Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek would like more residents of the state to help the school’s NIL efforts.
Yurachek spoke at the Little Rock Touchdown Club on Monday and lamented Arkansas’ place in the SEC’s name, image and likeness arms race. The AD said that the implentation of the rules that allow players to make money off their image rights was “terrible” and “awful” and said that Arkansas did not have nearly the resources as other schools did.
“But in college athletics, we are our own worst enemy and we find the loophole to every single rule in the rulebook, and we found a loophole where we created these things called collectives,” Yurachek said. “Collectives are donors pooling their resources together to pay student athletes as collectives under the auspice of doing charitable work.
“Whether that was tweeting about a charitable organization or signing autographs or making public appearances. But, the amounts of money that were getting paid were simply ridiculous and still are ridiculous, and they just continue to be ridiculous.”
Yurachek, who makes $1.5 million per year, went on to propose a solution to Arkansas’ NIL funding woes that would call on thousands of residents in the state.
“I’m going to make it so easy for you,” Yurachek said. “If we can get 10,000 households across the state of Arkansas to give $100 a month all year long, we would be in the NIL game from a football perspective. It’s that simple, but we can’t say, ‘The Tysons, the Waltons, the Stephens, the Hunts, hey they’ll take care of it.’ Because they’re not.
“They are so incredibly generous and they’ve done so much for our program. But if we’re really going to get a handle on this NIL, remain competitive, we need to rally people across this state and we really got to take some pride in the Razorbacks.”
In case you don’t want to do the math, Yurachek is asking for an annual donation of $1,200 from those households for a total of $12 million. That’s a lot of money to many people, even if you can spare a four-figure donation to Arkansas athletics. Unfortunately, many people in Arkansas don’t. The Census Bureau estimates the median household income in the state of just over 3 million is $58,700.
Though Arkansas’ men’s basketball program has been a perennial tournament team in recent years, the football program has been to just two bowl games in the past eight seasons and went 4-8 in 2023.
On the bright side, at least the money Yurachek is asking for would hypothetically be going directly to players. For years, college players were unable to make any money off their image rights while schools used donations for boosters to fund their athletic departments and build fancy facilities.
Yurachek’s plea to Arkansas residents also came a day before Tennessee announced that it was adding a 10% surcharge to football season tickets for the 2025 season as a “talent fee.” The money will be pooled as part of a likely revenue-sharing agreement in accordance with the impending House settlement for schools to start directly paying players.
