Kelvin Sampson wanted to be more certain that this one was worth the risk out of all the perilous moves he’s made in the name of recruiting college basketball skills. So he requested that it be by Zoom.
The 68-year-old University of Houston manager said,” I wanted to look them in the eye.”
Although there would be some misunderstandings as to who all of them entailed, four of the eye Sampson ended up meeting belonged to Seth Berger and Ian Orefice, co-founders of the Players Era Festival—a company college basketball multi-team event pitching an offer that seemed too good to be true: a million dollars of NIL income for each of its participating institutions, for three consecutive years.
As Sportico recently reported, Players Era’s beginnings began when Berger, the former CEO and co-founder of And1, presented the idea to his friend Orefice, the mind of EverWonder Studio, a new generation organization supported by RedBird IMI, the personal ownership joint venture between Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital and Abu Dhabi-based International Media Investments, in early 2013. RedBird IMI’s CEO is Jeff Zucker, the former head of NBC Universal and CNN, who has much known Orefice, previously the president and COO of Time and Time Studios.
Join the club if you have trouble imagining this chart.
Needless to say, until late, a Division I basketball coach would have no need to identify himself with a complex flow chart of internet and purchase honchos. However, Sampson’s task now is to ascertain, best he can, whether this knot of proper nouns supports a financial statement that defies standard knowledge in the new era of university sports—the players era, if you will. Players Era is planning to pay at least$ 8 million in NIL commitments for the kind of in-season college basketball tournament that traditionally earns less than$ 2 million.
The first event is scheduled for Nov. 26 through Nov. 30 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, with the majority of the game being broadcast on TNT, TBS, or TruTV. Houston does square off in the first game against Alabama, a collision of possible top-five plans, before taking on Notre Dame and Rutgers. Oregon, Texas A&, M, San Diego State, and Creighton are the other eight People Era team. In all, six of the eight schools made next month’s NCAA Tournament.
Houston and Creighton both made their personal leaps of faith to attend the 2024 event, but both made their own leaps of faith to make it to this place. The Bluejays, in their situation, decided to loan at the last minute on their position in the desired Battle 4 Atlantis.
” I spend a lot of time raising funds for NIL, and I’ll do it if I have an opportunity to do so without having to approach boosters who now support our plan,” Creighton head trainer Greg McDermott said.
In Sampson’s situation, he first heard about People Time next November from Steve Rosenberry, the long-time NBA hunter and front-office professional better known by his name” Rosey”. The two have been friends for a long time, dating back to when they played college basketball for North Carolina foes in the state. Over the years, according to Sampson, Rosey may reach out to the manager to seek his views on specific draft-eligible people. However, Rosenberry wanted to talk about something completely different this time. He was working as a consultant for a new multi-team event ( MTE ) that planned to pay schools$ 1 million in NIL money to participate, in addition to covering the costs of hotel rooms and charter travel.
Houston expressed interest.
” C’mon man, quit playing”, Sampson remembered telling” Rosey” in response. When the balloons start falling, he started rattling off all this material like I did on” The Price Is Right.”
While it’s been touch and go for decades, the strategy appears to be coming into shape. People Time announced its supply agreement with Turner Sports, the routine of matches, and a relationship with Publicis Sports ‘ marketing firm earlier this month. Orefice said the company has locked up at least$ 10 million of revenue commits for 2024, though he declined to provide specifics.
Without Sampson’s initial support, whose Cougars finished last year ranked No. 1, it’s still unclear whether Players Era will live up to all the hype. However, it probably would n’t have accomplished this much, this quickly. 3 in both the USA Today Coaches and AP polls.
Even though Players Era’s organizers insist on their unwavering commitment to compliance, there may not be a more provocative or evocative advocate than the Houston coach for a college basketball event that challenges the NCAA’s traditional enforcement ideology.
Sampson, of course, has a distinct history of breaching the NCAA’s recruiting rules. After being found to have repeatedly broken the association’s rules for contacting prospects while he was a student at Indiana, he was given a five-year coaching ban in 2008. Two years earlier, the NCAA punished Oklahoma for 577 impermissible phone calls Sampson and his assistants made to recruits over a four-year period at that school, the chairman of its infractions committee at the time decried Sampson’s” complete disregard for NCAA guidelines”.
Sampson publicly expressed his contempt and, after sacrificing his time as an NBA assistant, resigned in 2014 and accepted the position in Houston. In the decade since taking over the program, he has led the Cougars to their era of greatest success since the Phi Slama Jama glory days of the early 1980s. However, success only inoculates you so much, as Sampson should be aware of all too well. Indeed, the coach’s UH employment contract, which now pays him more than$ 5 million in annual compensation, spells out in fine detail various “prohibitions” that would trigger suspension or termination, such as committing or” condon ( ing ) a violation of NCAA legislation”.
Some other top-tier programs that Players Era approached in the beginning quickly determined that the tournament was an automatic infraction case. The compliance director of one Power Four athletic department told Sportico that, upon being pitched an invite last year, his school instantly decided the NCAA “was going to find a way to not make it work”.
Basketball date-making still occurs largely at the level of the head coach, unlike in football, where nonconference scheduling is done years in advance and frequently with athletic directors taking the lead.
