How a new bus service illustrates the Cougar Collective’s role at WSU in the wake of the House settlement

PULLMAN — Justin Mills had just about seen enough. A 2018 graduate of Washington State, Mills knew what it was like to experience WSU football gamedays at their best, RVs flooding the town and a packed Martin Stadium roaring and empty Fireball shooters scattered around the stands by nightfall. But now, with the Cougars’ attendance dropping as their conference affiliation shook the university, he understood one thing.

He couldn’t sit on his hands.

So one day in late March, he fired up his X app and sent a direct message to Hurley Media Group’s Brian Hurley, who had put out a call for WSU supporters willing to help set up a new bus service to games. Brian put Mills in touch with his wife and fellow media expert Cassie, who was leading the charge on that front.

A project manager based in Spokane, Mills had a background in organizing efforts like these, so things came together relatively smoothly. In order to make it easier for fans in Spokane and the Tri-Cities to attend WSU games – Pullman hotels drive up prices for game weekends so much that would-be attendees are forced to stay in the surrounding areas, or not come to games at all – he connected with a bus operation called Starline, which has a branch in Spokane.

The Starline representative, a woman named Tracy, stayed in touch with Cassie and Justin via group chat. Tracy and Starline eventually agreed to help Mills, Hurley and the entire Cougar Collective arrange a series of bus trips to and from each of WSU’s six home games this fall, with one route via Spokane and the other via Kennewick, Pasco and Richland.

“I’m gonna give him props, too, because he stayed on me,” Cassie said of Justin. “He was like, ‘Hey, any updates? Any updates?’”

“I wanted to help out any way I could,” Justin said. “I wanted the experience for other people to be how I had it at WSU, so I want them to have the same experience I did.”

The best part: It came at a reasonable cost for the collective, which would get 10% of the proceeds, which would then go on to benefit WSU athletes, a crucial development as coaches try to fend off poachers from other schools.

But the part that may excite WSU fans most has to do with what can happen on the bus trips. Thanks to a series of $15 permits Mills worked to acquire, bus riders can drink alcohol on their way to the games. Riders get their ID checked upon boarding, which allows them to drink any alcohol they bring.

“I’ve seen other people, like students, saying, ‘I wanna make a trip to Spokane just to take the bus back down to Pullman,’ ” Mills said. “So, you know, it sounds like very positive feedback.”

With all of that complete, only a few loose ends had to be tied up. Ol’ Crimson Booster Club coordinator CJ McCoy, who is also responsible for setting up people to fly the WSU flag at College Gameday, helped coin the name Ol Crimson’s Back Home Bus. Cassie and Mills also worked with a travel service called Wanderlie to put the $65 tickets online for purchase, and the Hurley Media Group produced a promotional video for the new bus operation.

“Everything we do is for the love of WSU. It’s a passion project,” Cassie said. “For us, it started back with the Pac-12 collapse, because we’re like, ‘We’re getting left behind, and it really, truly hurts our hearts.’ We love WSU, and it’s so special, and we want everybody to know how special it is. It’s a Coug thing, and we all know how special it is.”

In a vaccum, it’s a compelling story about WSU alumni working together to resurrect the bus service (the first iteration died around the time of the coronavirus pandemic) and give nearby fans easier ways to attend football games, a longtime struggle because of small-town Pullman’s lodging limitations. But zoom out and it fits into the bigger picture of WSU’s main NIL group, the Cougar Collective, which is finding ways to adapt to a system that changed forever last week.

Last Friday, a judge gave final approval to the House vs. NCAA settlement, paving the way for athletic departments to begin directly paying athletes via an annual revenue-sharing pool, which will be capped at $20.5 million in the first year, which begins on July 1, the same start date as WSU’s fiscal year 2026.

The settlement comes with two other meaningful impacts. It requires the NCAA and its Power Five members (WSU could remain under that umbrella in a legal sense) to pay some $2.8 billion in damages, or “back pay,” to compensate athletes for the denial of NIL opportunities under prior eligibility rules.

It has also prompted NIL collectives around the country to rethink their approaches now that institutional NIL will be the norm. In January, Colorado shuttered its collective in anticipation of the House settlement’s effect. Louisville’s will be turned into a marketing agency of the university. Ohio State is merging its two prior collectives into one broader one, which will be associated with the school.

