Everything Jeremiah Donati said on 107.5 The Game on Tuesday

University of South Carolina athletics director Jeremiah Donati joined Jay Philips and Elijah Campbell on “The Postgame Show” on 107.5 The Game on Tuesday.

Below is an edited transcript of Donati’s full comments on the program. In some instances, the remarks have been edited for brevity or clarity.

Q: So we’ve discussed a few things about you’re getting everything family-wise ready to go. So now it’s business-wise and you jumped right into the fire with the extensions and raises for Dawn Staley and Shane Beamer. I know a lot of that work was being done while you were being hired, maybe even a little bit ahead of that.

But take us from your perspective on getting both of those deals over the finish line.

DONATI: Well, I certainly had the ability to say no. But Coach Tanner did a nice job working through those contracts in the fall. And you know, first things first, there are two great coaches, we want them to be here for a long, long time. And so those were kind of two things we needed to show up pretty quickly.

So it just so happened that they just kind of in succession, boom, boom, came up, but I’m really happy we have those secured and we’ve got the future to look forward to with both of them. Obviously, women’s basketball and the success they’ve had speaks for itself. Dawn just continues to elevate the program to new heights.

Shane, I mean, just what he’s done and all you got to do is look at recruiting, the trajectory. One of the things that really impressed me about him when I spent some time with him early and this is before the contract was officially extended, I spent some time with him talking about what did you learn from the 5-7 year last year?

If you’ve been over to the football operations building, they’ve got, kind of all these mantras and sayings and words, it’s really cool. And he said, we found in talking to some of our guys that those were just words that we had lost kind of that core culture. So we’ve got back to basics, whether you’re the first string quarterback or the fifth string punter – we don’t have five punters – but we wanted to make sure that you understood what it means, what it meant to be part of the Gamecock football program.

So I was really impressed with how they kind of started over, if you will. And I think we saw last year, there was obviously great team chemistry. And so that told me, the right guy for the job, or reaffirmed that, right. And so I was really excited. That was my first kind of real up close, in person impression of Shane.

Q: How much did you, not that it influenced your decision on whether or not to come to Columbia, but again, both of those, those negotiating processes were in the works. What did you know of them when you were thinking about it? Did it matter at all to you? How much did that, if at all, play into it?

DONATI: Maybe a little bit, just in the sense that you want to go to places that have, they’re on a good trajectory. Candidly, I don’t know that I would have been as interested if the programs weren’t going in a good direction.

And I really felt like they were, and obviously football is, is a king and that’s what we’re going to make most of our economic decisions around. And so to see the success they were having and obviously I was following the games this fall and really liked Shane as a coach. Heard a lot of great things about him from other coaches and obviously comes from great pedigree. That was really exciting to be a part of that and to help continue to build that. So, yeah, it definitely played a factor and I was, I would say that the success of the football program was one of the big decisions or one of the key points to make that decision.

And when it comes to Dawn too, obviously some news around the exact same time that it was announced that Dawn was getting the extension and the raise, it’s announced that there’s a new payout structure for the women’s college basketball tournament. It happens at the end of the year, every year. And obviously Dawn deserves the raise and the extension because she kicks a lot of tail and wins a lot of championships, cuts down a lot of nets, but now it’s more profitable to be cutting down those nets with the new TV deal.

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Q: How much of a factor do those type of things, especially in the sport of women’s college basketball, kind of factor into maybe the urgency that you might’ve had taking this job?

DONATI: “The timing was, that’s a great point. The timing was great. And for those listeners at home, you know that our payout will model, to some degree, the men’s tournament model, with not quite the same economics, but it’ll start to matter very quick this year.

And of course, if you look back, we asked our CFO to take a look back at our success over the last four to five years and, you know, it’s real money. And so you’d like to think with the trajectory of women’s basketball that we’re just kind of just getting started there. And so of course, being at the top of the hill, so to speak, that, that bodes well for us. But you know, I’ve been a proponent that there’s more to the story of the economics of women’s basketball.

I think you’re seeing with those television deals, I think there’s some things that we need to look at from a ticketing standpoint. I just got the ticket notice for the women’s tournament in Greenville. Those prices are up 35 percent year over year. So women’s basketball is going in a great direction.

Dawn, on her for a moment, she’s a once in a generation talent. So there’s the economic side of it, but there’s also the intangible benefit. The city of Columbia and USC has benefited greatly by us being blessed with having her as a coach. You’ve got to kind of look at the holistic part of it when you take that all into, it was such a no brainer to do what we could to, to really show commitment to her.

