Fudōtokuna: $chertz to $LU

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I truly hope you all plan to stick around in the coming weeks because this school and team need everyone’s support. I’m seeing a lot of new names and new people posting, so stick with us through this. Too many ISU alumni and fans have been too quiet for too long. We’ve risen up and it’s time to stay up.
 

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Yeah completely spot on.

I hate beating a dead horse, but with Semmler's latest Tweet mentioning that a large part of Scherz's decision to leave was having $1 million more in NIL at SLU, we can't afford to be missing out on the easy ways to make money.

And for the record, this isn't just aimed at CoC. The University has been absolutely pathetic about supporting and promoting the NIL fund.

That is being worked on. A marketing firm is being consulted to hopefully change this moving forward. Fingers crossed.
 
For the passionate ISU fans and for everyone that has supported ISU this year this sucks, we were the ones that took a shot on JS and it feels like betrayal. This is college sports now and unless we change and we raise more money, if the next coach is a winner he will be gone too. Another thing we screwed up on was his contract buyout. should be no less than 2M with whoever we bring on next.
 
I’ve tried to be very kind and complimentary of your university and community. Here’s the bottom line, what Sycamore fans are dealing with now is the reality of being a mid major. Fact is assistant coaches from Power 5’s and successful Division 2 Head Coaches get the mid major jobs, these guys are looking to move into higher level head coaching jobs. The third type of mid major coaches are retreads from larger programs. A small collection are also assistant coaches on staff being promoted. My point, what you’re experiencing is exactly what every other mid major experiences if they have success. This is actually a compliment to your program, you have become successful. Your response to this will be a direct reflection of what your community actually represents. If you continue to bash a coach who has provided you with wonderful memories, you will stain your community’s reputation. If and when it happens at SLU, I will shake the man’s hand and wish him well. We are all in the same boat. Final point A-10 is ranked higher than Valley so please don’t argue he made a lateral move.
I’m good now. Thanks.

Valley is ranked higher than WCC so mark few might be interested in the ISU opening. That’s how it works right?
 

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That is being worked on. A marketing firm is being consulted to hopefully change this moving forward. Fingers crossed.
I genuinely don't mean this in a bad way, and I know people are working on this...but like at this point what is there to figure out or consult on? It seems like most every serious program has had it figured out for a while now. Is it just not being able to get blanks from UA? Is it the university being a hold up for some dumb reason? I know it's in the past now, but with the national attention how many thousands of the powder blue Avila jerseys would we have sold this year at $120 a pop?

I can go to the Purdue or IU official team store website right now and buy an actual Nike or Adidas jersey with name and number. You can go to the Purdue NIL store and athletes from dozens of sports have NIL shirts with Purdue logos and marks. Each basketball player has multiple designs. Teams have NIL shirts.

Hell the Purdue NIL store is selling straight up Purdue Final 4 sweatshirts that look better than most designs, and it has actual Purdue and Final 4 branding on it...and all that money is going into their NIL fund. Our NIL on Instagram is still removing the team logo when they post a picture of a player.


Just to fully drive the point home...
Will Berg averaged 4 minutes per game for Purdue this year. On the Purdue NIL website he has 3 jerseys and 23 different tshirts/sweatshirts you can purchase. All with official Purdue marks.
 
I genuinely don't mean this in a bad way, and I know people are working on this...but like at this point what is there to figure out or consult on? It seems like most every serious program has had it figured out for a while now. Is it just not being able to get blanks from UA? Is it the university being a hold up for some dumb reason? I know it's in the past now, but with the national attention how many thousands of the powder blue Avila jerseys would we have sold this year at $120 a pop?

I can go to the Purdue or IU official team store website right now and buy an actual Nike or Adidas jersey with name and number. You can go to the Purdue NIL store and athletes from dozens of sports have NIL shirts with Purdue logos and marks. Each basketball player has multiple designs. Teams have NIL shirts.

Hell the Purdue NIL store is selling straight up Purdue Final 4 sweatshirts that look better than most designs, and it has actual Purdue and Final 4 branding on it...and all that money is going into their NIL fund. Our NIL on Instagram is still removing the team logo when they post a picture of a player.


Just to fully drive the point home...
Will Berg averaged 4 minutes per game for Purdue this year. On the Purdue NIL website he has 3 jerseys and 23 different tshirts/sweatshirts you can purchase. All with official Purdue marks.

