NORMAN, Okla. — Danny White has a vision. It might not sit well with some Tennessee fans after the Volunteers’ AD announced an across-the-board ticket increase of 10% last week.
But it is one hell of a vision.
The increase is actually 14.5% for UT football fans if you break it down – 10% on all ticket invoices and an additional 4.5% on football tickets. White referred to that piece as a “talent fee” that will go directly to players.
Cash money. Forget NIL, forget collectives, cut out the middleman. This is unprecedented, this is gangsta – in a college administrative sense. This is also brilliant because it’s working. Forget about fans being upset. Renewals are tracking at 90%.
“If it was about just cold-hearted business we could have gone up 25% and I still think we’d be sold out,” White told CBS Sports before Tennessee’s game at Oklahoma on Saturday. “We had that much demand.”
The ever-evolving era of transactional college sports continues. Tennessee just happens to be near the top of the current pyramid of success. In 2023-24, the Volunteers became the first school in SEC history to win conference titles in men’s basketball, baseball and softball in the same academic year.
This season, Tennessee’s football team is undefeated (4-0) and ranked in the top five for the first time in two years. There is a 15,000-person waiting list for a season ticket in one of Neyland Stadium’s 101,915 seats .
White himself recently became the highest-paid AD in the country.
A 25% increase might have been aiming too low. Tennessee’s ticket increase is already unheard of in the industry. The average increase averages between 2-5%. Notice of such a hike usually arrives quietly during the offseason in hopes fans don’t revolt.
White is making it rain – at least for the talent he hopes to lure to Tennessee.
“Ultimately, we decided to call a spade a spade …,” White said. “It’s very much about how we are going to afford all this in the new world order … It’s a professional sports model.”
Those, um, professional sports are doing very well at Rocky Top. Its wunderkind quarterback Nico Iamaleava is making $8 million on his NIL contract with the Tennessee collective. The rest of Tennessee’s sports are also going to be part of the ticket increase.
The Tennessee Fund, the athletic department’s official fundraising arm, helps support all of 20 of the school’s sports, and has raised $140 million, the most in its history. There is a lucrative new naming rights deal with truck stop giant Pilot.
White remains one of the savviest ADs in the country. He claimed a national championship for UCF in 2017 after the Knights went 13-0. He staged a parade in Disney World to celebrate the “accomplishment“. He then commissioned a sign to erect at UCF’s stadium to commemorate the “feat.”
There are no air quotes around what White is attempting at Tennessee. This price increase is a monster recruiting coup. It becomes more marketable when fans know directly where their money is going.
It is also an edgy move that invites NCAA enforcement to take a look. These are, after all, what seem to be direct payments to athletes.
But the underlying impact of the increase is chaos. More of it is good for the current system. That is, if that chaos leads to collective bargaining.
A lot of ADs believe in it, but can’t or won’t say it. Collective bargaining – whether it comes in the form of a union or employment status – provides cost certainly.
ADs/schools would be bargaining for player compensation with player representatives. There would be bargaining on working conditions, benefits and, yes, salary.
If you are repulsed by such a concept, don’t be. It can’t be any worse than it is now.
There are players walking into coaches’ offices after big games and demanding a “raise” in their NIL benefits. Unchecked collectives are more than happy to oblige. Meanwhile, the return on investment is a crapshoot.
History has yet to record if Iamaleava is worth the money. Maybe that’s not the issue. It’s what Spyre Sports, Tennessee’s collective, thought he was worth.
Meanwhile, Florida is being investigated by the NCAA for promising quarterback Jaden Rashada $14 million, then not delivering. Tennessee itself is being investigated for rules violations regarding NIL benefits.
Collective bargaining would solve all those cases. In fact, they wouldn’t be cases at all. In collective bargaining, all parties would have agreed to compensation, working conditions and benefits.
Lawyers would be involved, in a good way. Labor laws would apply.
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There’s a lot of runway for White to land his vision. Megabooster Jimmy Haslam is more than familiar with collective bargaining. Haslam, a Tennessee grad, owns the Cleveland Browns.
White is one of those ADs who has the answer before the question is asked. Back in the UCF days he was advocating for an expanded College Football Playoff. Then he joined the exclusive Power Five club to take full advantage of it in 2021, taking the Tennessee job.
The upside of White’s ticket plan is impressive. Tennessee’s ticket revenue was $75 million for football last year. When it’s all said and done, White hopes to increase that number to the “high $80s next year if we sell out, which I expect we will.”
Talk about passing the hat. Figuring in that 14.5% percent that’s at least $11 million of found money for athletes.
Like his peers, White has to discover new revenue streams where there aren’t any these days. We’re headed toward a salary-based economy for the labor force. If the House v. NCAA settlement is approved later this month, each FBS school will have to come up with $23 million annually to fund revenue sharing.
It’s one thing to raise ticket prices, it’s another to raise them by a double-digit percentage. And it’s entirely something else to let the world know the new revenue goes to fatten players’ wallets.
Forget “talent fees”. Tennessee’s move screams to the heavens, “You in or you out?”
ADs like White are ahead of the tsunami because they know the worst-case scenario still looms. That would be Congress taking over college sports.
That’s the aim of the NCAA which has thrown good money after bad trying to influence lawmakers in creating an NIL law that would further cap income. That involves an antitrust exemption that so far hasn’t moved much beyond the lips of those who support it.
Repeat: You do not want Congress running college sports. That’s government overreach in the worst possible way. College sports is not a place where those even-keeled, sensible legislators – sarcasm added – should be sticking their bow ties.
Giant companies now compete for naming rights to swaths of turf. Private equity is edging into the scene. Third-party collectives already rule large parts of the compensation landscape.
College sports doesn’t need Congress, it needs an investment banker.
“You can’t just suppress student-athletes’ ability to make money. “Period, end of story,” said Jason Belzer, founder of Student Athlete NIL.
And so Tennessee won’t. In fact, Belzer argues players should get more than those talent fees. Belzer says he hasn’t heard of a single school in the Power Four (there are 68 with that designation)that won’t fully fund revenue sharing.
“If you’re sharing 22% of revenue with student-athletes, they should be getting 22% of everything,” Belzer said. “Schools are going to have to figure out ways of creating additional value.”
That revenue-sharing piece for athletic departments, then, will become an expense, same as gas money for the softball team’s bus. An expense that is much larger. There is a big revenue sharing bucket to fill.
That puts White ahead of college sports’ switchback curve with his ticket increase.
“We’re the least regulated sports world and then we have a bunch of rules that actually are making it more confusing and cumbersome for people to deal with,” White said. “We’ve made it really complicated.”
Usually, if you increase ticket prices 14.5%, there is a corresponding drop in fan interest for those tickets. White is betting current season-ticket holders, as well as those on the waiting list, will crawl through Tennessee River mud to get those seats.
There’s another piece to this. Everyone is looking for an edge. They really look for edges in the SEC. The Georgia governor last week signed an executive order that keeps the NCAA from taking “adverse action” in regard to NIL benefits. That’s code for anything goes if and unless that House settlement is approved later this month.
Until then, you shouldn’t have to be told Georgia enjoys a massive recruiting advantage. Without saying it, they can say it, “Come to Georgia and get as much as you want.”
Tennessee intends to play in that sandbox too. That part of the playground is getting increasingly crowded.
