Five lessons learned from the Matthew Sluka NIL saga
Of course this was going to happen. It’s only a wonder it hasn’t happened before.
College football is a sport where, more than three years after players were finally allowed to monetize their name, image and likeness, there are still no clear guidelines for the marketplace.
There is no governing body with real teeth to enforce the little rules that exist for both sides of a contract, and if one tries, an offended party can hire a lawyer, go to court and add a new chapter to the long series of NCAA failures. convincing a judge that his business model is fair.
Last week, UNLV starting quarterback Matthew Sluka posted that he planned to leave the program after “statements” made to him “were not accepted.”
— Matthew Sluka (@MatthewSluka) September 25, 2024
His father, Bob Sluka, told me The Athletics there was essentially a verbal agreement starting in January to pay Matthew $100,000 for his senior season in college. Instead, he had received only $3,000 for moving costs, and despite efforts to make good on what he was owed, Bob Sluka said, he had not been paid anything further from the UNLV collective since graduating from Holy Cross this summer and appeared in Las Vegas.
However, Blueprint Sports CEO Rob Sine said that in the handling of Sluka’s representation as of August 29, there was no mention of any money owed, and the UNLV collective denied that a deal existed and UNLV said it had paid all “agreed upon grants” for Sluka had honored.
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The No. 25 Rebels, who host Syracuse on Friday and are near the front of the line for a Group 5 bid for the College Football Playoff, move on.
Unfortunately, plenty of pitfalls exist in a fast-changing, largely lawless system that is evolving from an exploitative Stone Age to a sport that treats players – its most valuable asset – fairly.
I believe college football will eventually reach a place with something akin to player contracts, the ultimate solution to situations like this, produced by schools and using mostly boilerplate language. Ultimately, college football will share some of the billions of dollars in television revenue with the players, allowing schools to give at least some money to the players.
But this doesn’t have to be you or your program. There are lessons to be learned from this ugly saga.
1. Don’t do anything unless everything is in writing.
Both parties agree that there was never a written agreement. But the Slukas say a verbal agreement was reached with Matthew’s agent and UNLV offensive coordinator Brennan Marion in January, months before Sluka transferred from Massachusetts to Nevada.
There are hardly any standards. And what standards there are differ from collective to collective and from school to school.
“In a lot of the conversations I had, the head coaches brought up money directly,” said one player navigating the transfer portal The Athletics this off-season for an investigation into NIL’s internal workings. “They talked about the grades they give to players at my position based on how much value they deem based on the level of recruit you have and how much playing time you have.”
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No player is more valuable than the starting quarterback, although Sluka still had to win the job over Campbell transfer Hajj-Malik Williams, who led the Rebels to a win over Fresno State last week.
In February, a federal judge in Tennessee blocked the NCAA from enforcing laws the organization had regarding NIL. Sluka arrived at UNLV in June and started classes on August 26. In all that time and for three games, he couldn’t get it in writing. But he wanted to be a team player, so he kept playing.
And eventually Skuka realized he had gone to Vegas and rolled snake eyes.
Fair or not, his decision to leave a team chasing a Playoff bid a month into the season will cost him his reputation in the eyes of many.
No one should make major changes in their lives based on financial arrangements without a written agreement enforceable by attorneys.
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2. Provide proper representation.
There is no agent certification process in college football beyond what some states require to do business as an agent, and agent quality varies widely.
Sluka’s agent, Marcus Cromartie, splits his time between college and NFL clients, but he was reportedly not certified to operate in the state of Nevada, causing some around UNLV to pause dealing with him.
“I thought that was very strange,” said another officer The Athletics.
It’s unclear why an agent would consider a promise from an offensive coordinator as binding. But it was never made official.
“We have tried everything. We would take payments. Something. And they kept putting it off, and to this day we don’t know why,” said Bob Sluka, Matthew Sluka’s father. The Athletics last week.
Emails obtained by The Athletics show that Cromartie never brought up the $100,000 in his brief conversations with the UNLV collective.
Former Florida signee Jaden Rashada did get his contract in writing, but his representation also allowed the Florida collective to put in writing that it could terminate the contract at any time. They shortchanged him by more than $13 million. Rashada sued the collective and Florida head coach Billy Napier in May.
3. Coaches: Know your collective.
Coaches can endorse and have conversations with their third-party collectives, both things that were initially prohibited when NIL was instituted in 2021, and collectives that emerged from the NCAA rule change.
