‘Unsavory, exciting, unfathomable’: WSU athletics faces old challenges in the new world of NIL deals

If the average fan dropped out of a time capsule from 1979 when dominant football teams ran the wishbone or triple option running offenses, former Eastern Washington University head coach Mike Kramer said, he or she would struggle to understand the complex business behind collegiate sports today.

“They’d be like, ‘What am I looking at?’ ” Kramer said. “First of all, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry.

“Without some sort of regulation, this is going to continue to be the most unsavory, exciting, unfathomable experience that the collegiate experience has ever gone through on every level,” Kramer said.

That includes a level up at Washington State University, which embarks with the refurbished Pac-12 Conference at a time when college sports are smashing headlong into the free-market system.

Just a few years ago, women and men athletes were limited to a single transfer of schools and had to sit out a year to play at their new schools. If they were deemed good enough, they played for room-and-board and college tuitions.

But a series of anti-trust lawsuits successfully argued that schools and the NCAA profited on college athletics while players largely were left out. At the same time, relaxed transfer rules created what many consider chaos.

Athletes can now enter the NCAA transfer portal to announce to other schools their intent to transfer. And the portal only serves as a tool – players can simply leave a school and transfer as much as they want, as long as they have eligibility.

Money has also entered the arena. Players can now negotiate how much they receive through deals based on their name, image and likeness, better known as NIL.

Those transfer freedoms coincided with a massive court case that got settled this past year, known as the House v. NCAA settlement. As part of that settlement, universities can now pay up to $20.5 million, spread among all of their athletes each year, to play for their schools.

Indiana just parlayed an aggressive portal strategy into an undefeated season by second-year coach Curt Cignetti, who brought much of his infrastructure and coaches with him from James Madison, where he coached before he accepted the job at Indiana in 2024.

But as the Hoosiers relish their school’s first football national championship, the sport is littered with hundreds of Washington States and Nevadas and Idahos that must re-establish their niches in a system where athletes can now go to the highest bidder.

“Right now, the morality of the sport is incredibly lost,” said Kramer, who also coached at Montana State and Idaho State. “This is going to keep catapulting itself forward. In the meantime, there will be a lot of ugly flaws that are going to be exposed.”

WSU has benefited – but mostly lost talent – from the new system.

For example, the Cougars recruited quarterback Cameron Ward in 2022. He transferred to Pullman after starting his career as a zero-star recruit at Incarnate Word.

But the Cougars then lost Ward after two years when he again transferred, this time to Miami, which provided an NIL deal paying him about $2 million for his last year of college eligibility.

Ward parlayed his senior year leading Miami back to national prominence into becoming the first overall pick in the 2025 NFL draft.

While WSU has the ability to offer players NIL contracts – and does – it likely will continue to be outspent by schools in larger conferences with fan bases willing to shell out for their teams.

“A school like WSU has long held that it was one of the prime schools in the United States,” Kramer said. “Now it finds itself in more of a supporting role.”

Nevada coach Jeff Choate, who faces a similar situation as WSU, recently explained his recruiting strategy for prospective players.

“You know what happens when you come to Nevada? You get $1.4 million to go to Oregon if you’re developed the right way,” Choate said. “A guy that was a junior-college guy walk-on ended up becoming a first-team Mountain West player and then went and got a bag at West Virginia.

“That’s one of the things that we are selling.”

Kramer, who coached EWU from 1994-99 and later served as an assistant at WSU in 2010, said schools like Washington State or Nevada or Idaho are no longer necessarily pitching players on just getting a degree.

“The old mode of watching them walk around campus with a letter jacket is long gone,” he said. “Before, you couldn’t pay a player. Now there is no limit to what you can pay a player. Imagine the contrast.”

Pitch in Pullman

Tim Brandle is a WSU graduate who later obtained his law degree from Gonzaga University and now teaches a class on sports law and ethics in Gonzaga’s master’s in sport and athletic administration program.

But he also founded and now volunteers as the treasurer for the Cougar Collective, which was the original organization set up to provide NIL contracts to WSU players.

A Cougar fan at heart, he sees the current free-market sports system as a great opportunity for WSU despite its continued status as a program that doesn’t have the kind of financial support as those schools in the Big 10 or Southeastern Conference.

This season, the old Pac-12 holdovers, Washington State and Oregon State, will be joined by Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Utah State and Texas State. Gonzaga is also joining in all sports except football.

He pointed out that WSU has more living alumni, about 250,000, than all of the other schools in the new conference. That alumni base means clout.

“Look, we are the muscle of the new Pac-12. We just have to flex it,” Brandle said. “At this juncture in time, we have this 3-to-4-year window where the TV grants and rights are in place.

“We need to do what North Texas and James Madison and Tulane have done. Let’s be the bully,” he continued. “If James Madison is in the playoff, there is nothing to keep WSU from being in the playoff.”

But to support players, alumni must first open their wallets, he said.

While the House settlement guidelines say schools can give up to $20.5 million, there’s a catch: those funds must come directly from donors.

Brandle wouldn’t say how much the Cougar Collective has raised. As of September, the school’s Cougar Athletic Fund had about $4.5 million to provide for NIL contracts, according to then-WSU athletics director Anne McCoy.

