In part 1, I examined the recruiting and on-ice formula for success for small schools. What I purposely left out is the resources aspect and how that plays into recruiting and roster retention. I didn’t leave it out because it’s not important (in fact, it’s the opposite), but because I wanted to keep it narrowed to specifically the traditional parts of a hockey program. First, let’s go over the basics of the recent changes that have fundamentally changed college athletics.
NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness)
NIL essentially just means that players can now make money using the fact they’re student-athletes. Beforehand, they were not allowed to star in commercials, do autograph signings, etc. For the past few years, they have been able to do that.
However, what this ended up turning into in actuality is groups of donors, called collectives, paying players to play for the school. The collective essentially acts as a proxy for the school to pay the player. This has now mostly changed though with the introduction of the House Settlement, which allows schools to just pay the players directly. There is definitely supplemental NIL in addition to the direct payments, especially in football and basketball, but the method of money going to players doesn’t really matter as much as the amount.
House Settlement
The house settlement is a settlement to an NCAA lawsuit that led to a number of changes in college athletics. For a full breakdown of it, here’s a good article that lays it out. For a more college hockey focused breakdown, Mike McMahon did an excellent job there as did CHN in their recent report on the money in college hockey. Schools can opt in to the settlement and the rules that follow, but they don’t have to.
There are two main parts to the settlement. The first is increasing the scholarship limit from 18 to 26 while also implementing a 26 player roster cap. This is just an increase to the maximum number of scholarships to 26, but a program doesn’t have to fund that full 26. The second is allowing schools to revenue share with players in the athletic department with a maximum of about $20 million for the entire department.
Most college hockey programs don’t have that kind of money at their disposal. The top spenders are going to be the P4 schools who have somewhere from $500k to $1 million to play with each year for their roster budget.
This example from BC shows how they distribute their revenue sharing budget. Hockey obviously falls into the 5% of everything else, and they will only get a portion of that.
Per CHN’s report on the money that I linked before:
The Big Ten schools and Boston College are ready to play in the big pool, with budgets anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million. It’s not clear if Notre Dame is doing that yet for hockey, but will need to.
Not all of that will necessarily come from rev share, by the way, since those big schools need to spend so much on football programs. But a lot of it could come from the rev share pool, with some still supplemented by the NIL collectives.
Whatever the case may be, the overall pay package to players, if you add it all up, will be in that high range.
Most schools won’t have nearly that much to play with though. The baseline for competitive programs is in the $200,000 to $300,000 range, depending on the conference the program is in. A Big Ten team probably needs $500k minimum, but for the other conferences, the requirement to be competitive won’t be that high. Also from CHN’s report:
"If you want to be competitive, the standard is going to be around $250,000," said one athletic director.
In the grand scheme of college athletics, where some college football rosters are allegedly totaling $40 million, that’s not a crazy amount needed! Now, let’s get into specific aspects of the formula, and how the money ties into it.
Recruiting
Believe it or not, throwing money around doesn’t actually impact recruiting nearly as much as you would think.
A caveat to that is the high-end blue chip prospects. A program definitely needs a healthy amount of money available to be able to pay them right off the bat. The going price for a first round NHL draft pick is at least $75K and usually $100K+. The better the prospect, the more money required. Everyone has heard of the alleged $700K price tag for Gavin McKenna from Penn State. Porter Martone was allegedly in the $250K range for Michigan State last year. Could these numbers be inflated by media and the game of telephone? Absolutely. The point remains though that these prospects command money and a lot of it.
That doesn’t really matter for the small schools though because they were never competing for those types of prospects anyways. You don’t need the top NHL first round picks to win as Brad Schlossman laid out well here and as I said in part 1. Small schools are not landing blue chip prospects and have not been for well over a decade now. They have to land the older players and a handful of late round NHL picks. So how does the money impact the recruiting of these players?