Q: With talking about the money and some of the things now, when we spoke with you in December, we talked about what your priorities were. Facilities and certainly things going on at Williams-Brice, but I touched on it with you then about where things were going from a financial standpoint. We’re, we’re getting closer to that. Now you’re in the job soon enough here, as long as everything goes well with the House settlement, you’ll be sharing revenues. How prepared do you feel?

I guess for lack of a better way to say it, you got the money. You’re doing this with the coaches. You’re going to have the money for the players. Do you feel comfortable in what you’ve assessed now that you’re on the ground in Columbia with where things are headed financially in terms of being able to do those and, and still go up as the market goes up?

DONATI: Well, as it relates to the House case settlement, I mean, we are operationalizing the department for what it looks like the next five to 10 years. I’d be lying to you if I told you we didn’t have more work to do. We have a lot of work to do.

And so we’re kind of building the plane as we’re flying it. And that’s not an issue. You’re not alone in that. That’s every school, whether you’re in the SEC or the Big 12, the SEC or the Big Ten, everyone’s going through the same thing. I’m not saying we’re far behind other schools. We’re building this in real time. And I like how it’s looking.

It’s not without additional expense. You saw the news from the Department of Education. We’re going to probably be paying student athletes in four sports. Let’s just make that assumption. And so that’s probably 125 to 150 student athletes. We need people in the department that are negotiating with agents and families. We need people that are writing these contracts, administering these contracts, balancing and supporting a cap management system, and ultimately submitting this through the SEC as part of terms of the settlement.

So there’s a lot of things that we just don’t have people right now that are doing those. And so whether those are new bodies or new job functions, we are spending a lot of time to make sure we’re building for the future. So, you know, that’s more expense. And so we’ve got to be really mindful of the adding 20.5 million next year is not insignificant.

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You may have seen some news. There are some other powerful institutions, notably, I think it was Michigan State and I think it was Ohio State that operated losses here. And so this is real and every school needs to think about how they operate their business differently. And so we’re not exempt from that. And we are thinking about, and those are going to be tough conversation, because it just can’t go on the way it has gone. One of the things I said is that someone was giving me a kind of a gripe about the House case settlement. I said, you have to remember, this is a legal settlement. This was the alternative to going out of business, right? So this was not like, we didn’t sit down and design this, you know, beautiful plan.

This is not how any of us would have liked to set this up. This is what the trade-off was for not going out of business. The trade-off would have been losing a $14 to $15 billion legal settlement and having to completely cut your athletics department. So I think that’s important to know because that’s not, we didn’t just like, create this revenue sharing plan overnight. This was the function of a legal settlement.

Q: The reason this is happening is because for far too long the member institutions, the NCAA were breaking federal law. Now they’ve been told that, they’ve been shown that in court, as an athletics director yourself and what you’ve been doing in th Big 12 for a big time school, big time conference, how long has that kind of thought been in your head of, we’ve got to stop fighting battles that we know we’re going to lose?

DONATI: Great question. If Michael J. Fox pulled up in a time machine and we could put the dial to the year 2000 when these media deals really started to pick up steam, I think we probably would have consulted with attorneys to find a more elegant solution to start to begin to share this revenue, right?

Now we find ourselves with a less than elegant solution, which is, deal with it in five months. So, I’ve got news for you. These issues are going to continue to pile on and compound until we get some federal help. And I’m not asking the federal government to run college sports. We’re asking for help from an antitrust protection, from maybe even collective bargaining, there’s got to be a way we can make rules without being accused of colluding. These are just kind of basic federal preemptions so we don’t have 50 state laws and 50 attorney generals that are trying to outbid the next.

These are these are existential threats to not only football but to all college athletics because of the downstream effects. So, if we don’t get that, I’ve got news for you. There will be another. By the way, this lawsuit, for those listening at home who may not be familiar, there’s only a ten year right. It only goes out 10 years. They’re just like, the great unknown after that. So my hunch is it’s not going to be better. So the 20.5 million will look like 30 plus million by the time you get to 2030 when you just add the four percent every other year.

So this is when I, going back to looking at our business differently, this is a real threat to all our sports programs.