The university “doesn’t tell us how much money they have. I don’t share how much money we have with anybody,” Brandle said. “I tell the coaches, but not the general public.”

But that gap in what the school could spend and can spend puts WSU at a disadvantage against schools that have already ramped up efforts to raise donations.

“At WSU, it was never part of the culture. When I left, I was never thinking I would donate $50 a month to the football program,” he said. “We’ve always given to academics. We’ve just never given to athletics. In order for us to succeed, we need to get on board.”

How NIL works

Before last year, Brandle’s Cougar Collective was the only way supporters could provide funds that could then go to players.

“The NIL world is full of people who don’t know what they are doing,” Brandle said. “There are uncles who are making 10% off their nephews’ contracts.”

But it starts with donations. Before last year, all came to the Cougar Collective, and Brandle would then work with WSU athletic staff to sort out the details.

“We are supporting every single sport on campus,” he said. “If one of our donors has a soft spot for women’s softball, we honor that. We just reach out to that coach and say, ‘You have x-amount of dollars for your roster this year.’ ”

But that changed last year as part of the House settlement, and WSU set up the Cougar Athletic Fund.

“The Cougar Collective is more like the special forces, and the university (Cougar Athletic Fund) is the army,” Brandle said. “We can be more selective on how we use our money.”

If a donor approaches either collective, they provide their information and how much they want to give. Once Brandle has collected all that information, he alerts the WSU athletic department.

“We would turn around and say, ‘Hey, coach Dickert or coach Rogers. Here’s what your budget will be for 2024,’ ” Brandle said.

The athletic department would provide a list of the players and amounts they should get paid.

“I’d write up contracts and sign agreements with the Cougar Collective,” he said.

Then Brandle would forward those NIL contracts to the College Sports Commission’s NIL Go program for approval.

The College Sports Commission, which was created after the House v. NCAA settlement, subcontracts with the global accounting firm Deloitte.

“It’s very subjective,” Brandle said. “They put together this rubric where they judge … whether it’s a fair market deal for that athlete. From what I’ve heard from industry sources, there are only 15 people at Deloitte tasked with reviewing thousands of (NIL) contracts.”

One of the deals WSU proposed was rejected, he said.

“We had an offensive lineman who for the year was going to receive $15,000,” Brandle said. “It was rejected … for an offensive lineman, who based on the number of plays and starts and experience, on the open market was worth $300,000 to $500,000.”

And before recently, most of the NIL contracts were nowhere close the amounts top players currently demand.

Things changed in 2022 with the recruitment of Cam Ward.

“He told coach Dickert and coach Morris that SEC schools were offering him $100,000 annually and a lease for a Porsche to come play quarterback at their schools,” Brandle said. “We were just flabbergasted.

“Up until that point, NIL contracts in our world was Max Borghi (running back from 2018-21) doing cameo videos for birthday parties or appearing in Arby’s for a social media campaign,” he said.

Within a couple years, WSU went from Borghi birthday parties to offering $1 million to quarterback John Mateer to stay in Pullman.

“John was very gracious and humble,” Brandle said. “He said, ‘That is so amazing. I need to take some time to talk to my family about this.’ He ended up going to Oklahoma” for about $3 million.

“The way the system is set up, WSU is going to have a hard time when people come kicking down our door,” Brandle said.

Going forward

Brandle said a school like WSU likely won’t fill its future rosters by bidding on players available in the transfer portal.

“It’s subject to market forces,” he said. “With all the offers from different schools, some will have more money than you. We develop players. We find talent, identify them and grow them.”

Former WSU coach Mike Price agrees.

Ironically, the current economics of the sport have put the Cougars in a similar place the team was when Price coached in Pullman from 1989 to 2002, a stretch when his teams played in two Rose Bowls.

“Do I like paying players more than professors on campus to play sports? It doesn’t matter what I think,” Price said. “We are the same university that we were before all this stuff happened. We will work hard to get good players and make them into great players.”

Price, 79, recently relocated to Walla Walla from a home on Lake Coeur d’Alene.

He, like Kramer, noted that WSU is not alone in its struggle.

“It’s never easy to be a Cougar,” Price said.

After winning recruiting wars with larger programs, the coach didn’t face losing former quarterbacks Drew Bledsoe or Ryan Leaf to other programs that could pay them more.

“That’s the new reality,” he said. “If you don’t like it, you better change.”

But he acknowledged that it is frustrating to see a Cam Ward or John Mateer develop at WSU only to leave for better paying contracts.

“What you want to do is use that,” Price said. “If you come here, I’ll make you a lot better and send you off and you can make $2 million as a junior. That sounds good to me. You’ll have to sell that.”

Kramer, a 71-year-old who retired from coaching in 2017 and now helps his son-in-law farm near Clarkston, agreed.

“There are so many people under the surface, behind the scenes,” he said. Athletes have “agents or handlers. They are just looking for the biggest amount of money they can get for the experience that a young man or young lady can provide.

“I don’t know where it’s going to end,” Kramer continued. “It’s a complete free-for-all.”