Dannen dives deep on rev-share, talks challenges for basketball coaches at football schools

Nebraska athletic director Troy Dannen spoke with reporters for nearly an hour on Friday inside Hawks Championship Center in Lincoln.

The AD touched on several topics. Among the most notable were revenue sharing and NIL.

One of the main takeaways from the AD’s chat? Football is king and funds about 85% of the athletic department, Dannen said. Because of the sport’s importance, it’s treated as the top priority.

That being said, as Nebraska and everyone else navigates this new college athletics world, winning football games is incredibly important for the university.

“Football is the engine in every way, and it is important that you win,” Dannen said.

Dannen said he’s seen progress in the football program under head coach Matt Rhule. The AD likes to use building blocks when discussing goals. Dannen viewed the Huskers’ win over Boston College in December’s Pinstripe Bowl as a huge building block for the future of the university.

“Getting to the bowl game, as absurd as it seems given our last decade, that was a foundational block that needed to happen before we could take the next step,” Dannen said. “Winning the game was a foundational block. The next one is going to be that fourth quarter drive that everybody talks about what hasn’t happened, and then we can finally start talking about what has happened.”

Here’s a quick breakdown of what Dannen had to say.

Which sports will get a share of the $20.5 million?

Four sports — football, volleyball, men’s and women’s basketball — are allocated a cash pool from the $20.5 million that each program has to distribute to its athletes because of the House Settlement. Dannen chose not to go into specifics regarding how much money each of those sports, and its athletes, are getting.

“I’m not going to talk about the numbers, and I don’t think anybody in the country is talking about the numbers that’s going sport by sport,” Dannen said. “I don’t think anything’s out of probably whack with what happens in most places. When the coaches get that pool of money, they decide who gets what and how much, whether it’s one-year, two-year, whatever the contract terms are with the individual athletes.”

With those sports needing to divvy up their share of the payment, coaches have started hiring general managers to do that for them. In Nebraska football’s case, head coach Matt Rhule’s GM is Pat Stewart. In Nebraska men’s basketball’s case, head coach Fred Hoiberg’s GM is Luca Virgilio.

“That’s why coaches, everybody’s moved to the GMs, because there is now a strategy in how are we, where are we allocating those resources,” Dannen said. “Not to mention the fact that nearly every athlete has an agent, and the head football coach cannot be expected to deal with 80 agents, and that’s the role of the general manager right now.”

Dannen also noted that soccer, wrestling, baseball, softball and men’s and women’s track and field have additional scholarships, and they will count against the $20.5 million.

What does the process look like for determining which players get what?

Dannen said he got with Nebraska’s NIL point man, Associate AD of Administration Johnathan Bateman, last year to figure out how the rev-share process will work.

Dannen said he and Bateman met with every head coach to get their thoughts on what was needed to be competitive. It was a learning experience.

“My mindset coming in changed from talking to coaches, I thought we were going to have one program and one plan, one size fits all,” Dannen said. “I would tell you we probably have 24 different models. What does football need? Because it’s different than baseball. Baseball needs scholarships, maybe before they need rev-share dollars. So there’s a lot of that that the coaches had to decide.”

Once the decisions were made on how much of the $20.5 million would be allocated to each sport, Dannen said it was up to the head coaches/GMs to decide how much money a player gets. Once that is determined, contracts come into play, and Bateman and Dannen need to sign off on them.

Nebraska’s contracts, Dannen said, are similar to everyone else’s in the conference.

“Just like a scholarship, the coach decides how much somebody should have. Then the coach and the sport administrator make that decision,” Dannen said. “It goes to Jonathan, and Jonathan makes sure it, from a compliance standpoint, are we within the number that’s been allocated before we submit it? Does everything work? Everyone who’s getting $1 in cash from the rev share has to sign a contract. It’s a contract that’s common across the Big Ten. My guess is this contract will be common throughout the A-four. They sign that contract, and then it gets to me, and ultimately, then I sign off on the contract.”

