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I think about it this way: - A couple years ago the Supreme Court said there is a lot of revenue in college sports so you need to share it with the players. - NCAA comes up with NIL as a way to share revenue with players that generate the revenue. - Lawyers are now saber-rattling that sharing the revenue only with players that participate in sports that generate the revenue violates Title IX. - NCAA is so concerned about Title IX they are willing to potentially pay every athlete $30k, in addition to scholarships, room and board, etc. It'll be a very unique program that doesn't cut it's Olympic sports to the bone if this all goes through. Nothing more than is required than to stay eligible for D1.

A bunch of people have said it, so this isn't exactly a new point, but to me the only way this makes sense is if the NCAA thinks the current NIL process is going to get destroyed by Title IX concerns. I never like NIL because it was clearly always going to be pay for play, but the one aspect I liked was it allowed a work-around for Title IX. At the end of the day, I don't believe a women's lacrosse player should get paid as much as a football player if players are going to get paid. But this new proposal is an attempt to get the non-revenue sports a modicum of pay for play and the suggested starting price is $30k per player. There is no way the football schools like this proposal UNLESS they know the courts are going to blow it all up so might as well try and get in front of it before that happens.

Can anyone explain why there is a G League draft when most other guys like Yuri just sign contracts with their team and play on the G League affiliate?

In reading the original tweet it referenced "Basketball Only" member. I took that as them only going to play basketball, but now that I think about it more, it really just means they don't play football but would play every other sport in the AAC.

If VCU leaves we should really reconsider pushing for membership in the AAC. It would clearly be a stronger basketball conference than the A-10 and a better geographic fit too. Yes, they aren't catholic schools but that is overrated as a reason to be in a conference. Plus, with our recent NCAA tourney drought we won't be leaving behind but one NCAA Unit with only a couple years remaining.

Let's say that happens. I assume the A10 has to kick VCU out for all other sports, right?

It was in the article explaining him leaving CBC: https://www.stltoday.com/sports/high-school/boys-basketball/justin-tatum-looks-to-australia-to-continue-building-strong-coaching-resume-after-stepping-down-at/article_def115c4-f4e4-11ed-9e2d-ebe61da3b841.html “I love St. Louis so much and I’m a Billiken at heart,” Tatum said. “One day, I hope to sit as the head coach of St. Louis University after Travis (Ford) has done such a great job.”

Late to this thread but to summarize: a couple of posters are mad that a SLU staffer posted a short clip of 3 NBA players practicing at SLU. This first player is the named sponsor of the local AAU team that we are constantly trying to recruit from. The second player is the son of a former SLU player that very seriously considered going to SLU and absolutely loves/represents St. Louis. His dad, the former player, has publicly stated one of his goals in life is to eventually be the head coach at SLU. The third player is a local high school star that choose SLU, graduated from SLU, and against many odds has now made the NBA. Yeah, I'd say we are pretty much in peak off-season form if people are criticizing the posting of this video.

Granted the translate feature isn't perfect, but man things would be a lot more fund in Billiken land if the bolded part was true.

Kevin was far better than "decent." He is 6th in the all-time SLU scoring list and while that may have been modestly inflated by his teammates not being good enough to spread out the shots, he would have been a major play on any Billikens team, ever. Not to mention he was a two time Australian league MVP and played in the Olympics for Australia. Dude was a stud.

Last night on Sports Plus, Frank had a long segment on Kevin Lisch and his family returning to St. Louis. I couldn’t find it online but maybe someone else can find it. He’s going to work for Scott Highmark at Mosaic Family Wealth and will be starting low on the totem poll. It was a neat interview and it’ll certainly be great to see him at SLU games more often now. He has 4 or 5 kids so there’s probably some recruitable student athletes in the bunch too!

Awesome stuff! Happy for Gibson, coach Ford and all of Billiken fandom.

Butler doesn't get into the Big East, much less the A10, without those two runs to the championship game. The first run with Gordan Heyward was pretty legit, but still had two wins of 2 points and one win of 4 points. The second run was as an 8 seed and included last second baskets in the first two games just to get to the sweet 16 and an OT win in the Elite 8. Relying on deep runs in the randomness of the NCAA tournament to improve your program is the definition of lucky in my mind. I think it's also worth noting all the programs that have been at the low to mid-major level take the first opportunity to move up when they have deep runs in the tourney. Butler (A10, Big East), Loyola (MVC, A10), George Mason (A10), Davidson (A10), VCU (A10), Marquette (Big East). So all these schools want to move UP in conference when they do well, but you are suggesting we should move DOWN so that maybe we can have a good run? Which will then give us the opportunity to move UP again, back to the A10? Or are you suggesting we just permanently stay in the Horizon league forever type thing?