Q: I feel like that would put a little more onus on the element of your job with like fundraising. For an athletic director that’s already a pretty big part of the job, right? But that dollar amount from that settlement is not going to get any smaller as time goes on. What type onus does that put on you to be able to kind of try to up the ante when it comes to being able to raise funds and give your athletic department more of a cushion than you already have?

DONATI: It’s a good segue into or maybe a potential segue into Williams-Brice Stadium and one of the things that is currently top of my mind is, there a lot of money literally and figuratively locked up inside Williams-Brice Stadium.

I mean, it’s no secret, I think we have 18 suites, it’s the last in the conference. I think Arkansas, for example, has 184. We have the fewest premium seat offerings. So why is that important? Well, that’s a lot of revenue that could be used to reinvest in the department. Right now we’re without that and so what’s the challenge for us in the short term is, candidly, huge upside.

Because we’re the only school – maybe you could tell me this, Jay, you could look up the Power 4 schools in your computer there – I don’t know how many schools really have the opportunity to build what we could potentially build. So that’s a really big opportunity for us. Obviously nothing has been approved yet and we’ve had some great conversations internally and even with the Board.

I’m very optimistic that we will have a plan to do this and I think taking more of a holistic look at the stadium, not just one side and even beyond. I think that’s really critical to our future success. Operationalizing the House case settlement and really understanding the opportunities at Williams-Brice Stadium and fundraising component, I think are absolutely critical to our success.

JAY: I think a lot of it does come down to, as Elijah pointed out, fundraising. I mean this in kind of a tongue-cheek but also a serious way, a school president and a school’s athletic director, maybe that’s job one and it just takes on different forms.

DONATI: You think about it, the more money you can raise for a stadium project like this, the less debt you have to take out, less institutional burden. So, going back to your point, the more effective we are in fundraising, the better it is for our future.

I’d be curious, just having been in two conferences now and played all across the country, I just can’t really think of another program. Kansas would have been the one I’m using, but they’re renovating their stadium right now, so I don’t know. I’d be really curious to see if there’s anyone that’s got quite the upside we have. I know this for a fact, Northwestern was building a billion-dollar stadium because they came to TCU and modeled a lot of our things we’re doing. Vanderbilt’s got 50 or 60 suites, they’re way ahead of us.

Q: We talked a lot about finances in that first segment. And just just one more on that. That’s where revenue sharing kind of butts into name, image, and likeness. We know name, image, likeness isn’t going to go away. Players can still go out and sign a deal with a restaurant, a car dealer or whatever.

Obviously, there are some limitations there, and that may still happen. But with revenue sharing in the major sports, a lot of the need for that may go away. How do you look at name, image, likeness itself? I know Hilary Cox in the office is doing a great job with that in-house. Do you want to see more of that? How is that going to look? How do those two things mesh?

DONATI: It’s funny. We actually met on this earlier today with Hillary.

And we’ve got a group that’s helping us operationalize the House case response. Part of that’s revenue share, but part of it’s real. Post July 1, and it’s probably not one answer.

There’s probably a few different solutions. It’s going to be difficult.

I used to work in on the NFL agency side. And when I worked for Leigh Steinberg, one of our clients, one of Leigh’s clients, was an All-Pro running back. And he had a deal with Nike that I remember was $50,000 annually. And this particular running back had to do all these things for it.

Now, granted, this is 14 years ago. And so I use that as context to say that if these deals are truly fair market value, the numbers we’re seeing right now just won’t, they won’t survive. They won’t survive scrutiny because that deal required this guy to fly all over the country for real commercials and that type of thing was $50,000.

So, you know, we’re talking about linebackers and running backs that are getting six, $800,000 deals And if you want to burn up some of your revenue share inside the cap for that, that’s the institutional decision. But to find an $800,000 real NIL deal to pass a scrutiny, I’m telling you, they’re very, very, very few and far in between. Other than a Heisman Heisman Trophy caliber player, they just don’t exist. And they certainly don’t exist for offensive linemen or that type of thing So that’ll be some kind of hard industry set.

Assuming the letter of the law comes, that the settlements written on it, assuming those things do become enforceable, you just won’t see the same numbers. But it is going to be important to have NIL deals to go above the cap. And so we’re we’re looking at a number of solutions from internal people, to expand our partnership with Learfield or multimedia rights holders, to outside entities. So we’ll have kind of what has started to look like a multi-pronged approach to do that. We’ll have to turn up the heat on those people to make sure they’re delivering those.

Q: And good news, I guess you got a Heisman-caliber candidate.

