LSU football will enter the 2024 season with a roster budget set between $14 million and $17 million, head coach Brian Kelly told Yahoo Sports' Ross Dellenger.
When asked if every school could match that budget, Kelly told Dellenger, "Everybody in the SEC."
Schools will be able to directly pay college athletes for the first time in NCAA history starting in fall 2025. This revenue sharing is expected to be capped at around $20 million.
LSU isn't the only school planning on spending the majority of that revenue-sharing limit on football. Most SEC schools plan to spend 75 percent of the cap on their football programs, Dellenger reported.
That focus makes sense considering the revenue football brings in to SEC schools like LSU, which reported $200.4 million in overall athletics revenue in 2023. More than half of that total, or $105.7 million, came from football, according to the school's most recent financial audit.
Kelly's statement comes one week after Tiger Athletic Foundation, the nonprofit supporting LSU athletics, announced an official partnership with the LSU-focused NIL collective Bayou Traditions.
The two groups will now form a single platform where donors can contribute to either LSU athletics as a whole or directly to NIL opportunities funded by the collective.
Contributions sent to the NIL collective do not currently count as charitable contributions, the foundation noted, although boosters can receive priority points for their donations.
Kelly told Dellenger he believes the partnership between LSU's foundation and collective is a temporary "bridge" that will be in place until schools can share money directly with athletes.
The next step, Kelly said, will be NIL agreements that entice students to join LSU, where they can then participate in revenue sharing.
"They become front-loaded contracts that expire in recruiting," Kelly told Dellenger. "They become the sweetener that gets you [to revenue sharing]. I don't see it being this big of an operation as it is right now."
It is not yet clear whether schools like LSU will be further limited in revenue-sharing distribution by Title IX rules.
Although the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights recently told ESPN's Paula Lavigne and Dan Murphy that Title IX will apply to revenue sharing, it is not yet clear if that means money must be equally distributed to men and women based on proportional roster spots. In that case, Dellenger reported that collectives could help increase the roster budgets for football and men's basketball.
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