I think you are letting the random path that some teams took to success cloud the reality that every school you identified that we want to be like (Gonzaga, Xavier, Marquette, Butler and Creighton) is currently in the Big East except for Gonzaga which is only not in that conference because of geography. I don't count Gonzaga in these discussions because they are a unicorn that every catholic school dreams of being and its a miracle they are where they are. The fact is every team we want to be like is in the Big East so I don't understand at all why you want to go in the opposite direction from the Big East. Xavier made it by dominating the A10 for over a decade. Marquette made it from a conference that was better than the A10. Butler made it by two magical final four runs and then going to the A10. 3 of the 4 teams on your list joined the Big East from the A10 or a better conference. Creighton made it by sustained success in the MVC and strong university connections. You brought up Loyola, they obviously prefer the MVC and later A10 over the Horizon. You brought up the 50 yr history. As you have so well created threads on twitter, we did try to lower conferences moving from the Metro to the MCC. I don't know exactly how long we remained in the MCC before joining the Great Midwest but I do know how many NCAA tourneys we had during that time: 0. Moving down in conferences in not the answer. Dominating the one you are currently in is.

I respect him as a poster for his long history as a fan of the Billikens, but strongly disagree with TheTorch that going down in conference is the best path. He's been beating that drum for years and I'm pretty sure if given the choice of the Big East he believes we should decline. To me it's simple. Get into the conference that produces the most NCAA bids per year and do your best to compete. $, recruits and fans will all be bigger in better conferences. Until this year, the A10 has been a multi-bid conference and realistically it should be multi-bid going forward. Probably too much to ask for 4 bids but 2.5 a year is not unreasonable. Why anyone would want to join a conference where the entire regular season doesn't matter and the only thing that really matters is whether you can win your conference tournament every single year is beyond me. p.s. if anyone is serious about downgrading conferences, why in the world wouldn't you want the MVC? It's full of regional rivals and is also a one bid league every year.

The administrators of the collective will determine who gets what and for what services. The coaching staff is not legally allowed to say who get's what. But you know as well as I do that the coaches will have input into what get's paid out.

I'm sure Chairman Powell would be interested in your thoughts on monetary policy.

Taj, they say there are 5 stages of grief. I've been through them all; you just need to get past depression and into acceptance. Denial: NIL will never happen, the NCAA will stop it. The NCAA will change the rules to provide guardrails. SLU doesn't really need to participate fully in it. Anger: It pisses me off that these players are going to get paid a lot of money to play basketball. A scholarship and stipend should be enough. I already give a lot of money to SLU, now they want me to send money to a collective? Bargaining: OK, if I'm going to send money to a collective, I'll just reduce the amount I send to SLU. Depression: This just sucks and makes me sad. A somewhat pure sport has been ruined by professionalism. Are high school kids next? CYC? Acceptance: SLU better build a collective that I can contribute to sooner rather than later so we don't get left behind.

Absent NCAA regulations, NIL is here to stay Taj. It could very well be the case that the absolute dollar amounts being paid to players levels off or goes down, but I kind of doubt it. It's not about whether a stipend should be enough and to your point, players 10-13 on your roster probably will get very little to no NIL money. As I don't work for the SLU athletic department, I don't know how much they get in true private donations on a yearly basis, but let's make a number up and say it's $5mm. Why is it hard to believe that that $500k of that could be diverted to NIL collectives for the benefit of the players and then handed out to the men's basketball team on a merit based weighting scheme? The athletic department will figure out how to make due with $4.5mm in contributions (assuming every last dollar is just a re-allocation instead of donors digging deeper to fund both). The alternative is we keep pouring money into buildings, coaches salaries, etc. and the NIL collective stays dry. No good players will come without NIL money and pretty soon we'll have a full 13 man roster of guys you named in your post above.

