Take One: NIL Continuing to evolve

This is not so much a take as just new information that might have been missed in all of the different stories coming out over the past two or so weeks.

When Matt Sluka left UNLV unexpectedly, there were a lot of different opinions on the rightness or wrongness of his decision. I am not going to go into that minefield, but it did expose something with the ‘formal’ response of the University when Sluka went to the staff to ask where NIL payments were: “UNLV athletics interpreted these demands as a violation of the NCAA pay-for-play rules, as well as Nevada state law,” the school said.

This is a very important distinction. There are reports that Sluka and his representatives believed he was not allowed to sign NIL paperwork until he was enrolled as a student and that he could not ask for anything until that paperwork was signed. We could dig really deep into this, but I would rather talk about what UNLV said because that is an accurate interpretation of current NCAA rules. The NCAA may not be able to stop transfers, and they may not be able to limit total NIL, but they can currently say that schools are not allowed to directly pay players beyond scholarship money.

Georgia is working to change that at the local level. Two weeks ago, on September 17th, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed an executive order allowing schools in the state to directly compensate their athletes for their name, image, and likeness. You know what comes next. Just about every state that wants their school to remain competitive is going to follow suit – because no one wants Georgia to have a recruiting advantage by being permitted to pay players directly while others have to follow NCAA guidelines.

We can debate whether this is good or bad for a long time and probably not come to a consensus, but the reality is that it is coming. I don’t know if Oregon will jump as quickly to get something like this to be passed, but I anticipate that Georgia will force the NCAA’s hands. It may not matter how many states pass this as a law, because the NCAA is – once again – going to have to re-evaluate their slow and backward approach to the fast changing world of college athletics.

If we look deeper into the Sluka situation, what we see is that Sluka talked to a coach after he left Holy Cross but before he enrolled, but the collective never heard the same number that the coach had mentioned. This is a very similar situation to Jaden Rashada’s where bad communication led down a broken path. The only difference here is that Sluka is a senior and Rashada was a high school recruit.

If the Georgia concept becomes policy across the NCAA, moments like this may not entirely go away, but at least the schools could respond accordingly.

Take Two: Best Ever?

I said on ‘Fact or Fiction’ yesterday that I did not think this would be the ‘pound for pound’ best class in Oregon history because I went with a technicality that the average star rating per pound of weight would be lower.

But it is worth mentioning that this is going to potentially be the best class Oregon has ever signed on an average star rating. if we look at just the top 15 recruits from each class, the 2021 class has an average star rating of 4.13 while the 2025 class has an average star rating of 4.27 so far.

This class is very elite at the top end of the class so a lot of whether this average continues to be so high is going to depend on who all Oregon closes on to get to 20 recruits – the magic number for Rivals ratings since only he top 20 go toward team rankings.

Greg Smith talked a little about Linkon Cure making it out for a visit – if he does, there is a much better chance for a flip. I am still very much in the camp that Cure is a longshot until we hear otherwise. If he does make it out for a visit, I will have to talk to people after the visit to see how much that visit changes things from an odds perspective.

But it is going to take more than just Cure to get to a best ever recruiting class. This is where it starts to get really difficult to project. Oregon is going to have a smallish class in 2025 and they are going to need to sign elite prospects to get that highest ever rating and I just don’t know that the staff has the same evaluations that we do and there are potentially going to be some guys that commit who might not ‘bump’ the ratings up, but who are perfect fits for what the staff wants at a given position.

If the Ducks want to get that kind of momentum, they probably need a couple of other elite flips and right now the ones that keep getting talked about are likely not ones that are going to switch up – so the one take I will have is that I think that signing day(s) this year are going to have even more surprises than we have seen yet. There will be some signing day flip that will come out of the blue.