Boo Corrigan met with the media on Friday to discuss offseason developments at NC State, and foremost among those is the shift to the revenue sharing model that began in July. The new model left schools with two decisions to make: (1) either opt in to revenue sharing or opt out and (2) if you’re in, decide if you want to spend the full $20.5 million or not.
NC State of course opted in—every power conference school did that—but hadn’t said anything publicly about what it was going to spend. Corrigan cleared that up yesterday:
In the new landscape of everything that’s going on, what are we going to do to be competitive? We’re going to go all in. We are all in with regards to the 20.5 million dollars in scholarships and everything. I think it’s important for our fans to know that. We’ve known it. I haven’t seen this as a point of reference of we’re going to do this with football and this with basketball and this with all of our other sports, but our coaches have known since October that we were all in on what we’re going to do.
It is important for fans to know that, so thank you, Boo. There is nothing more important right now than the capability to spend the max amount. It’s good to have confirmation that NC State is doing that.
Schools can spend up to $2.5 million on new scholarships that count against the cap, and Corrigan said that State is going to spend about $2 million there, which leaves $18.5-ish for NIL distribution. Corrigan, like many ADs, is giving his programs a dollar amount and the flexibility to spend it how they see fit:
What we did with our sports was we gave them a number, right? And as opposed to your baseball, baseball gets 10 point or 11.7 scholarships. Instead of doing that, we went and said, here’s a number. If you want to do that in 25 scholarships, you can do it in 25 scholarships. If you want to do it in scholarships plus [$] and lower the number of scholarships, you can do it that way.
So, for instance: baseball can provide 35 scholarships now, more than tripling the previous allotment of fully-funded roster spots. Let’s say that a scholarship is $20k, on average (assuming a roughly 50-50 split on in-state and out-of-state players). And Boo’s giving Elliott Avent $500,000 to work with, let’s say. Avent has to decide how much he’s going to spend on scholarships, and how much he wants to set aside for NIL money on top of that. Good portal players are going to require some walkin’ around money, so a portion of your budget needs to be set aside for those additions. Maybe you don’t want to offer 35 full scholarships, but 25, or 30, and save the rest for NIL. Having the flexibility of “here’s your pot of money, do what you want” is important, as roster needs are going to vary year-to-year.
These are the new machinations for football, men’s and women’s hoops, and baseball at NC State in this new era.