Culture
Five lessons learned from the Matthew Sluka NIL saga
Of course this was going to happen. It’s only a wonder it hasn’t happened sooner.
College football is a sport where more than three years after players were finally allowed to monetize their name, image and likeness, there are still no clear guidelines governing the marketplace.
There is no governing body with real teeth to enforce what little rules there are for either side of a contract, and if anyone tries, an offended party can hire a lawyer, go to court and add another chapter to the NCAA’s long line of failures in convincing a judge that its business model is fair.
Last week, UNLV starting quarterback Matthew Sluka posted that he planned to leave the program after “representations” made to him “were not upheld.”
— Matthew Sluka (@MatthewSluka) September 25, 2024
His father, Bob Sluka, told The Athletic there was essentially a verbal agreement from January to pay Matthew $100,000 for his final season of college football. Instead, he’d been given only $3,000 for moving expenses, and despite efforts to pursue what was owed, Bob Sluka said, had yet to be paid anything further from UNLV’s collective since graduating from Holy Cross this summer and showing up in Las Vegas.
However, Blueprint Sports CEO Rob Sine said in dealing with Sluka’s representation beginning Aug. 29, there was no mention of any money owed, and UNLV’s collective denied a deal existed and UNLV said it had honored all “agreed-upon scholarships” for Sluka.
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The No. 25 Rebels, who host Syracuse on Friday and are near the front of the line for a Group of 5 bid to the College Football Playoff, are moving on.
Unfortunately, plenty of pitfalls exist in a quickly changing, largely lawless system that is evolving from an exploitive Stone Age into a sport that treats players — its most valuable asset — equitably.
Eventually, I believe college football will reach a place with something resembling player contracts, the ultimate fix for situations like these, produced by schools and with mostly standard language. Eventually, college football will share some of the billions of dollars in television revenue with the players, making sure that schools have at least some money to give players.
But this doesn’t have to be you or your program. There are lessons to be learned from this unsightly saga.
1. Don’t do anything unless everything is in writing.
Both sides agree there was never a written agreement. But the Slukas say a verbal agreement with Matthew’s agent and UNLV offensive coordinator Brennan Marion was made in January, months before Sluka made the move from Massachusetts to Nevada.
There are barely any norms. And what norms there are vary from collective to collective and school to school.
“A lot of the conversations I had, the head coaches would bring up money directly,” a player who navigated the transfer portal told The Athletic this offseason for a survey about the inner workings of NIL. “They would talk about the numbers that they give to players at my position based on how much value they deem based on the level of recruit that you are and how much playing time you’ll have.”
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No player is more valuable than the starting quarterback, though Sluka still had to win the job over Campbell transfer Hajj-Malik Williams, who led the Rebels to a win last week over Fresno State.
In February, a federal judge in Tennessee blocked the NCAA from enforcing what laws the organization did have governing NIL. Sluka arrived at UNLV in June and began classes on Aug. 26. In all that time and through three games, he didn’t get it in writing. But he wanted to be a team player, so he kept playing.
And eventually, Skuka realized he went to Vegas and rolled snake eyes.
Fair or not, his decision to leave a team chasing a Playoff bid a month into the season will cost him his reputation in the eyes of many.
Nobody should make major changes in their life based on financial arrangements without a written agreement enforceable by lawyers.
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2. Get the right representation.
There is no agent certification process in college football beyond what some states require to do business as an agent, and the quality of agent varies widely.
Sluka’s agent, Marcus Cromartie, splits his time between college and NFL clients, but he was reportedly not certified to operate in the state of Nevada, which gave some around UNLV pause in dealing with him.
“That was very odd to me,” another agent told The Athletic.
It’s unclear why an agent would take a promise by an offensive coordinator as binding. But it was never made official.
“We tried everything. We’d take payments. Anything. And they just kept deferring it and deferring it, and to this day, we do not know why,” Bob Sluka, Matthew Sluka’s father, told The Athletic last week.
Emails obtained by The Athletic show Cromartie never broached the $100,000 in his brief communications with UNLV’s collective.
Former Florida signee Jaden Rashada did get his contract in writing, but his representation also allowed Florida’s collective to get in writing that it could terminate the contract at any time. They shorted him more than $13 million. Rashada sued the collective and Florida head coach Billy Napier this May.
3. Coaches: Know your collective.
Coaches can endorse their third-party collectives and have conversations with them, both things that were initially banned when NIL was instituted in 2021 and collectives sprouted from the NCAA rule change.
