Everything School? For How Long?
Image: knoxnews.com
By Jon Reed
Everything. School.
Knoxville: America’s College Sports City.
It is a badge of honor for the Big Orange Trinity of Danny White, Donde Plowman, and Randy Boyd. It drives every other fanbase in America crazy.
But it’s an undeniable truth. Tennessee is excelling in every sport. However, we may be headed towards a crossroads very soon. Revenue sharing is coming, and it’s coming soon.
Like, next school year soon.
(Click that article to read more about revenue sharing if you want a more in depth look breakdown, but here is the TL:DR version. Schools will be in charge of divvying out roughly 22% of their average athletic department revenue. The number is expected to start in the low $20 million dollar range and slightly increase each year. The schools are in charge of how that gets allocated. It’s unclear how Title IX will play into it. The schools may or may not be able to circumvent equal payment to women athletes, but third party collectives will still be around to get players more “bonus” money and take the Title IX pressure off of the schools.)
Tennessee’s administration will soon be faced with decisions. It’s not exactly Sophie’s Choice, but a formula or guideline will soon reveal how the administration ranks their sports.
As a fan and sports media member, I enjoy being good at everything. There is always a big win just around the corner. I’ve been doing this since 2013; it was the complete opposite of that for a long, long time. We aren’t far removed from praying for the football team to be good enough to make a bowl game followed by a basketball season that felt fortunate if it ended up on the bubble. Baseball was a complete afterthought, and the people who did think about it just strived to make the conference tournament. Women’s basketball was good but disappointing. Softball was still really good. Shoutout to the Weeklys!
It was a vicious cycle.
But lately? The burden for this fanbase has been trying to save up enough money and time off of work to travel to the College World Series, the College Football Playoffs, and Elite Eight, winning arguments with other fanbases, and trying to figure out who is real and who is using fake pictures pretending to be someone else.
Well, get ready for a new stressor: how Tennessee’s administration should cut up the pie.
You’ll have your football is king crowd that thinks that pigskin is the *ONLY* game that should matter. You’ll have your baseball hipsters that secretly have a weird sense of superiority that talk about how the baseball team should be rewarded more for being the only champions on campus. The Lady Vol truthers will want the women athletes to get half. The Communists Utopians will beat the drum that every athlete and coach works equally hard and should all get equal payments.
I admittedly go back and forth on the issue. I understand that football funds everything, but I also understand that I really, really enjoy being good at that aforementioned everything.
However, I am certain about one thing: for as long as Rick Barnes is coaching at Tennessee, I want him to have every possible tool be made available to him.
He has earned it. Volunteer basketball has forever been elevated by him. The school was wandering through the desert of relevancy wondering if they would ever find water again after Bruce Pearl. They found Rick Barnes and a spot firmly in the top 10 current basketball programs in the country.
The one thing missing? A Final Four. Tennessee has been close the past two seasons, falling short in the Elite Eight both times. They owe it to the legend to give him the best possible roster possible to finally break through.
These days, a gigantic part of building that roster is by having an appropriate amount of funds to lure transfers. I want us to find that appropriate number and then throw a couple extra million on top of it.
Reports are out there that the Vols may be doing just that. Instead of luring all of their guys from mid-majors like in years past, Tennessee is heavily involved with highly sought-after PG Ja’Kobi Gillespie and Virginia’s Isaac McKneely. The rumored spending budget has almost doubled from approximately $2.7 million to the $5.5 million range.
Maybe the quest for the “Everything School” title will keep most of the teams with a ceiling of just being “great” instead of “championship elite.” Maybe revenue sharing drops that ceiling from “great” at all sports to something much more evenly spread out. Maybe I’ll change my mind about how I feel in a couple of years and grow tired of football maxing out at Tier 2.
But, for now, I’m happy. And I want Rick Barnes to have his chance to take us to where we’ve never been before.