I think the difference is collectives like Purdue have full time employees working on this. All of our money is going to the athletes versus administrative overhead, too. As far as I understand, the folks that are the Board of CoC are not full time. Twitch would have to confirm, but that is my understanding. I know he is also the link on the marketing group and CoC.
 
For the passionate ISU fans and for everyone that has supported ISU this year this sucks, we were the ones that took a shot on JS and it feels like betrayal. This is college sports now and unless we change and we raise more money, if the next coach is a winner he will be gone too. Another thing we screwed up on was his contract buyout. should be no less than 2M with whoever we bring on next.
Nobody would come here.
 
Nobody would come here.

Sure they would. If they had a $2m buyout, that means they have $4m+ remaining on their deal. Just like $chertz did at $LU flashing him some cash, someone would sign if we were paying that. The greater reality would be trying to get to a point where the buyout is in the $500k-$1m range if they left "early" versus the $250k we're going to get when $chertz exercises his out. Then your buyout forward funds a year plus of the next coach.

Check out the link in Post 755 which talks about contracts and touches on buyouts.
 
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I think the difference is collectives like Purdue have full time employees working on this. All of our money is going to the athletes versus administrative overhead, too. As far as I understand, the folks that are the Board of CoC are not full time. Twitch would have to confirm, but that is my understanding. I know he is also the link on the marketing group and CoC.
I definitely get that. Part of me thinks that may be a bit "penny wise, pound foolish"...but that's my uneducated/overly optimistic view. You pay someone $50k a year and if they can bring in an extra $50,001 it's worth it. One of those situations where its expensive to have someone on payroll running things, but way more expensive in the long run not to. But even if we wanted to keep things free, I'm sure we have enough passionate Sycamore fans that have a background in sales, marketing, branding, merch, fundraising, etc that we could get a pretty solid crew together...but we don't even have a way to find out info about that on the website.

What's harder to understand is the scrubbing of all ISU marks/not doing any officially branded products like it's 2019.

Final gripe...and it goes back to missing our free throws. Good social media costs money in terms of having someone who knows how to use it. But mediocre/decent social media can be free. Crossroads Twitter hasn't posted a single Tweet calling for donations in 8 months...and that was a retweet. How far would something today as simple as "Sycamore fans, hate how you're feeling right now? Donate to Crossroad Of Champions NOW to help ensure you never have to experience this again" with a link to donate. Hell, have to lead to a special landing page with a suggested one time donation of $32 in honor of every win from this season.
 

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Who is in ISU recruiting class this year? Are they good enough to play in the A-10 against the likes of Dayton, VCU and Loyola? The A-10 is a mid major but is a quality conference. Shertz may pass on bringing them to SLU as they may be better suited for the Valley.
VCU and Loyola wouldn't have been top-3 in the MVC this year. They were quite a bit behind ISU, Drake, and Bradley in NET, KenPom, etc.

Your team also lost by 40 to an MVC school who didn't even reach the MVC quarterfinals. If you want to initiate trash talk, perhaps the Ohio Valley is more your speed.

Your response to this will be a direct reflection of what your community actually represents.
Like how your fan base responded with how toxic it was to Travis Ford and his family this year? Read around other teams' boards -- many people's perception about SLU's fan base is heavily negative. You have no self-awareness and no room to stand on a moral high ground.
 
I definitely get that. Part of me thinks that may be a bit "penny wise, pound foolish"...but that's my uneducated/overly optimistic view. You pay someone $50k a year and if they can bring in an extra $50,001 it's worth it. One of those situations where its expensive to have someone on payroll running things, but way more expensive in the long run not to. But even if we wanted to keep things free, I'm sure we have enough passionate Sycamore fans that have a background in sales, marketing, branding, merch, fundraising, etc that we could get a pretty solid crew together...but we don't even have a way to find out info about that on the website.

What's harder to understand is the scrubbing of all ISU marks/not doing any officially branded products like it's 2019.

Final gripe...and it goes back to missing our free throws. Good social media costs money in terms of having someone who knows how to use it. But mediocre/decent social media can be free. Crossroads Twitter hasn't posted a single Tweet calling for donations in 8 months...and that was a retweet. How far would something today as simple as "Sycamore fans, hate how you're feeling right now? Donate to Crossroad Of Champions NOW to help ensure you never have to experience this again" with a link to donate. Hell, have to lead to a special landing page with a suggested one time donation of $32 in honor of every win from this season.