DONATI: I just saw the odds. We’re obviously excited about LaNorris and what he brings back. I think if he has a season like he did last year, I think it wouldn’t be unforeseeable to see him in New York. I had the great fortune of being there a couple of years ago with Max Duggan. And that was one of the coolest things. I mean, it’s a really cool experience, and truly once in a lifetime, because you only get so many shots to do that.

But anyhow, we’ll keep our fingers crossed that LaNorris or another USC Gamecock in the near future has that experience.

Q: Can I look at the basketball court, too? Right before you came in here, Jay and I were talking about the men’s team and a really big game tonight. Part of that discussion involved this league turning into like a bleeping monster. Like this thing is terrifying. You’re an average team kind of in a league where there are no bad teams or mediocre teams.

The SEC has kind of grown in men’s basketball to a level that, as someone who has followed this league my entire life, it has never been it has never been this right.

So with the the modern college basketball the way it is, what’s the thing we can maybe do to improve the men’s basketball program to be able to keep up with the way a lot of these other schools like your Missouri’s and LSU’s even Texas’s that are able to to fund their basketball programs and get them to where they have created this league to be the monster it is?

DONATI: Well, what’s what’s old is new for me. I came from the top basketball conference. I think like 12 years running, the Big 12 was considered the top basketball conference.

And the year I leave, I think the SEC is taking over. I can’t escape. There are no easy wins. I mean, every single game and we’re seeing that this year in the SEC, is that it’s just a dogfight.

And it’s really been a tale of two seasons for the men’s and women’s program.

We were talking off air about the Clemson game and just, you know, seemingly things were going in a great direction, had some injuries, and we just have not had any luck since then.

But I’ll tell you, I think Lamont can really coach. And I think that his brand of basketball, even with some of the injuries we’ve seen us really give some of the best teams in the country everything they can handle. And probably could have, should have won those games.

And so that’s encouraging. If you’re a Gamecock fan, I feel like we do have a coach who can coach.

You know, do we have a talent gap? I mean, that’s something that he and I really have got to talk about. I think we’ve got some good players. I think we clearly probably didn’t have the depth that that we needed to compete in night in and night out. That’s a l ittle evident that we’re seeing that in real time.

It’s not a matter of if Lamont’s coming back, it’s how can we better support him? So, when the season’s over, I actually have a meeting with him next week to start that conversation about what it looks like in the fall, excuse me, into the spring, and then into revenue sharing.

Because it’s not just about paying players and finding more money to pay players. Yes, that’s part of it.

But what are we doing as a program to to help continue to build that? So, you know, it’s an ongoing evaluation. It’s probably not one or two things I can tell you right now that I can tell you. But yeah, we need some more depth. I can tell you that’s probably one thing that we’ll be looking and making sure that the roster’s strong because I don’t expect or I don’t anticipate a big drop off the league next year.

We’ve got some key pieces that we think we can bring back. If you can do that and continue to build this and bring in some new guys, I think we like what we see. But we certainly have some more work to do. I’ve been just really impressed with even with some of this his hard luck, we’ve continued to battle and we’ve found ourselves these games.

We’ve got a big one tonight at Georgia. I think it’s probably a winnable game, and so we’ll see what the guys come up with.

Q: You mentioned the Big 12 and you’re coming into the SEC now. Has life been different for you from that perspective and working with your colleagues? I mean, most of the day to day stuff, I imagine, isn’t a whole lot different in terms of administrating. But now you’re in the SEC. What’s that been like for you?

DONATI: Very similar in the sense that my first AD call, the issues were exactly the same. They just had different faces and different brands attached to them.

The biggest difference, I’d say, is probably the personality of the commissioners. Both of them, I’m big fans of, but they’re very different. And I’m saying that kind of joking and I’m smiling at you.

But, you know, we’re the issues are the same at the Power 4 level. They come in different shapes and sizes, but the same things we were talking about in the Big 12 athletic directors’ room, we’re talking about here.

We’re all kind of, that’s the good news, I think, about all this is, is that we’re all kind of in this together. We’re all trying to figure this out together.

And one thing that gives me hope back to the kind of where we started with the House case is that previously the NCAA made rules and we had to follow them. This is unique in the sense that the commissioners are the ones creating these enforcement agencies going forward. So we get a chance to some degree to help kind of cast part of our future.

And so when you have guys like Greg Sankey and others who are really smart and committed to doing that for the sake of their leagues, you have a chance and there’s reason for hope.

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