I’m not confident how successful we can be based on what I know.”
NJ Advance Media spoke to three people with knowledge of Rutgers’ NIL funds. One fundraising official put the figure for football at “around $1.5 million,” a top NIL supporter said it was “$1.8 million,” and a Rutgers insider said it was “just over $2 million” as of Dec. 1.
One expert, who requested anonymity because their firm does consulting work for a Big Ten school and two others ranked in the AP Top 25 last fall, said the average Big Ten program has $3 million in its bankroll. Mid-tier programs such as Michigan State, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin are north of $5 million, and the elite Big Ten powers like Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State are all over $7 million, the expert said.
Maryland — the most comparable Big Ten school to Rutgers in terms of geography and on-field struggles — is at $4.5 million, the expert said. Indiana, another Big Ten bottom-feeder for most of this past decade, is expected to support new football coach Curt Cignetti with at least $3 million for NIL, according to the Indianapolis Star.
Learning the exact size of Rutgers’ NIL pot isn’t so simple. Collectives raising Rutgers’ NIL funds — like other collectives around the country – are independent of the university, so their financial information are not subject to New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act, like many other university financial documents.
“If we judge NIL by how much money is being generated, Rutgers certainly ranks in the bottom 10 percent of Power 4 institutions — no question about that,” said Jason Belzer, a Rutgers professor who helps universities, including Rutgers, run their NIL collectives.
Belzer, the founder of Student Athlete NIL, said the average NIL collective at major-conference schools is around $3 million for football and approximately $750,000 for basketball.
All three insiders were in agreement that Rutgers’ NIL cash on hand likely won’t be enough to stave off rival programs from poaching Schiano’s roster. But the bigger concern, Dohn said, is that Rutgers doesn’t have enough NIL money to lure high-end talent during this current wave of recruiting.
“We will go into the portal and we will try to secure some more guys,” Schiano said last month after his team concluded the regular season with a 6-6 record. “You know it, I know it: NIL is part of that. If we don’t have the firepower to do that, it’ll be harder.”
A fundraising official estimated that a Power 4 conference collective would need around $3 million annually, which would allocate roughly $20,000 to each of the 85 players on a football roster, or $1.7 million, with “high six figures” paid to the top talent draining the remainder. Many believe that’s not nearly enough.
Nebraska coach Matt Rhule told reporters last week that “a good quarterback in the (transfer) portal costs $1 million … to $2 million right now.”
Newman told NJ Advance Media last year that Rutgers football would need $10 million annually to contend in the Big Ten, but Schiano has told top donors the need is between $6 million and $8 million annually. Regardless, those are large amounts to siphon from Rutgers donors with an unfocused approach.
Is outside help on the way?
While keeping collectives at arm’s length, Hobbs would like to see major rule changes in NIL. He hopes the NCAA — or Congress — implement legislation to allow schools to control more of the process.
“It has the potential to be an enormously corrupting influence and it’s created a lot of challenges for coaches in recruiting, especially the coaches that I have. They have integrity and they’re trying to do it the right way,” Hobbs said. “It has the potential to be transformative to college athletics in a negative way, but I also think it has the chance to be transformative for college athletes in a positive way.”
He said a recent NIL proposal by NCAA President Charlie Baker is “a conversation starter,” and he’s “glad he put something out.”
The plan allows schools to make NIL deals directly with their athletes via a trust fund. Baker’s proposal would require schools that want to be a part of a new tier of Division I to commit to paying their athletes tens of thousands of dollars per year on top of athletic scholarships.
“We need rules,” Hobbs said. “We need to come up with a system that works. This is a proposal, obviously, for the better-resourced schools. So we’ll take a look at it.”
Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, through a spokesperson, declined to be interviewed regarding the NCAA’s recent proposal and the NIL issue in general.
Some Rutgers insiders fear, however, such a proposal would bankrupt an already cash-strapped athletics department with hefty recurring bills for athletes.
Student-athlete aid ($18.7 million) and student-athlete meals ($5.1 million) accounted for 17.2 percent of the school’s $138.4 million athletics budget, according to the most recent fiscal budget.
In June 2021, in NCAA v. Alston, the Supreme Court paved the way for schools to distribute as much as $5,980 a year to athletes in education-related compensation. More than 50 schools have since announced they’re doling out the full Alston funds to their athletes. Rutgers isn’t one of them.
Reaching 100 percent compliance for its 700-plus athletes would cost Rutgers approximately $4.2 million, according to an NJ Advance Media analysis.
Hobbs wonders whether every college athlete needs to be paid on top of a free college education and if some of them actually want it.
“Lost in all this is the value of the degree,” he said. “I put three kids through college and graduate school, and if somebody had relieved me of those costs because of their athletic talents that would’ve impacted my life, not just their lives. We have to remember: This is access to college.
“For the vast majority of these students, they’re never going to go on to any professional (sports) success. The vast majority of these students don’t have any interest in being out there trying to raise money for NIL. They think they have it pretty good: ‘I have a scholarship. I’m getting supported in other ways, and that’s what’s important.’ Then on the NIL front, it’s also forcing students to become entrepreneurs at a much earlier age. They have to be more mindful and careful about their brand.”
Collectively, they’re on their own
Danny Breslauer remembers the first phone call. Twelve hours after the NCAA suspended amateurism rules on June 30, 2021, Breslauer called Newman, his partner on a popular Rutgers sports podcast, to discuss brokering the first deal with a Rutgers player.
