Marquette head coach Shaka Smart refuses to negotiate NIL compensation with agents associated with college basketball players. He reportedly told his team to ditch them all together.
The strategy provides an obvious advantage for the program, while also helping to streamline the process for the players.
Smart, currently on the tail end his fourth college basketball season as the head coach at Marquette, was hired approximately three months prior to the start of Name, Image and Likeness. July 1, 2021 changed the entire landscape of collegiate athletics forever. Money plays a bigger role than ever before. Players are compensated beyond scholarship, room and board, which creates a professional entity under the guise of amateurism that is void of all regulation.
The importance of negotiations between NIL collectives and athletes created a rise of college agents. A large number of these “agents” do not have any proper qualifications. Many of them only came to exist over the last few years. They often take a large cut of the money from their clients.
This is not to say that every NIL agent is a bad apple. They’re not. However, a high-profile agent openly admitted to conning his clients with an easily discredited lie earlier this year. Coaches are fed up with the sketchy behavior of the people who represent their athletes.
According to Dennis Young, Smart does not even acknowledge them. He has “been refusing to negotiate with agents this spring, telling his players and recruits that they’ll get the same money from [the NIL] collective with or without one.”
As a fairly small school on the highest level of Division-I basketball, Marquette does not have a deep pool of NIL money on which to recruit and/or retain its roster. There is only so much dough to go around.
Thus, the players are only going to get a very specific amount of money no matter how much they request. An agent will not help them to get a bigger deal but an agent will take a (potentially huge) percentage of their already-limited earnings.
No current player on the Golden Eagles roster lists an agent. They go directly through Shaka Smart, the collective and Madison Dunker, the program’s NIL general manager. That likely cannot be said for any other team that competes in a power conference. It is unique to Marquette.
The lack of agents is both good and bad for the players. On one end, they are able to make as much money as possible without having to pay out a percentage of earnings to a third party. On the other end, they do not have anyone to help them find a more lucrative deal on the open market.
For Shaka Smart, it can only provide an advantage. There is far less worry that his players will be lured into the transfer portal by a large financial sum. There is no middle man. Everything is handled in-house.
The post Shaka Smart Forces Marquette Basketball Players To Ditch NIL Agents While Refusing To Negotiate appeared first on BroBible.
Shaka Smart Forces Marquette Basketball Players To Ditch NIL Agents While Refusing To Negotiate
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