Quote Originally Posted by Rawdawg View Post
I think he?s asking why it took so long to form a collective or initiative. In my opinion our infant ?organization? was focused on educating student athletes on how to be responsible and how to safely navigate NIL within the framework of the NCAA. While on the surface this is great and looks good in the headlines, however in the real world schools like Florida with the Gator Collective came out utilizing NIL to what we see it is now: paying players and recruits. For some inexplicable reason we thought that players wouldn?t be getting paid real sums of money across the country. We were naive in thinking it wasn?t easy for player A to get a large sum from a group funneling money into one fund - which at the time we did not have.
I think the law the MS Legislature passed didn't help us either - as we tend to over correct and over enforce on ourselves - we weren't going to bend the "school can't be involved" law. Meanwhile, most other schools don't have that handicap, and OM doesn't follow rules anyway so they didn't GAF and we fell behind.