After three consecutive weeks of Pro Football Hall of Famers making appearances at the Little Rock Touchdown Club, University of Arkansas Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek took his turn at the club’s meeting Monday at the DoubleTree Hotel in downtown Little Rock.
Yurachek spoke for about 30 minutes and offered direct insights on the topics he spoke about, especially with his opinions on the current state of name, image and likeness in college athletics.
“It has been terrible. It’s been awful,” Yurachek said when asked about dealing with NIL as an athletic director. “NIL the way it was intended on July 1 of 2021, that if a student athlete had a value to their name, image or likeness and there was a business product or service that wanted to use a student athlete to market their business, product or service, well (the athlete) could receive valid compensation to do that.”
Yurachek said the intention behind the approval of name, image and likeness is not what is happening in reality. He said the first year went fairly smoothly, but things have changed drastically over the last 2 years.
“In college athletics, we are our own worst enemy,” Yurachek said. “We find the loophole to every single rule in the rule book and we found a loophole where we created these things called collectives. Collectives are donors pooling their resources together to pay student-athletes collectives under the (guise) of doing charitable work.
Yurachek said the issue with collectives is that, unlike a business that will pay fair market value, collectives are paying athletes “outrageous” amounts of money that do not equate to the so-called charitable work that is being done.
“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,” Yurachek said. “Collectives aren’t paying market value, they’re just buying teams. That figure has grown to a ridiculous number and athletic directors are charged many times with going out and raising those dollars through various means.”
Yurachek said that Arkansas is not where it needs to be in order to be competitive with the top programs in the SEC. He cited the University of Mississippi as an example, claiming that Ole Miss has about 5,000 members in its football collective, while Arkansas has just 1,000 members at this point.
Outside of his comments on the NIL, Yurachek also cleared the air regarding the high-profile hires of offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino with the football program and Coach John Calipari with the men’s basketball team.
“First and foremost, the Bobby Petrino hire, that is Sam Pittman’s hire,” he said. “I do not hire assistant coaches for any of our sports programs. I helped Sam facilitate that. People are going to speculate that I made (Pittman) hire him and that Bobby is going to be our next head coach, but that’s not at all the case and I credit Sam for not being intimidated by that.”
He added, “(With) Coach Cal, that was my hire. We are serious about being successful in all of our sports and hiring somebody like Coach Cal and making that investment was surely a sign of that.”
Yurachek expressed optimism for both the men’s basketball team and the football team the rest of this season. Arkansas is 2-1 on the year following its 37-27 home win over Alabama-Birmingham on Saturday. The Razorbacks’ SEC slate starts this Saturday when they travel to face the Auburn Tigers at Jordan-Hare Stadium.
“Things change a little bit when you go and start playing in the SEC,” Yurachek said. “If you’ve looked at the polls lately, there’s six SEC teams in the top 10 and nine in the top 25. Going on the road in Stillwater (Okla.) and playing a team like Oklahoma State early in the season (has prepared) us for (conference play).
“I think you will see that our team that played at Oklahoma State will be the one who shows up on Saturday down at Auburn and I think you can expect a great game from the Razorbacks.”