In organizing schedules, their challenge is to strike the balance between playing a slate of competitive—but not too onerous—road or neutral-court games that will impress the NCAA Tournament’s selection committee, while at the same time selling as many home game tickets as reasonably possible. A shiny new ball keeps the juggling act at a height of NIL money, which has made it even more difficult.
” None of them got in the game because they were money-raisers or businesspeople”, Berger said. I consider this as a way to assist coaches. If each program in Players Era knows that for each of the next three years, their program is starting with a million dollars in NIL opportunities for their teams—and in addition, all the expenses on the ground for their programs are covered—we’re helping them solve the problem that they did n’t have three or four years ago”.
Houston, a member of the Big 12, will have to play a conference schedule that includes Texas Tech, Arizona, Cincinnati, Iowa State, Baylor, and Kansas City, beginning its second men’s basketball season on November 4. The team is required to compete against the likes of Kansas, Arizona, Cincinnati, and the American Athletic Conference.
” My ideal]way ] of balancing our schedule was not to add Alabama, Rutgers and Notre Dame”, Sampson said, referring to his Players Era opponents. ” I am not sure I would have done that, aside from the NIL thing and the consistency of it, which happens every year. An opportunity to be in this tournament to get the money they are talking about? You must be crazy not to take it.
In late December, a few weeks after his initial discussion about it with Rosenberry, Sampson was handed the phone by Bobby Champagne, UH’s basketball operations director, who had previously worked as an assistant under Sampson at Oklahoma and Washington State. Berger, who has worked as a venture capitalist while serving for the past 18 years as the head boys coach at Westtown School in suburban Philadelphia, has been on the other end of the spectrum since the sale of And1 by American Sporting Goods in 2005. The Quaker college prep academy is known for churning out so much Division I basketball talent that most every big-time college coach has had the experience of recruiting at least one of Berger’s players.
Rosenberry’s initial pitch was reaffirmed by Berger, and Sampson left the phone feeling persuaded that” this thing has a real chance,” as he put it. Others in UH’s athletic department, however, questioned whether an in-season tournament would be able to dole out the money it was promising to pay while complying with NCAA rules.
Chris Pezman, who served as UH’s athletic director before being let go at the end of June, said,” We felt like we were trying to thread a needle in the middle of a hurricane and honestly, we were n’t quite sure how to make it work.”
Pezman said that, shortly upon first hearing from Sampson about Players Era, he phoned Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, to get the governing body’s two cents.
Nobody knew how to make it work, according to Pezman, but they were aware of it and had heard of it. ” There were so many different compensation conversations happening around student-athletes. They were helpful in the NCAA’s defense, but the issue was that the event was changing frequently as we were contracting it.
In late January, Pezman and Orefice signed an agreement for Houston to participate in what was then being called” Players First”. What precisely was being considered at that time is unclear. A copy of the term sheet accompanying the contract, which was obtained through a public records request, redacted the entirety of its key terms.
According to Pezman, EverWonder Studios initially hoped to reach a comprehensive, all-inclusive agreement with schools that would set out the terms of the players ‘ NIL funding commitments. This was later changed to two separate contracts: a three-year game participation agreement with the institutions and a separate, corresponding agreement with their official collectives over the NIL money. At the request of Houston and other schools, the latter eventually included a$ 250, 000 buyout clause in case EverWonder terminated the agreement before the three-year term was up.
There were other changes to come.
The original plan for a single bracket made way for two separate four-team events to prevent conference rivals from having to compete against one another in their nonconference schedules in order to comply with the NCAA’s regulations regarding multi-team events.
After their December call, Berger and Sampson continued to stay in touch over the course of the 2023-24 season, but made little progress.
When Front Office Sports first reported on the tournament, the information became widely known in early March. Last fall, a couple months after its investment in EverWonder Studios, RedBird IMI bought a minority stake in FOS. Houston was named among the schools in discussions about participating, according to unnamed sources in the publication.
Soon after the Cougars ‘ season ended in a Sweet 16 loss to Duke, Sampson began receiving a flood of calls from other college coaches about Players Era.
” Hostoros is in,” Sampson said,” Seth and Steve were telling them.”
But it was n’t, exactly. Although UH had signed an initial contract with EverWonder in January, the agreement was invalid by spring, as many aspects of the festival, including its name, had changed.
Although the NIL compensation Players Era offered was effectively found money, even a successful festival would not be without its financial sacrifices from the schools. For one thing, by playing in Vegas over Thanksgiving week, Houston would be putting up at least one, if not several, of their home games, as well as the anticipated$ 500,000-plus gates that they would each typically bring in.
” You are cannibalizing yourself on your basketball revenue to the department”, Pezman said. However, given the NCAA’s current restrictions on school funding going directly to athletes for NIL, all basketball revenue is not necessarily equal.
” Everybody that wanted us to go to their exempt tournament was saying you guys are crazy, that this is not going to work”, Sampson said,” and some of them had done their own research to get their facts to bring to us”.
On April 11, the Zoom call between Sampson and Players Era took place, the same day that UH star guard Jamal Shead, the reigning Big 12 Player of the Year, made its NBA Draft official announcement.
