Oklahoma vs NIL and the future of flyover football
The story of a program accustomed to greatness is struggling to adapt to new challenges and frontiers.
A little while back there was a really remarkable interview done by the main actors of Oklahoma’s 247 website, Brandon Drumm and Parker Thune, with Jason Belzer.
Belzer is the founder of Student Athlete NIL, a company that manages NIL collectives on behalf of multiple universities, including Oklahoma. In this episode, Belzer spills all the beans on OU’s collective, how they manage it, the sorts of funds they’re dealing with, etc.
Here’s the link:
There is so much to absorb here as Belzer was shockingly candid and dropped a massive amount of information.
The background story is that Oklahoma’s fanbase is experiencing massive anxiety over the NIL era and its juxtaposition with their move to the SEC.
Brent Venables has signed two full cycle classes since taking over as the head man at Oklahoma. The 2023 crew ranked 6th nationally and featured three 5-star blue chip players in quarterback Jackson Arnold (DFW), safety Peyton Bowen (DFW), and Edge Adepoju Adebawore (KC). They also added a whopping 19 transfers, which provided 10 guys who were either starters or near-starters.
The 2024 class ranked 9th in the nation and is headlined by a badly needed 5-star defensive tackle with another 12 transfers coming in. So things are going well, right?
Well here’s the concern. Their O-line room was completely emptied by the transfer portal. The departures were mostly players who didn't seem to be putting it together but there was also former blue-chip recruit and promising freshman starter Cayden Green. This kid was considered a potential future left tackle and was the only starter returning from the 2023 line. The circumstances were ugly, he was clearly poached by Missouri who (probably) tampered to convince him to enter the transfer portal and then gave him an NIL contract considerably larger than Oklahoma was willing to pay.
The quest to fill in the other four slots in the starting line, as well as to grab some of the new class of Kansas City and St. Louis prospects Oklahoma generally considers to be within their turf, have also run into problems. They’ve lost some bidding wars against Missouri and other SEC programs. Under the headlights of some very public losses, Jason Belzer did this podcast to get under the hood of what’s going on with Oklahoma’s NIL and consequently told us a great deal about how things are working in this space across college football.
His goal seems to have been to simultaneously reassure Oklahoma fans that they have smart management in charge while also lighting a fire of concern about what it’ll take for the Sooners to compete. I don’t envy anyone trying to do PR which balances those two contradictory messages.
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