By Hunt Palmer
Coaches have long led players by example. Now Brian Kelly is leading donors the same way.
Kelly and his wife Paqui are donating up to $1 million to LSU Athletics in the Million Dollar Match Challenge, the university announced Friday.
For every dollar gifted to LSU’s NIL collective, Bayou Traditions, the Kelly family will match with a donation to Tiger Athletic Foundation’s AD Excellence Fund.
Charitable donations are nothing to the Kelly family.
In October of 2022, Kelly and his wife Paqui donated $1 million to LSU to aid in the enhancement of the existing athletic training space within the football operations building. The Kellys also made several donations to Notre Dame over his 12 seasons as head coach of the Irish including a $250,000 donation toward a new cancer research center in 2010.
Generosity is the name of the game in college football these days. Not necessarily from coaches, but from boosters who have become increasingly important in the Name, Image and Likeness era.
NCAA rules prohibit coachers from donating directly to a school’s collective or student athletes, so the money the Kellys have donated will be allocated elsewhere within the athletic department.
Coaches have openly suggested that roster composition in football is increasingly tied to fundraising. With April’s new regulations allowing revenue sharing from athletic departments to student-athletes, Kelly suggested on Signing Day that the time is now to raise funds.
“What you have to be is thinking about how you can get ahead of revenue share,” Kelly said. “How do you retain the players on your team and maximize April’s revenue share so that when you get to April, and you start to share that revenue piece, say it’s $13 million dollars…How do you retain players without that $13. 5 (million) being invested in a small number of players? How do you stretch that out? And you do it by raising money prior to that and getting to those guys through the collective early on. So being proactive prior to getting into revenue sharing is crucial.”
In November of 2023, Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule commented on the state of the quarterback market in college football.
“Make no mistake: a good quarterback in the portal costs $1 million to $1.5 million to $2 million right now,” Rhule said. “So just so we’re on the same page, right? Let’s make sure we all understand what’s happening. There are some teams that have $6-7 million players playing for them.”
LSU didn’t have to dip into the transfer portal. Garrett Nussmeier announced Wednesday that he will return for a fifth college season and second as a starter.
Nussmeier finished the season sixth in the country in passing and certainly could have chosen to leap to the NFL or test a lucrative transfer market.
Kelly and the LSU staff made Nussmeier a priority.
“I think there was always this sense that he was going to come back, but we never took it for granted.” Kelly said. “We did our due diligence., We made our case why it was in everyone’s best interest for him to come back for another year. When we were able to present him with what we felt was a great opportunity from NIL to revenue sharing and all the things that go along with arguably the best quarterback in the SEC and maybe the country, then were able to close this and publicly say that he was coming back.”
Sources with knowledge of LSU’s collective Bayou Traditions have told LouisianaSports.net that the last month of fundraising has been extremely encouraging. That hasn’t always been the case.
Kelly doesn’t believe that reluctance to join the arms race was unique to LSU.
“I don’t think LSU is different. I think LSU is probably similar to most,” Kelly said. “Not all, but most. ‘I don’t want to give to NIL. I don’t want to pay players. I don’t want my money to go to a player. I want it to go to something different.’ So I think early on it was educating the donors on the landscape of college football…Making them understand what recruiting is.”
Kelly and his staff landed the No. 7 class in the country according to On3, but the work continues in the all-important transfer portal where LSU has now lost upward of 16 players. Those roster spots will need to be plugged.
Kelly said earlier this week that he made stops at three fine dining establishments in Baton Rouge in one night, all in an effort to maintain his current roster to an extent and add the necessary talent to compete in 2025.
“We’re going to recruit,” Kelly said. “We’re going to put in the time. We’re going to get the right young men that want to graduate, that want to compete for championships. But we also have to be able to provide them with the NIL resources through our collective because other schools are going to do the same. So, if you want to be in the poker game, this is what the ante is. I think we’ve gotten through to that.”
Kelly’s public generosity is nothing new, as noted above, but it certainly shows that he’s willing to practice what he’s preached to the donors to Bayou Traditions.
Inflated coaching salaries and buyouts have long been counterpoints to those that say the money for players isn’t there. Since he can’t pay the players directly, Kelly has shown he’ll do what he can.
Friday proved that once again.