The most effective schools have great communication between the two, and the chief reason for that is budgeting. Coaches and staffers need to know how much money is on hand for a collective or how much could reasonably be raised for a transfer prospect or a high school recruit.
Bob Sluka said his son’s agent was hoping to speak with Hunkie Cooper, a UNLV support staffer, after the team’s win at Kansas on Sept. 13, saying he recalled Cromartie saying “that’s the guy who’s avoiding us right now about the money.”
A later conversation produced an offer from Cooper for $3,000 a month for the next four months, telling the Slukas to take it or leave it.
In the world of collectives, $100,000 is not a lot of money for a quarterback and especially not for a starting quarterback of a Top 25 team hunting a Playoff spot. For UNLV to be able to offer only $3,000 a month for the rest of the season points to a glaring disconnect between the coaches’ vision for their roster and the means of the collective.
Few, if any, coaches are going to make a promise they have no intention of delivering. Word travels fast, and there’s no quicker route to eroding trust with your current roster and future prospects. A member of the coaching staff discussing financial numbers for a player is against NCAA rules, though according to agents interviewed by The Athletic, it happens all the time.
“I prefer to deal with the coaches because they’re so out of their element. They’re like, ‘We can get it done.’ There’s an ego thing — you want to get it done for your position group and your school, show you’ve got money,” one agent told The Athletic this offseason in the NIL survey.
Whether or not Marion made what he believed to be a firm verbal offer, Sluka believed it was and felt strongly enough to leave the program over it. Negotiating the finer points of an offer with a coach is rare, an agent told The Athletic this week, but somewhere between the recruiting process and fulfillment of an NIL offer, the Slukas and Marion weren’t on the same page.
4. Honesty is the best policy.
If there was no money, UNLV would have been well-served to explain that to its starting quarterback.
I spoke with people around UNLV’s program this offseason who were complaining that a lack of NIL support was a big reason why the Rebels were unable to keep starting quarterback Jayden Maiava, who committed to Georgia before flipping to USC, where he’s now Miller Moss’ backup instead of chasing a Playoff bid with a team he helped lead to nine wins a season ago. He threw for more than 3,000 yards and ran for almost 300 more in Marion’s innovative Go-Go offense.
Maiava left for much more than $100,000, a person briefed on the situation told The Athletic, but that lack of support is what put UNLV on the market for a transfer quarterback in the first place.
And this situation could hurt the program and hurt both Marion and head coach Barry Odom on the recruiting trail, despite the program’s denials about what unfolded or Odom’s level of involvement.
UNLV said in a statement it interpreted Sluka’s “demands as a violation of the NCAA pay-for-play rules, as well as Nevada state law.”
That might technically be true, but those NCAA rules were already defeated in a Tennessee court in February, and the way college football is operating in 2024 is that players expect to be paid, especially if they believe they had reached a deal.
Blueprint Sports, which runs UNLV’s collective, released a statement that there were “no formal NIL offers” made to Sluka and that the collective “did not finalize or agree to any NIL offers.”
That’s true. And it’s going to hold up in court and prevent Sluka from pursuing any legal action.
But it doesn’t tackle the real issue, which is that he says he was promised money from a coach, who had had no agency to deliver it, and it wasn’t there to begin with.
5. Think through all your options.
When Sluka hit “post” on his announcement last week, he chose the nuclear option. He is moving home to Long Island, his father said; his time with the program is done.
Sluka leaving the team opened the door to him being called a quitter. There’s a portion of the population who will never see it any other way, even if they would also quit their job if they believed they had been promised $100,000 and were paid $3,000.
But he had options. Might I suggest a more creative one?
Given how fruitless the Slukas say their efforts had been to resolve the issue privately, Sluka could have publicly explained his situation, either by posting a video or statement on X. Sluka could have publicly professed his willingness to be a team player, kept working and kept his coveted spot as the starting quarterback for a Playoff contender.
Barely 12 hours after Sluka’s post announcing his exit, Circa Sports CEO Derek Stevens reportedly offered to pay him $100,000 to resolve the dispute but was told by UNLV the relationship was already too far gone.
By going public only after the relationship had been severed, he didn’t get any of the money he believes he was promised and in the eyes of many lost the public relations battle.
That’s a tough 1-2 punch, and it didn’t have to go down that way. Whatever happens between now and next season, it’s hard to imagine Sluka will end up in a better on-field situation.
(Photo of Matthew Sluka:Kyle Rivas / Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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