Dave Reardon: Hawaii still behind in NIL race for athletes

The college sports online matchmaking game once helped student-athletes and schools find each other directly.

But now, if you’re a seasoned athlete (or a parent of one) looking for college, one of the first things you’re going to do is scan the most recent list of collectives you can find. .

It’s a fairly new term in the sports lexicon. In case you don’t know, a collective is a group of supporters of a specific school’s athletic programs. They have a lot of money or influence, or both.

The group pools its resources to attract the best possible athletes. By “resources” we mean name, image and likeness opportunities, which translate into money for players.

Since, by NCAA decree, the schools themselves aren’t supposed to have anything to do with NIL, it’s pretty much the Wild West out there. Free enterprise, supply and demand, buyer beware… all of that good stuff.

This allows the – hopefully well-advised – student-athlete to shop around for the best deal available. But maybe it’s not so good if we think in terms of structure and equal opportunities.

That’s true at the highest level…and that’s what sparked Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher a few days ago. According to 2019 figures, Texas had 650,216 millionaires (second only to California in the United States) and Alabama only 94,259 (26th). It’s an important consideration when Saban said “Fisher’s Texas A&M (team) bought every player” in its top-ranked 2022 recruiting class.

How will little old Bama ever survive this treacherous new world?

(In case you were wondering, Hawaii registered 38th with 44,383 millionaires.)

As you can imagine, these collective lists include all of the big name programs… some of them more than once. For example, a listing has three separate collectives for Penn State.

Most collectives are affiliated with Power Five conference programs. But one list includes seven Five-Four schools (eight, if you count Central Florida, which is leaving the American Athletic Conference for the Big 12 next year).

The University of Hawaii is not on any of the collective listings I could find online.

If you’re a UH fan, there are a couple of ways you can watch this:

1) Once again, Hawaii is a day behind and running out of money to keep up with the rest of the college sports world. Maybe it will make you feel better knowing that no one else from the Big West or Mountain West is listed either, but that’s cold comfort at best.

2) Recently, the NCAA hinted that they plan to monitor collectives more closely reminding them that they still fall under the category of boosters and to ensure that the few NIL rules that exist are not violated. This would include outright bidding wars to attract recruits or high school transfers. So, even if the investigation and enforcement seems to be even more problematic than before the genie was unleashed, is it better that your favorite school is not on a list of collectives?

Number 1 makes more sense to me, as long as the rules are followed. If UH fans love their athletes and teams as much as they claim, more needs to be leaders and help provide deserving student-athletes with more incentives to get involved and stay at UH.

There have been a few scattered efforts over the year since the NCAA changed its rules, such as the Bank of Hawaii’s deal with certain volleyball and basketball players, correlating with its deal of naming rights with SimpliFi Arena at the Stan Sheriff Center.

But what does it say about UH and the state when its most high-profile athlete with an existing NIL contract with a local company is traded to a conference rival? Central Pacific Bank may have a branch in San Jose one day, but it doesn’t now.

What happened to that state athletic commission a few years ago? Has it ever been done and does it still exist? If I remember correctly, it was Lieutenant Governor Shan Tsutsui’s baby.

It would be a perfect job for an athletic commission, to serve as a collective at UH. All you guys and girls who race for LG, do you want to separate yourself from the pack? Promise to rebuild that commission…Job One because that would be riding the herd to get the Aloha stage done, pronto. And Job Two should convince anyone who needs convincing that national champion volleyball players here on student visas should be eligible for name, image and likeness benefits, just like their American teammates.

Maybe there’s a Hui out there, a Hawaiian version of alluring Illuminati athletes with lucrative names, pictures, and likenesses to pick UH for. But if so, it’s unnecessarily working in the shadows and not doing a very good job.

After almost a year since the game changed, UH has accomplished next to nothing when it comes to NIL.