MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. -- Kirby Smart is a two-time national champion in the NIL era who works at one of a handful of schools able to routinely fund a massive budget for talent acquisition. But as coaches gathered for the SEC's annual spring meetings on Tuesday, Georgia's Smart was quick to call for sanity in the marketplace.
Smart was among a number of SEC coaches to bemoan the massive uptick in spending from revenue sharing and NIL, and he suggested, if trends continue, that the ballooning football budgets will put all Olympic-level sports in peril.
"My biggest concern for our sport is we're going to ruin all the other sports," Smart said Tuesday. "People say, well, that's just the way it is. I don't agree with that. We fund Olympic sports at our program and we go to class with [other athletes]. You learn culture by being around those people. But that's why we're talking about student-athletes, which most of you all would argue that there is no student in the athlete. I still think the best thing is to get a degree while also training to be a professional athlete. We're going to lose that if we keep spending because not everybody can spend at the rate we're spending."
Smart's comments come in the wake of several schools already cutting sports -- more than 40 Division I sports, according to a report from Bloomberg -- while fellow SEC member Arkansas recently flirted with cutting men's and women's tennis before a number of donors helped bridge a financial gap.
Meanwhile, the College Sports Commission, which was set up in large part to regulate the NIL market, is in a battle with a number of schools largely in the Big Ten and SEC over millions of dollars in rejected deals or deals still under review.
A number of coaches simply threw up their hands, lamenting that any rules put in place will quickly be ignored, with lawsuits in local courts helping tilt the scales in their favor anyway.
"I'm not advocating players make less money," Smart said. "I'm fine with what student-athletes make. I'm trying to make it where it's as equal and comparable footing for everybody and not a race to the bottom."
Texas A&M coach Mike Elko painted an even bleaker financial picture if schools continue to increase their NIL spending at the same rates they have in recent years, where typical budgets for high-level football rosters can easily exceed $40 million.
"If we don't get some level of regulation within the market, a lot of people are going to go bankrupt," Elko said Tuesday. "If it keeps going from where it's at up another 20% and another 20% --we're two-and-a-half years away from having an NIL budget that's more than the TV revenue for all of our universities. And when that happens, we're going to have some serious questions about how that gets funded."
