Very few college football coaches in today's game keep it as "real" as Texas HC Steve Sarkisian when it comes to the financial side of the sport. This is now the second or third time in the past six months that he's shut down the whole "woe is me" narrative from other programs regarding NIL holding them back, or teams reporting that they don't spend as much NIL money as they actually do.
He spoke about the topic again in a recent media session when it was brought up that only five or six schools are "big spenders" in college football.
"You’ve got to pay a lot of money just to get in the game. So the teams that have a chance to win it, and I don’t know what that number ends up being. Call it 25, but everybody’s in that game. And if you say you’re not, then you’re not being truthful."
What he's basically saying is that a lot more teams have the NIL capacity and spending ability to be real players from a success standpoint than they're leading us to believe.
Maybe it's not 25 as he said, and it could be closer to 15, but that's a heck of a lot more than the consistently overused description of four to six schools every year. For example, on top of the public NIL declarations, there can also be private investors in a program. A school like SMU is said to realistically be one of the wealthiest programs in all of college football due to the number of backers and boosters that the university has.
Places like South Carolina, UNC, and Florida State are probably in the top 25% of college football teams when it comes to NIL, and where has that gotten them? You can't always buy your way to the top, and that's more apparent now than ever before.
Sark is 100% right in his stance when it comes to other teams using money as an excuse for lack of success.