Maybe I am being chicken little, but I think there are a lot of alumni that would have viewed paying recruits as cheating before, but will be happy to make a tax deductible marketing expenditures through their business for NIL payments. I don't think our pecking order will change nearby, but I could see players that we have been able to get in the past despite being slightly behind in payments we will lose now as the gap between payments will get bigger with them being legal payments. I am also concerned that some schools we compete with in other states, particularly Texas, might be able to put together more appealing NIL deals. TCU is tiny, but how many rich alumni business owners do they have compared to us? Same with Baylor. Hell, even SMU. We compete with OK St. and Texas Tech for leftovers in Texas. We have the SEC ties, but how many wealthy alumni do they have from oil and gas? Does Arkansas start being more competitive for Texas recruits with NIL money? What if large schools like Arizona St. decide to get serious and try to compete with us in Texas? Granted, they're a hell of a long way for most texas recruits, but we're not exactly close. What if schools with relatively large alulmni bases like Purdue and Indiana decide to try to compete with us in Tennessee? Are the SEC ties enough for us to be Louisville for Tennessee recruits when Louisville can outspend us?
My thing is we have had two pretty complete teams in the last decade, and then several almost good teams that just had one or two glaring holes. What if all the sudden we lose 2 or 3 recruits a year that we wouldn't have otherwise lost? I don't think it takes much to change the composition of our teams because we have such razor thin margins of error to begin with.