The answer is truthfully not that much. Since these players are not the top prospects, the price tag isn’t as high, and that makes them easier to recruit and land. Going back to RPI, I’m not at liberty to discuss specifics, but there are incoming freshmen who turned down NIL/rev share money from bigger programs during their recruitment.
For the players not being offered full scholarships, the school cost can be a factor though. Using the Minnesota State and Quinnipiac examples from before, Minnesota State cost of attendance is about $37.5K while Quinnipiac’s is about $81.8K (my god). If a prospect is offered a half scholarship at both, that’s a major difference in the out-of-pocket expenses, assuming no academic aid or financial aid also helping with the cost. That definitely matters, and it’s likely more of an impact for these types of prospects where NIL/rev share money isn’t playing much of a role. The small schools that offer a lot of financial aid (like the Ivies) or academic aid can help mitigate the disadvantage in the athletic scholarships and direct player funding.
With the CHL opening up, there’s also more talent available than ever before, and the big programs don’t have enough spots on their roster to take all of them. As a result, lots of the older players don’t need to be given money beyond their normal scholarships. For the players that do want to be paid extra, a lot of schools move on because there’s enough talent available in that same tier that they can get a player at a similar level without money.
While money will certainly help any small school in recruiting, it’s not necessary to follow the recruiting strategy of older players. RPI currently is ranked as the 13th best incoming freshman class in the country by Neutral Zone, and they’re ranked 22nd by average quality of recruit. They did this without any money at their disposal to pay players.
Player Development
This is where there’s a big impact from paying players. The ability to pay players alongside no restrictions for the transfer portal has created a year-to-year free agency where any player can leave at any time for any reason. Tampering is rampant, with agents and schools in contact as early as December discussing transfers. There’s no such thing as planning rosters for 2-4 years out anymore; the only future planning that can take place is for the following season.
It’s the wild west, and the new landscape of paying players adds directly to it. A small school who develops a young forward now might lose them early after putting up 30 points as a sophomore. A big school will come along, offer them $50K to transfer and play on their second line, and off they go. It doesn’t matter that they were happy and playing a top of the lineup role; more often than not, they are taking that offer.
A lot of people say this is a lack of loyalty and an issue with today’s players, but I disagree and think that’s a short-sighted way of looking at it. Think about it like this. These players are usually between 21-23 years old, sometimes even older, and they very likely do not have a long-term NHL future. At best, they might have a career in the AHL or Europe. For those players, $50K for a year while still in college is a lot of money. If we were all in that same situation, I don’t think we would behave any differently.
It’s worth noting that programs can still invest in development facilities. Players want to play pro, even if that’s at the AHL level. If a program invests in strength and conditioning facilities, hockey development areas, and nutrition, and they also create an environment where players are treated as pros, that matters. Consistently sending players to pro hockey, even at just the AHL level, is huge. Players want to be developed into pro hockey players, and these details are still important for achieving that. The money matters a lot, but it isn’t the only part of the equation.
In part 1, I mentioned needing an elite coach to execute the formula. While that’s true, not even an elite coach will consistently overcome this money gap while developing players. Can they win a battle here and there to keep a player from transferring? Absolutely, and that happens frequently. Sutter Muzzatti had offers with NIL money from big programs to transfer after both his freshman and sophomore years that he turned down to stay at RPI with the old coaching staff. He only entered the transfer portal after the coaching change. As the old adage goes though, you can win the battle but lose the war. That’s going to be the case for any small school without the ability to pay players.
This easily is the biggest wrench in the plan for small schools competing. If they lose the really good older players that they have developed before they are upperclassmen, they are not going to be able to compete on the national stage.
How Do the Small Schools Compete?
The unfortunate reality in today’s landscape is that you need a budget to pay players. It’s the answer that no one wants to hear because everyone wants to believe that small schools can compete without it, but that’s no longer the case. My part 1 laid out the on-ice formula for competing, but the issue is that without money, schools can’t consistently retain the players that they develop to execute that formula.