Dannen said he did not give more scholarships to the sports that are receiving revenue sharing. However, those sports could use those rev-share dollars for scholarships if they chose.

“We didn’t say, ‘Here’s money, plus scholarships.’ It’s, ‘Here’s a pool of money if you decide you want to add scholarships,'” Dannen said. “So if Matt wanted to be at 86, he wanted to be at 83, he has that flexibility, whatever he thought his needs were. The question for Matt was, if you have $1, is it best invested in your two deep? Or is it best invested in your 87th player? And those are hard decisions, but those are decisions that every coach had to make.”

Dannen is seeing frontloaded deals enter the mix in high school recruiting … with little regulations

Prior to the July 1 House settlement, there was an issue of collectives frontloading NIL deals to secure athletes.

Only six weeks into the settlement and the College Sports Commission clearinghouse, also known as NILGo, there’s little regulation or consequences for collectives continuing to throw money at recruits.

“The biggest question is, what are we going to do about high school recruiting? Because you can give anybody anything right now and it’s unregulated by the terms of the settlement,” Dannen said. “It’s probably circumvention of the settlement. I hear various things about what’s happening. Some of it’s true, some of it’s not true. I’m not sure I should repeat it because I don’t trust a lot of what I hear unless I see it, to be sure. I do know there’s a lot of money going pre-enrollment right now as a way to circumvent the gap. I’d say it’s moved from recruitment and retention to recruitment. How that’s handled, there’s a lot of us that have made suggestions about what we should do from a regulatory standpoint. We’re waiting.”

Dannen said he’s careful about what he believes when he hears certain dollar amounts.

“I don’t know what other programs are paying. What I do know is that everybody lies. ‘We’re doing x and that school is doing y.’ Are they really?” Dannen said. “A lot of the numbers you see right now are a result of frontloading. Money that came in. This roster is getting x. That x is not a part of the $20.5 million. That’s impossible. If you want to have a thriving program, then you don’t have a $10 million basketball chunk out of your $20.5 million. The one thing about no transparency – we all try to keep this provincial because there’s this competitive piece to it – is that we’re liable to the misinformation that’s flowing around.”

Return on investment — Dannen will talk to the coaches about it at the end of the year

While it’s unclear what exactly Nebraska paid to secure high-profile transfers like Dane Key, Nyziah Hunter, Rocco Spindler, Dasan McCullough and others, Dannen said he plans to meet with coaching staffs to discuss the ROI.

Was this player a good investment? Did it turn out to be a bad investment?

“I’ve told the coaches, at the end of the year, when we have our evaluations, we’re going to go through the allocation of revenue share dollars and we’re going to talk about ROI,” Dannen said. “Was the ROI on this allocation good? Was the ROI on that allocation good? It’s going to impact what happens the following year.

“Coaches have always been accountable for budgets and in some ways, if you missed on a scholarship, eh, you missed on a scholarship. If you miss on a $250,000 revenue share allocation, that’s a big deal now. Back to the role of the GM – why are we spending so much on GMs and adding that person in now? The stakes are really high right now. The $20.5 million, that is about 1.5x greater than the scholarship budget of the entire department. So it’s a big number.”

Dannen’s thoughts on evaluating Fred Hoiberg’s basketball program at a football school

Dannen said basketball coaches at a football school, like Fred Hoiberg, are challenged right now.

The AD also said that the biggest basketball spenders aren’t always the biggest winners. So being smart with spending, Dannen added, is key.

“You have to spend reasonably. You have to make certain investments. If your decision as to whether we have success is whether I have the largest NIL budget, there’s going to be a lot of places that aren’t your place,” Dannen said. “I think basketball coaches are challenged right now that have big football programs because of what they see in the programs that don’t have the football expense, if you will.

“They also don’t have the revenue driving in. Very few basketball-only schools are self-sufficient. How and if they’re able to drive enough revenue to provide numbers of a magnitude, we’ll see over time. There’s a lot of stories out there. The fact of the matter is, one donor could write that check and donate it to the university and there you have it. It is different.”