As college football’s elite is engulfed in a power struggle, G5 left just trying to survive: ‘We are a farm system’

This offseason, Will Hall will be a football coach for just a few hours a day. He’ll attend morning winter workouts and, once spring practice starts, lead his Southern Miss football team on the field.

Aside from those instances, Hall is a fundraiser. On a random Wednesday in February, Hall, the coach, starts his day at 7 a.m. observing workouts. By 10 a.m., Hall, the fundraiser, is meeting with donors in his office. At 11, he jumps in his car for the 90-minute drive to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where more donor meetings are held at 1:30 and then 3. His goal is to meet with 12 donors a week.

“I do zero football anymore. Zero football in my life right now,” Hall said. “I do culture and recruiting.

“Most of my day is spent all across the southern United States raising money,” he said before pausing, “for NIL.”

Hall’s offseason is a window into life these days at the Group of Five level — the lower-resourced bottom half of FBS where tight budgets and small staffs have coaches pushing aside football for fundraising. Gathering donor dollars for name, image and likeness (NIL) deals gives schools the ability to recruit players and, more importantly at this level, retain them.

Plenty of Power Five coaches are operating in a similar capacity as Hall. But in the Group of Five, NIL fundraising isn’t only more arduous — smaller donor bases, fewer school resources – but it is much more urgent. G5 coaches are scrambling to amass enough dollars to ward off Power Five poachers.

Already historically disadvantaged from brand and budget perspectives, programs in the Group of Five are now struggling to compete with their bigger brothers in compensating players. Power Five programs, equipped with on average five times more NIL cash, are outbidding Group of Five schools to take their best players, pillaging rosters…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/as-college-footballs-elite-is-engulfed-in-a-power-struggle-g5-left-just-trying-to-survive-we-are-a-farm-system-140058685.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-02-19 14:00:58

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.