The lucky thing that I mentioned before is that the money in hockey really isn’t that much compared to football or basketball. A budget of about $250K can keep you competitive, and overall, that’s not too much! The way I see it, there’s a couple of different ways to reach that budget in terms of donations. The first is the traditional yearly donations being scraped together from alumni. A $20 monthly donation from a group of 1,000 alumni gets you to $240K yearly. In the grand scheme, that’s not a lot of people, but obviously, that is easier said than done to find a group like that.
There’s another less traditional way to do it, but in my opinion, it is the better way to set up your budget. I think an endowment fund is the better way to operate if a school can get it set up. An endowment fund of about $5 million gets the school to the $250K yearly budget as the typical endowment uses about 5% annually of the funds and lets the rest grow. The benefit to this is it sets it up in perpetuity because the other 95% of the fund compounds and grows, so the 5% can permanently fund the player budget. If you have a mega donor, it also combats the donor fatigue because it’s just a one time donation.
This is extremely similar to the C. Lloyd Bauer endowment for RPI’s head coach position where the endowment pays for the yearly salary for the coach, as an example of how it can be set up. The difficulty with setting up an endowment like that is finding the donor with the money obviously. At an Ivy League school or tech school like RPI, it’s certainly easier than other small schools, but it is hard to get at any school. There are plenty of other ways to get creative and have the money, but these are the two main ways that come to mind.
One interesting creative path that the Ivies and others are attempting is setting up paid summer internships for their players as a form of this. CHN mentioned this in their report, and I’ve also heard about this through some sources as well. The thought process is that programs can use their vast alumni networks to set up their players with lucrative summer internships that pay them. This passes the Ivy League rules because it is a true summer internship, and setting it up through alumni connections is no different from how most normal internships work anyways. It’s pretty normal networking, but now it is with college athletes. I believe RPI and other programs with great academics have been working on setting this up too to try to find ways to compete in the money space.
If a small school does find the money, the way to manage it is pretty straightforward to me. They pretty clearly do not need the money to recruit older talent given the wealth of talent available now. RPI’s incoming class is evidence enough of this. Once they develop those talented players, they should use the money to retain them. If they can match those offers from big schools, they can likely keep the players, which allows them to continue with the talent and systems play needed to compete nationally. They still won’t keep every player; sometimes the alure of a big program with all the resources and brand recognition is too much to overcome regardless of the money. However, it shifts the balance from losing most top players and only keeping some occasionally to keeping most top players and only losing some occasionally. It’s a whole lot more manageable.
One arguable advantage for RPI and the Ivies is the top notch education. They can lean into recruiting good students who care about their education, and it can help with player retention. There is a reason that the ECAC consistently is one of the better conferences in terms of players transferring out. The double edged sword is that it definitely limits their player pool. RPI has lost plenty of players over the years because of transfer credits not being accepted, players not wanting to go to such a difficult school, and so on. Is it worth the trade-off? With today’s expanded player pool and the issue being more slanted towards retention rather than recruiting, it probably is.
The resources required to win have always been a debate in college hockey going back decades. The resources included have evolved over time, whether it’s paying players, having top notch development facilities, and on as you go back further and further in the timeline. It has always been agreed upon that a school needs a supportive administration to tackle the various shortcomings, whether it’s getting help from admissions to get players admitted into the school (something the Ivies, RPI and many others always have to deal with), getting the necessary funding needed for the program’s budget, etc.
If you want to come out of this feeling hopeful, small schools have always found ways to stay afloat throughout the decades despite whichever “resource” is the current hot topic. There also have always been at least a few who have managed to compete nationally with the best resourced programs in every era of college hockey. Maybe this one turns out to be no different, but there’s no doubt that the freedom for players to leave whenever they want for whatever reason when money is so accessible has created the most daunting challenge that the small schools have ever seen.
Good article! What or where is the breakdown for BIG schools to small schools?
Would Northern Michigan or Ferris state be considered Big schools? Please explain!
Thanks Marv
Informative and insightful. Excellent job Stephen. Looking forward to the season.
Michael