Agreed on all of it.

That is also why I'm looking forward to when all of this is done at the school. Until then, I hope Twitch can negotiate us the help in the meantime.
 
Sure they would. If they had a $2m buyout, that means they have $4m+ remaining on their deal. Just like $chertz did at $LU flashing him some cash, someone would sign if we were paying that. The greater reality would be trying to get to a point where the buyout is in the $500k-$1m range if they left "early" versus the $250k we're going to get when $chertz exercises his out. Then your buyout forward funds a year plus of the next coach.

Check out the link in Post 755 which talks about contracts and touches on buyouts.
Buyouts typically equal one year of salary for coaches to leave. If coach gets fired, the school owes the remainder of contract.
 
This may not be the case at all, and I doubt we ever know what actually fully went down, but I'm in a calm-ish mood so I'm throwing out my hypothesis with for the absolute most generous reading towards Schertz leaving. Beyond just way more money and resources (which is honestly fairly understandable in itself). I doubt this isn't actually what happened...but I'm willing to be generous.

It very well could have been that as the season went on, with our increased interest and hype, multiple starters all season looking like they were going to be all-MVC, that coach realized that even if he returned, at best it would be with 1-2 of the current starters. Agents talk, people talk, rumors spread...I'm sure players were starting to get whispers at what they could be making elsewhere. With some of the numbers being thrown around about what bigger programs are offering quality transfers, it very well could have been the case that each player on our starting 5 would be getting offers that exceed our entire NIL budget. And that doesn't even get in to location, facilities, perks, amenities...all sorts of things. A jump like this could have legitimately been the only chance to actually "run it back" next season.

I don't know if this is the case. I don't want it to be the case. I really like the world where Schertz simply wanted to leave for more money versus the one above...because in the one above we are in a massive world of hurt. If it's Schertz simply leaving for money...alright. We can deal with that. We get a new coach, we use our increased NIL funds to try and keep 1-2 of the starters, some key bench pieces, and we're in a decent spot. If the scenario above is the case though...we have a lot of things that need to massively turn around if we have any hope of even building an above-average program over the next decade.
 

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This may not be the case at all, and I doubt we ever know what actually fully went down, but I'm in a calm-ish mood so I'm throwing out my hypothesis with for the absolute most generous reading towards Schertz leaving. Beyond just way more money and resources (which is honestly fairly understandable in itself). I doubt this isn't actually what happened...but I'm willing to be generous.

It very well could have been that as the season went on, with our increased interest and hype, multiple starters all season looking like they were going to be all-MVC, that coach realized that even if he returned, at best it would be with 1-2 of the current starters. Agents talk, people talk, rumors spread...I'm sure players were starting to get whispers at what they could be making elsewhere. With some of the numbers being thrown around about what bigger programs are offering quality transfers, it very well could have been the case that each player on our starting 5 would be getting offers that exceed our entire NIL budget. And that doesn't even get in to location, facilities, perks, amenities...all sorts of things. A jump like this could have legitimately been the only chance to actually "run it back" next season.

I don't know if this is the case. I don't want it to be the case. I really like the world where Schertz simply wanted to leave for more money versus the one above...because in the one above we are in a massive world of hurt. If it's Schertz simply leaving for money...alright. We can deal with that. We get a new coach, we use our increased NIL funds to try and keep 1-2 of the starters, some key bench pieces, and we're in a decent spot. If the scenario above is the case though...we have a lot of things that need to massively turn around if we have any hope of even building an above-average program over the next decade.
Schertz told Donors he believed he could keep the team together for “not Pennie’s on the dollar but 50cents on the dollar” and that he believed he could keep the core group for somewhere between “350k-400k”.
 
Don't we have a marketing department in the school of business? We always hire people to do the work that we are supposedly teaching students how to do.

Did anyone say anything about “hiring” which implies a fee for service? No.

The NIL is actually pretty separate from the University so getting some help from a class while a good idea is highly unlikely. Also at that point, you deal with continuity and consistency.

We need to be constantly pushing out this information and promoting Crossroads. We need to be thanking donors who donate any amount of money. We need to be following up on deliverables that are promised. The thing has so many missing pieces - it’s more than a “class” can handle.
 
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