During his weekly SEC Teleconference on Wednesday morning, Arkansas head coach Sam Pittman delved deep into the new era of revenue sharing in college athletics and the effects it'll have on the Razorbacks football program in the coming months.
The House Settlement preliminary approved Oct. 7 paved the way for $2.78 billion in "back damages" to multiple categories of student-athletes and also established a 10-year revenue-sharing plan, which allows schools to share 22% of annual revenue with student-athletes.
How that revenue will be delegated between sports within different athletic departments is the hot topic, with many SEC head football coaches estimating that roughly $15 million will be spent per school on their football players.
That dollar amount could be more or less depending on the school, and it's a conversation that's already been had between Pittman and Arkansas Director of Athletics Hunter Yurachek.
"Well we have to know, you know," Pittman said Wednesday. "Basically, your collective is going to be in effect until July, then as your talking about it, you'd talk about it in totality of what it looks like with your collective and then the revenue sharing, I think you talk more of a year-long instead of a half-and-half. At least, that's what we're going to choose to do and then obviously you're going to have to stay in a budget, but there were restrictions on that when you were in (a) collective, before revenue sharing as well.
"Because it's not monopoly money, you got to have the money. I don't know that it's going to be a whole lot different. Ours is certainly going to go up a lot, because what we had in our collective, we certainly are going to have more money in revenue sharing."
For a program like Arkansas, as Pittman alluded, revenue sharing will only benefit the Razorbacks' recruiting efforts in the transfer portal and high school ranks. Usually behind the eight-ball regarding NIL (name, image and likeness) fundraising, Arkansas can now self-support itself alongside the money brought in by its collective, Arkansas Edge.
How soon we see the positive effects of revenue sharing is yet to be determined, but Pittman said he believes Arkansas will have a "lot better chance" of competing in the SEC and nationally on every year because of it.
"Some people are going to take that as, I'm making an excuse," Pittman said. "I'm not, you asked the question. When you're half the money of your competitors, that makes it very, very difficult to recruit. Yes, do I think that this will allow us an opportunity to go out and financially recruit with the rest of the teams in the SEC? Absolutely. Were we able to do that in the past three years? No."
Up next, the Arkansas Razorbacks (5-5, 3-4 SEC) will welcome the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs (4-6, 3-4 CUSA) to Razorback Stadium on Saturday. That game will kick off at 3 p.m. CT and will stream on SEC Network+.