“But we’re certainly not gonna go anywhere,” said Tim Brandle, the Cougar Collective’s treasurer and legal counsel.

The Cougar Collective is here to stay, not vanishing with the House settlement’s approval. The team will still enter into NIL contracts with players, same as it has for the past couple seasons, and those agreements will come with the same stipulations that Brandle and the team began installing recently: If an athlete hits the transfer portal and leaves WSU early, they’re responsible for paying back those funds, a buyout provision to protect the collective in the event players break their contracts.

But plenty is also changing for Brandle and the Collective. The House settlement requires that deals more than $600 must be reported to a new clearinghouse called NIL Go, run by accounting firm Deloitte, which will in turn attempt to determine if those agreements are “fair market value” – an arbitrary threshold not entirely based on athletic ability – and if they aren’t, they can get sent to arbitration or scuttled entirely.

But that only applies to contracts signed after the settlement’s approval, meaning many of the Cougars’ newcomers – the team signed 13 transfers in the spring window and will welcome 26 incoming freshmen this summer – may not be subject to those restrictions. That’s a key reason why many schools around the country, WSU included to a lesser extent, prioritized signing transfers this spring. They could avoid the incoming limitations and combine with institutional NIL to maximize player profits.

Ostensibly, it’s a measure to help schools like WSU, an outfit growing in NIL capabilities but still more than vulnerable to poaching. In that way, these measures do something to level the playing field, which many Cougar coaches and supporters have been clamoring for as their players have been lured away by lucrative NIL offers from other schools — sometimes even before they enter the transfer portal.

But the way Brandle and others at the Collective see things, it doesn’t strike the heart of the issue, which is “unfair trade practice,” Brandle said. The deeper-pocketed schools will have few issues surpassing the $20.5 million cap by loading up on profitable NIL deals before the House settlement’s approval, combining those with their revenue-sharing allotment to put the highest spenders in the $30-$40 million range per season.

This is where WSU might benefit in a subtle way, though. The Cougar Collective has made strides in recent months — last winter, the group put together an NIL package of around $1 million to try and retain quarterback John Mateer, who turned it down and transferred to Oklahoma — but the organization isn’t always in a position to offer deals that would get flagged as above fair market value anyway.

Even if those offers did, the Cougars’ program may not face the same type of scrutiny than that of other Power Four operations, which are much better equipped to dole out the types of contracts that would warrant investigation. If a player from another school were to have their deal rejected and their university files a lawsuit, it might stand to reason that development would occupy more of Deloitte’s resources than something happening at WSU.

That isn’t to say the Cougars would be getting away with illegal deals – “I would turn them over, upload them,” Brandle said, “be like, here you go, check this out” – but rather a reflection of WSU’s position in the bigger picture of college athletics, in the traditional Pac-12 and outside it. The Cougs have always been in the business of doing more with less.

For those reasons, Brandle and the collective team remain focused on the same things they were focused on before the House settlement was finalized – recruiting new members to their 1890 Club, a nod to WSU’s founding year that asks patrons to donate $18.90 per month, and getting creative with new ways to raise money.

One of the more significant developments helped the collective secure the name for its new bus service. The Ol’ Crimson brand has allowed the collective to use its trademark, which led to the Ol Crimson’s Back Home Bus branding, as well as the coffee and beer products that bear the Ol Crimson branding.

How much will the collective augment WSU’s institutional NIL? The Cougars are expected to commit around $4.5 million in revenue-sharing dollars to the football team this year, athletic director Anne McCoy said in January, but she also indicated that number includes scholarships and stipends, making it unclear how much true revenue-sharing money will go toward the program.

Whatever the number , the Cougar Collective will remain a part of the NIL picture at WSU. In fact, Brandle said, the team is more aligned now with the university than it has been before. It’s the new world of college athletics, where dollar signs play a more prominent role, forcing collectives and administrations to figure things out on the fly.

“All that is to say our modus operandi is not just asking people for money,” Brandle said. “It’s providing value and showing people that we have a coffee, we have a beer. “Soon, we’re gonna have several other different products that we’re rolling out.”