College basketball is bracing for a fiasco of its own after UNLV quarterback Matthew Sluka left the team midway through the season

In the After the Matthew Sluka brouhahaa question began to ponder: When is this coming to college basketball? There’s always a leak, and this snafu is no different. If the starting quarterback of an undefeated UNLV club can leave the team to preserve his redshirt amid an unprecedented NIL upset, then everything is on the table in this new era of college athletics.

“It’s a lot more common than you think,” said Dan Poneman, considered one of the most influential NBA/NIL agents in the industry. “Usually players have to take it lightly. This is the first time I’ve seen someone take a stand in the middle of the season.”

Money is at the heart of an unraveling relationship between Sluka and UNLV football. ESPN reported that Sluka was verbally promised at least $100,000 by a UNLV assistant coach. Multiple sources told CBS Sports’ Matt Zenitz that Sluka received zero money from UNLV. A key point of the breakdown was the fact that what he believed Sluka was promised by UNLV was not spelled out in writing before Sluka arrived as a coveted transfer from Holy Cross. A NIL agent told CBS Sports that Sluka’s camp or Agent Marcus Cromartie It was “disastrous” not to have reached a written agreement.

“It appears that there was a verbal commitment to the agent that there would be a contract as soon as the kid got on campus, and the contract never materialized,” Poneman says. “I experienced that. If that’s the case, I believe the player is right. I see people dragging the agent and I don’t think that’s fair. As an agent it’s easy to sit on my high horse and say, “I’m the best, I’d never do that.” However, the reality is that until this year, clubs weren’t allowed to hand out contracts , before players set foot on campus, and even when that rule was changed, many schools were adamant and still insisted on not handing out contracts until you arrive on campus.

“I feel for this agent who is being dragged out by people who don’t understand how NIL works, who don’t understand the market, who don’t understand the Wild West nature of this whole thing. “Of course he wanted a contract before the boy came to campus, but the school wouldn’t provide it and then they pulled the rug out from under him, so the agent gave his advice and the boy accepted it.”

Unfortunately, not all contracts are created equal and the money is rarely fully guaranteed. Every contract has exceptions for extrajudicial misconduct (arrests, academic revocations, expulsions, failed drug tests, etc.), but the dirty little secret in college basketball and college football is that no money is used at the negotiating table will not always Strictly speaking There. Sometimes money needs to be raised. Sometimes boosters can change their minds or take money off the table to force a coaching change.

“I think the biggest misconception is that there’s so much money out there,” said Marc Hsu, a former assistant at DePaul and Western Kentucky who is now vice president of agency Verus Basketball. “Doesn’t exist. There are a few schools that have a handful of money and it’s not what people think schools have. For example, a school has $2 million more than what it committed to on this list. They thought they would. “I’m getting donations from people, but nothing has come in. There isn’t as much money as everyone thinks.

“Most Power Five basketball collectives average between $2.5 million and $4 million. Do the math: If you have 13 scholarship recipients, that’s about $300,000 each. Some get $600,000, others get $900,000. That’s not as much as everyone thinks out there.”

Hsu noted that one of Verus Basketball’s customers did not receive his final six-figure payment until three months after the season ended.

“There’s a chance you won’t get the amount you signed for,” Hsu says. “This is a real possibility. The last three months after Christmas? Phew. I know several kids who went to Big 12, Big Ten schools last year and still didn’t get paid because the collective ran out of money.”

Poneman has experienced numerous situations where some collectives pay late. One collective even filed for bankruptcy to avoid being sued. It is not uncommon for some players to receive their full zero salary thanks to a strong contract, but their teammates are not so lucky because the contract was not as strict.

“I always joke when collectives say, ‘You don’t need an agent, we’ll do what we said we would and get you every dollar,'” Poneman says. “Imagine an NBA general manager saying that to a player. That would never happen. There is no area in professional sports where the GM or the coach would tell the player that he has no representation. It is a mechanism to exploit players. There are a lot of people who got verbal commitments from collectives and got every penny, but there are a lot of people who got commitments and only got a fraction of that. It’s tragic.

Poneman continued to outline difficult scenarios.

“Bad collective directors are the most dangerous thing for the success of a program. “Imagine being a head coach at a high major school and having worked so hard to build relationships with agents, AAU coaches and players and build a reputation.” And there’s a guy you didn’t hire and who has a big ego and who tries to argue with agents over unimportant details. This guy is undermining the program’s ability to recruit top players where the top guy was fired because he was so annoying to me and they said, “If you take away this power that we gave you, you’re undermining our ability to to recruit more players in the future, then you will do more harm than good.’”

College basketball currently does not have a redshirt rule similar to football, where a player can play up to four games and keep his redshirt. This adds another wrinkle. Currently, when college basketball players play a second in a season, their redshirt is burned unless an injury waiver is in place. Purdue’s Matt Painter has long used the current redshirt rules to develop key players, but in the NIL era, where maximizing your value is critical, some players are opting to redshirt and save a year of eligibility, if they believe their path to minutes is limited. Former Illinois guard Sencire Harris was a key spark plug for the Illini as a true freshman in 2022-23, but opted to redshirt before the end of his sophomore season. After the Illini advanced to the Elite Eight, Harris moved to West Virginia, where he will have three more years of eligibility. He followed new WVU assistant Chester Frazier, who recruited the defensive first guard to Champaign.

The NCAA is currently considering historic changes that would allow basketball players to play up to 30% of a season before burning the redshirt. That could open the door for a Sluka-like fallout to play out in basketball when a player decides to leave the team.

College basketball’s opening night is less than six weeks away. The squads are set for now, but the preparatory exercises will clarify who will get minutes and who won’t. Some promises are not kept. No doubt feelings will be hurt, and that will lead to rumblings in the transfer portal.

Unfortunately, some payments will not be made.

“I hear it a lot,” Hsu said. “It’s usually parents who feel like they can do it on their own. We have a pipeline of people. We can hold teams or teams accountable, as opposed to a mom or dad who might not care if they burn that bridge because they’re coming after them? No one.

Sluka’s public dispute with UNLV over finances is happening behind the scenes in college basketball. This level of repercussions simply did not exist. Still.

Dennis Dodd, John Talty And Matt Zenitz contributed to this story.