By Sampson’s telling, the Zoom featured” all the final decision makers”, including Zucker. However, Berger and Orefice claim that they were the only two Players Era participants and that neither Zucker nor anyone else from the private equity firm were present. In an interview, Orefice surmised that Sampson may have “been conflating him” with Zucker, who he had at one point in the call referred to as his partner.
By the end of April, Players Era had locked up seven institutions, and Berger claimed to be in discussions with three or four other institutions about getting the top spot. That’s when Creighton made its move. The Battle 4 Atlantis, whose eight-team field was announced last November, was where the Bluejays were supposed to play.
On May 5, Sean Bourke, Creighton’s assistant AD for athletic development, called Berger to make a bid for Players Era. In less than a week, a deal was reached.
” It all came pretty quick”, said Marcus Blossom, Creighton’s athletic director. ” Should we shoot, we are already in a great MTE, what should we do?” is our first thought. We started to analyze where the landscape is going and how the rules are changing, and it quickly changed to, what if we do n’t? Is it a missed chance for us to be able to bring in money to help the players and maintain our competitivity?
Still, Blossom noted that in making the bet on NIL money in Vegas, the school might have forever burned its bridge to the Bahamas.
When asked if there was any blowback, McDermott responded,” Absolutely there was, and I fully understand it.” But I have to make decisions that are the best for our program, and this is something I felt that we needed”.
Lea-Miller Tooley, the founder of Battle 4 Atlantis, did not respond to an email asking for comment.
With Creighton in the fold, the eight-team field was publicly unveiled in mid-June, but certitude would still be a ways off.
Even among the schools, there was a general misunderstanding about the financial justification for Players Era, which planned to spend at least four times as much money on NIL payouts as most successful MTEs typically do. Earlier this month, Orefice told Sportico that the tournament will earn at least$ 10 million in first-year revenue, while declining to specify how.
Additionally, the nagging question arose about whether the tournament would override the NCAA’s ambiguous, but still formal, prohibition against paying players to play.
On May 3, the association published its latest “educational column” on institutional involvement in athlete name, image and likeness, which stated that schools could coordinate athlete NIL activities with both event operators and collectives, so long as the money is “distinct from participation in the event”.
One could only be so certain that the agreements between EverWonder Studio and the collectives would reaffirm this distinction. The NCAA, while engaging with schools and operators, does not officially endorse specific MTEs.
Derrick Coles, the associate director of NIL development for the NCAA, and Lauren DuBois, Houston’s chief athletics compliance officer, sped onto the phone a week after the educational column was released. According to a summary of the conversation DuBois later documented, she left the chat with the impression the NCAA was not OK with schools ‘ collectives receiving and distributing the seven-figure disbursements from Players Era.
Players Era made the eight-team lineup for its debut event official in a press release on June 12th. A month later, however, it decided upon a new structure, which was outlined in a one-sheet sent to the schools. Two distinct, four-team MTEs, dubbed” Impact” and” Power,” would now form part of the festival, and each team would have three games to play in a round-robin format. Still, the tournament had yet to name a broadcast partner or any sponsors.
” I think we all wanted to make sure we covered this,” Sampson said. ” Bobby]Champagne ] and I started to work on a contingency plan. We believed that if this project was to fail, there would be seven other teams that would require a game, and you could add some “buy-game” teams and create your own MTE.
Typically, Sampson said, his staff takes its time off and family vacations in August, after returning from the summer recruiting trail. Sampson claimed that he and Champagne had been sweating it out at UH’s basketball offices from the beginning of last month, and that the basketball operations director had daily Players Era briefings knocking on the coach’s door every day.
” Updates in August are never a good thing”, Sampson said. With a lock on the door, the hay ought to have been in the barn. You do n’t work on your MTE schedule in the middle of August. However, we have to do this deal for NIL purposes because we can go through an avenue that does n’t require donor participation and does n’t have to pay taxes on our fan base. Sometimes you have to pay your own bills”.
DuBois requested a formal interpretation request from the NCAA on August 19 through its RSRO ( Requests/self-reports ) website in order to determine whether collectives could manage the payments made to athletes from Players Era.
” All other schools participating in the MTE plan on operating in this manner”, DuBois wrote in her communication, which was obtained through a public records request. ” ( H)owever I had a call with Derrick Coles in May, where he said the collective should not be involved and that doing so would lead to a potential letter of inquiry,” he continued. I would like clarity on this before we proceed any further and do not wish to operate under different circumstances than others in the same tournament”.
An NCAA spokesperson responded to questions by saying that Coles ‘ “remembering of the conversation was different.”
On Sept. 5, the day after Sportico requested comment for this story, the NCAA formally responded to UH’s interpretation request by reiterating the guidance it gave in its May 3 educational column. It stated that players could be compensated as long as it was n’t for their participation.
That will likely have to suffice. Whatever happens, happens, and Players Era is less than three months away.
” I have no choice but to be confident”, Sampson said. My door has been shut. I am two feet in. We intend to travel to Vegas for Thanksgiving week and play at the University of Alabama that Tuesday.