Louisiana’s college athletics leaders gathered last week with a blunt reality hanging over the room: the money fueling NIL and revenue-sharing deals is not unlimited, and for some schools, it is already stretching thin.
At a Louisiana Board of Regents NIL symposium Friday at Grambling State University, athletics administrators, university officials and others from the state’s public Division I schools tried to sort through the pressures that come with paying student-athletes in the modern era. Representatives from the office of Attorney General Liz Murrill also took part, as Murrill has pushed for more state laws to regulate the rapidly expanding NIL landscape.
The conversation ranged from whether athletes are prepared to handle the market to how schools can keep up financially. But the biggest issue, participants agreed, was the simplest one: Louisiana higher education does not have endless dollars to spend.
“No one has endless money, whether you’re at LSU or at McNeese,” said Heath Schroyer, LSU’s senior deputy athletics director who was the McNeese athletic director from 2021-25. “We’re all fighting the boogeyman, if you will?”
Louisiana’s position makes the squeeze even tighter. The state ranks 25th in the U.S. in population, but it has 11 Division I schools - one for every 420,000 residents. It also sits next to last in wealth and median household income, which leaves a relatively small donor base to support a large number of athletic departments.
That reality creates a sharp divide between LSU and the state’s 10 non-power conference schools. Those smaller programs are operating with leaner budgets, and administrators said they have to pay players just to keep rosters together while also dealing with athletic departments and universities that are already under financial strain.
Officials from those schools interviewed for this article said their player-payment budgets, including third-party deals and direct compensation, run from the low-six figures to low-seven figures.
The funding pressure has not been matched by a surge in fundraising. Instead, school officials said money is being shifted away from other needs that used to be covered by philanthropy, including facility upkeep, so programs can keep athletes in place.
“Donor fatigue is a real thing,” Grambling athletics director Trayvean Scott said in an interview. “We’ve got what I believe is about 30,000 living alumni nationwide, and so that pull on those donors can create that fatigue.”
Even with the financial strain, administrators said they still see value in paying players. Schroyer, who spent six years as McNeese’s athletics director before joining LSU in March and was known there as a strong fundraiser, pointed to the way the Cowboys’ basketball success has affected the university’s visibility.
When McNeese reached the NCAA Tournament, he said, traffic to the school’s website spiked. McNeese has made the Big Dance the past three seasons.
“I don’t know if you can put a monetary value on what successful athletics can do to market your university,” Schroyer said. “If you take athletics away from all of the institutions in this state, all those schools, they they can’t survive”
Still, the headaches do not end when the money is secured.
Taylor Jacobs, LSU’s top NIL administrator, said one of her most common challenges is dealing with athletes whose expectations for their own value do not match reality.
“I have more conversations with agents and athletes now, basically saying, ‘You have 10 followers on Instagram, you are quite literally not worth the money you are asking for,’” Jacobs said.
She also said athletes sometimes fail to follow through on the appearances, photoshoots and other obligations tied to the deals they sign.
Louisiana Tech athletics director Ryan Ivey said that issue comes down to emotional capacity.
“It is not your God-given right to be here to get paid and to do this, right?,” Ivey said. “If you don’t want to do what you’re supposed to do, that’s fine.
Doesn’t make you a bad person. It just means you can’t be here because there are thousands of other people that want to do what you’re doing, and they were lined up to do it probably for less.”
One area where Louisiana leaders said the state is ahead of the curve is player protection.
Earlier this year, Louisiana became the first state to approve a law requiring NIL agents to register with the state. The law, authored by Sen.
Patrick Connick, R-Marrero, expands the state’s sports agent registry to cover anyone representing student-athletes in NIL sponsorship deals. It also requires agents to pass a background check and complete a training program before registering with the attorney general’s office.
“It is really something that is rare that we get to say here in Louisiana that we’re leading in something,” said David Fleshman, an attorney who specializes in college athletics.
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