TDub wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 11:12 am
jfish26 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 11:07 am
TDub wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 10:38 am
apparently school..uh ..collectives..are now sending alumni letters asking for donations to the NIL funds
I haven't seen anything but that's the rumor, at least for some schools.
fucking gross.
To each his own.
For me, I'd care a lot about the efficiency of how my money is spent.
If I am spending money to support
the basketball program (and not other, more altruistic purposes), I would MUCH rather it go directly to getting great players, rather than it going indirectly toward attracting great players by way of funding a tenth locker room renovation or basketball dorm in the last thirteen years.
Personally, I think
inefficient use of donor money (including, for time being anyway, management fees and overhead at collectives) is, and has for a very long time been, fucking gross.
donation money to a library, student housing, hell even a stadium...something lasting and impactful for the university
Donation money for a 1 year rental of some kid to play basketball who doesn't give 2 shits about the university and who already is going to make more in his 1 year than 99% of the people they are asking to donate make in 5.....is disgusting.
Like I said, to each his own.
I don't find choice to be a bad thing at all (and I'm not putting those words in your mouth, either).
My choice (were I a big-dollar donor, which I'm not) would most likely be to donate toward major capital projects that enrich the whole experience (like a library or
student housing or a stadium), OR something super-specific (like an endowed scholarship for students of particular backgrounds or with particular goals).
What I find disgusting is/was the athletes-only facilities arms race that was simply inefficient player-compensation-by-proxy (with a side of mutual backscratching with service providers like architecture, construction and management firms). Grotesquely so when the projects are beneficial nearly exclusively to revenue sports athletes (like McCarthy Hall, which cost $11.2 million and houses
thirty-eight people, sixteen of which are basketball players and the balance of which are "non-athlete upperclassmen").
There is not a remotely serious argument that this is "something lasting and impactful for the university" (which you did not say it was!) except as a basketball recruiting enticement.
Of course, willing buyer/willing seller. No one made those donors spend their money that way.
But is it what they would do now, in an era where you don't need to spend money on recruiting enticements so inefficiently? I think we'll see the answer to that question over the next ten years.