The most effective schools have excellent communication between the two, and the main reason for that is budgeting. Coaches and staff need to know how much money is available for a collective or how much can reasonably be raised for a transfer candidate or high school recruit.
Bob Sluka said his son’s agent hoped to speak with Hunkie Cooper, a UNLV support worker, after the team’s win at Kansas on Sept. 13. He recalled Cromartie saying, “That’s the guy avoiding us now because of the money.”
A later conversation yielded an offer from Cooper for $3,000 a month for the next four months, instructing the Slukas to take it or leave it.
In the collective world, $100,000 isn’t a lot of money for a quarterback, especially a starting quarterback on a Top 25 team chasing a playoff berth. That UNLV can only offer $3,000 per month for the remainder of the season highlights a glaring disconnect between the coaches’ vision for their roster and the collective’s resources.
Few, if any, coaches will make a promise they have no intention of keeping. Word spreads quickly, and there’s no quicker way to undermine confidence in your current roster and future prospects. A coaching staff member discussing financial figures for a player is against NCAA rules, although according to agents interviewed by The Athleticsit happens all the time.
“I prefer hanging out with the coaches because they are so out of their element. They say, ‘We can make it happen.’ There is something selfish: you want to get it done for your position group and your school, to show that you have money,” said one officer. The Athletics this offseason in the NIL survey.
Whether or not Marion made what he believed to be a strong verbal offer, Sluka was convinced that this was the case and felt strongly enough to leave the program on it. It’s rare to negotiate the details of an offer with a coach, one agent said The Athletics this week, but somewhere between the recruiting process and the fulfillment of an NIL offer, the Slukas and Marion were not on the same page.
4. Honesty is the best policy.
If there wasn’t money, UNLV would have been well served explaining that to the starting quarterback.
I spoke to people around the UNLV program this offseason who complained that a lack of NIL support was a major reason why the Rebels were unable to continue starting quarterback Jayden Maiava, who committed to Georgia before transferring to USC, where he is now Miller Moss’ backup. instead of chasing a Playoff bid with a team he helped lead to nine wins a season ago. He threw for more than 3,000 yards and ran for nearly 300 more yards in Marion’s innovative Go-Go offense.
Maiava left for much more than $100,000, a person briefed on the situation said The Athleticsbut that lack of support is what put UNLV in the market for a transfer quarterback in the first place.
And this situation could hurt the program and hurt both Marion and head coach Barry Odom on the recruiting trail, despite the program’s denials about what happened or the level of Odom’s involvement.
UNLV said in a statement that it interpreted Sluka’s “demands as a violation of the NCAA pay-for-play rules, as well as Nevada state law.”
That may technically be true, but those NCAA rules were already thrown out in a Tennessee court in February, and the way college football functions in 2024 is that players expect to get paid, especially if they think they’ve reached a deal .
Blueprint Sports, which runs UNLV’s collective, released a statement saying that “no formal NIL offers” have been made to Sluka and that the collective has “not completed or agreed to any NIL offers.”
That’s true. And it will hold up in court and prevent Sluka from taking legal action.
But it doesn’t address the real issue, which is that he says he was promised money from a coach who had no agency to deliver it, and it wasn’t there to begin with.
5. Think about all your options.
When Sluka pressed ‘post’ on his announcement last week, he opted for the nuclear option. He’s moving to Long Island, his father said; his time with the program is over.
Sluka leaving the team opened the door to him being called a quitter. There is a segment of the population that will never see it any other way, even if they would also quit their job if they thought they were promised $100,000 and paid $3,000.
But he had options. May I suggest a more creative one?
Given how fruitless the Slukas say their attempts to resolve the issue privately had been, Sluka could have explained his situation publicly, posting a video or statement on X. Sluka was able to publicly profess his willingness to be a team player, keep working and retain his coveted spot as the starting quarterback for a Playoff contender.
Just 12 hours after Sluka announced his departure, Circa Sports CEO Derek Stevens said reportedly offered to pay him $100,000 to resolve the dispute, but was told by UNLV that the relationship was already too far over.
By only going public after the relationship had broken down, he got none of the money he said he was promised and, in the eyes of many, lost the PR battle.
That’s a tough 1-2 punch, and it didn’t have to go that way. Whatever happens between now and next season, it’s hard to imagine Sluka finding himself in a better situation on the field.
(Photo by Matthew Sluka:Kyle Rivas/Getty Images)