There absolutely has to be a sliding wage scale for NIL. That's kind of the point of NIL; not everyone is equal on a team or across sports and a player should be compensated based on how good he is or how much value he can add by marketing his name image and likeness. How collective funds get allocated will technically not be done by the coach as it isn't allowed by the NCAA, and in some ways I suspect the coaches appreciate not being involved directly as it should ease the issue of kids coming to him and saying they want more money. But we all know how it works in the real world as coaches will undoubtedly talk to the administrators of the NIL collectives and have input into how much each player gets. It has enormous potential to impact the locker room comradery as good players will get paid more, etc. But in fairness, every single one of them will be working for pay in a few years whether on a basketball team or at a job and salaries are rarely the same among friends. Finally, $130k annually for the budget of a collective simply isn't going to cut it if SLU wants to remain relevant in college basketball. Think numbers more like $500k to get into the right ball-park. How that market develops over time is anyone's guess (I could see plausible arguments for it going up or down dramatically as time passes) but that's probably about right for teams in the 25-75 range these days.

I don't know, but let's be honest you don't really need a collective for the other sports (maybe men's soccer). The amounts players in the other sports could reasonably expect to make can be handled with the service portal the already exists. Put differently, if you are rich and like the baseball team you can hire a few of their players to come to your kids baseball practice and pay them $1,000 each. That would go a long way to helping the baseball team. But for basketball, coach Ford NEEDS a collective that he can point to and say something like "last year we had $500k in the collective and it was split up amongst the players." That is so much more effective when talking to a recruit than saying "if you come there may be a few donors willing to pay you a 1,000 to come coach their kids basketball team." I dislike NIL for many reasons, but the one thing I have to give it credit for is it's an elegant way for schools to pay players but not have to do it equally across sports and genders. It's purely market based and for the most part the only two sports that will generate big $ are men's basketball and football.

SLU is definitely behind in NIL. Somehow Ford was able to convince the returning players not to jump ship over the summer when they were offered big NIL deals from other schools. I do think it has hurt recruiting this fall as he doesn't have the same loyalty factor with high school kids that he likely does with the seniors on the team. That being said, there is work being done to set up a collective which is a critical part to keeping up with the Joneses. Once the collective is set-up it'll be up to donors, big and small, to start contributing. This isn't going away and if we ignore it, the program will quickly fade to irrelevant.

I'm not sure I agree with this as it depends on who is coming back. If we go to the Final 4 but most of the players move on, people will know as much as while attendance will increase it won't be a doubling of our season ticket base. If we go to the Final and Yuri, Gibson and Thatch come back we'd sell a lot of tickets... That's the unfortunate reality of college basketball, all the real excitement happens at the end of the season, well after any home games are going to be played. For the two weeks that the Bills are in the Sweet 16 and Final 4 this city would go bonkers for the Billikens. You can count on that. But two days after we lose in the semi-final would be opening day for the Cardinals and the casual fan would move on just as quickly.

Making the sweet 16 as a 1-6 seed is not really a long shot. It happened that during that window of time 6 "mid-majors " had that chance and failed, but that doesn't make it a long shot. It's kind of like if Goldschmidt goes 0-6 over two games, I don't think it's a long-shot for him to get a hit in the next game. You keep believing that we'll have a better shot at the sweet 16 as a 11-15 seed and I'll keep believing it's better to be in the top 25 and be a 1-6 seed. And we can all live in billikens.com harmony.

By your definition of "mid-major", which you seem to associate with any A-10 team, includes anybody not in the Power 6 or AAC or Gonzaga? So based on that definition here are the "mid-major" top 6 seeds and their performances. 2022: St Marys as a 4 seed lost in the round of 32 and Colorado St. as a 6 seed lost in the first round 2021: San Diego St. and BYU as 6 seeds lost in the first round. 2019: Buffalo as a 6 seed lost in the round of 32. 2018: Wichita St. as a 4 seed lost to another mid-major in the first round 2017: None 2016: None So basically in the last 5 years a grand total of 6 "mid-major" teams have had top 6 seeds and none of them have made the sweet 16. And you compare that to the "mid-major" field for those same years that includes all teams with seeds 8-15. In 2022 alone there were 20 such mid-major teams. If that average holds over 5 years, there are 100 such opportunities for low seeded mid-majors to make a run. Put differently, because 4 out of 100 mid-major teams made a run to the sweet 16 you think it is "easier" to do it as an 8-15 seed than it is as a 1-6 seed?? As I said before, give me a top 25 ranking and a top 6 seed and I'll take my chances. You can keep the 4 in 100 chances that seem to be the rest of the mid-major field.