A day later, they signed running back Isiah Pacheco — now a Super Bowl champion with the Kansas City Chiefs — to the first NIL deal in Rutgers history.
“Trying to make that deal happen with Pacheco in the early days, we realized there was no apparatus for Rutgers athletes to do it legally, and Jon and I were like, ‘Oh, my God, if this is what it’s like to pull deals with these kids, there needs to be a central entity,’” Breslauer said.
When university officials balked, Rutgers’ first collective was born. Newman, who runs a Virginia-based public relations firm, says presiding over Knights of the Raritan is “my second job.” Breslauer works for a New York software and technology company following a long career in play-by-play broadcasting.
They dipped into their Rolodexes to form a 10-person committee of passionate Rutgers fans who are interested in compensating athletes.
“None of us has taken a dime off this endeavor,” Breslauer said. “I’ll never forget when Pacheco got paid, he was like, ‘Cool, I can get a haircut now.’”
Newman estimates it took the company six months to put the infrastructure in place. Why did they do it? Because no one else at Rutgers did.
“We felt if we didn’t do something, Rutgers would totally be behind the 8-ball in this,” Newman said. “It’s been very frustrating to see what other schools are doing, especially where other athletic directors have taken a leadership position and not have the same thing happen at my alma mater in an effort that I’m trying to lead.
“While I understand the hesitancy and the reasons for being conservative and following the letter of the law, it’s been frustrating to get emails from my daughter’s alma mater. When coaches are aggressively out there in public, talking about this as a key factor and seeing us not being as aggressive as we should be — that’s frustrating as well.”
Hobbs bristles at the criticism, telling NJ Advance Media he’s been supportive of NIL, publicly and behind the scenes on the fundraising trail.
“If you hear the conversations I’m a part of with corporations and others, I am as encouraging as I possibly can be of them engaging with our student-athletes to provide NIL opportunities,” he said. “There’s not a corporate sponsor that I get in front of where I don’t say to them, ‘Hey, listen, you have marketing budgets, you have opportunities, we have the greatest ambassadors for your brand that you can have, and you should work with the people who are here to the extent that you see it as a value.’ I’m confident we’re going to have continued and growing success in the future.”
Hobbs avoided a war of words with the school’s main collective.
“I have nothing but respect for those guys and how hard they’re working,” he said. “They’re passionate about Rutgers. I think they play a really important role. I know those people, I know their commitment to Rutgers, and I want them to succeed. The more successful they are, the more successful our student-athletes are in benefitting from their name, image and likeness.”
In August, Rutgers took a step toward keeping up with its competitors in NIL by announcing that Reed Zak would help athletes find endorsement opportunities. Because he works for Altius, a third-party NIL partner, Zak is not a Rutgers employee. Rutgers “needed somebody driving home NIL every day, particularly in the corporate community,” Hobbs said.
Zak, a former Monmouth University lacrosse player, will serve as Rutgers’ point person to the donors wishing to pay the athletes. His job, he said, is to help both sides “navigate it all.” Newman points to a series of fundraising campaigns that Rutgers will promote on its social media outlets in January. Critics wonder why it took so long.
“We all have common desires to see Rutgers be great,” said Shawn Tucker, a deputy athletics director who leads Rutgers’ fundraising program. “We’re all just doing it in a different way.”
Better days ahead?
One of the sticking points over Schiano’s contract demands during his initial negotiations over his return as Rutgers coach in 2019 was a commitment by top school officials to build a new practice facility. Four years later, with a contract extension in his pocket, Schiano’s priorities have shifted. Raising money for NIL is imperative, he’s telling anyone who will listen. But Hobbs insists the school’s push for new facilities occupies much of his focus.
In March 2020, Rutgers announced a deal with AECOM, a Los Angeles-based company renowned for its sports facility designs, to produce a facilities master plan that is expected to include conceptual designs for a new football practice facility and renovations to Jersey Mike’s Arena. Last month, Hobbs said the school will renovate the 8,000-seat basketball arena by the 2025-26 season.
“We still need to do everything we can to close the [facilities] deficit,” Hobbs said. “But the world is changing. So part of the job now is making sure students understand the opportunity of competing in the New York marketplace, in an area rich with corporations that if they manage their name, image and likeness the right way, then they can seize some benefits. None of us thought that would be part of our world a few years ago. But it’s part of our world today.”
Every Tuesday, Hobbs sits at the head of a large conference table inside the Rodkin Center for meetings with a dozen staff members on NIL. Earlier this fall, as he sat in the same room, Hobbs expressed his belief that Rutgers is headed in the right direction in its NIL endeavors.
“We’ve built the right infrastructure,” he said. “In terms of supporting our student athletes, in terms of explaining to our donors or to businesses that are interested in NIL. People give to their passion, so what I try to identify is, ‘What are you passionate about?’ And then I’ll try to connect you to it. If they’re passionate about Rutgers athletics, I’ll find a place for them to put their resources.”
He dismissed the notion that Rutgers is lagging behind its competitors in NIL, insisting that — just as a football coach can steal plays from better teams — the school can learn from NIL trail blazers who are beating them now.
“I don’t so much view it as a risk of falling behind,” he said. “I view it as we’re in a really good place, and as those other schools have success, we’ll be able to point to that success and have that success, too.”
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Keith Sargeant may be reached at ksargeant@njadvancemedia.com.
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