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If you know where the line is drawn on NIL rules and what is or isn’t an NCAA violation, you are a member of a profoundly exclusive club.
Last week, the University of Miami women’s basketball program was hit with sanctions over the recruitment of Haley and Hanna Cavinder, twins and TikTok stars who transferred from Fresno State, where they were All-Mountain West players.
At the heart of the matter, the Cavinder twins had dinner at the home of Miami booster John Ruiz, the billionaire founder of MSP Recovery and its subsidiary LifeWallet.
Ruiz tweeted about said dinner.
He has been perhaps the most famously brash booster in the country, helping, for example, to lure Nijel Pack, a former Kansas basketball player who was a four-star recruit out of high school, to Miami.
Pack reportedly signed a two-year, $800,000 deal to promote LifeWallet plus Ruiz’s boat company, Cigarette Racing.
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In all, Ruiz has pledged to spend at least $10 million on NIL deals, and it’s presumable that the NCAA sanctions against Miami have as much to do with a warning shot over his lavish influence as any direct violation of the rules.
These are the first sanctions the NCAA has handed out.
The college sports governing body claimed the dinner comprised “impermissible contact” and a recruiting “inducement.”
You can freely write a contract for nearly a million dollars — or, in some instances much higher, as Florida notoriously had a $13 million NIL deal with quarterback Jaden Rashada fall through just last month — but how dare you impermissibly induce athletes to your alma mater with a chef-cooked dinner.
Being savvy in the ways of social media, the Cavinder twins turned the saga into a TikTok video mocking the NCAA.
Katie Meier, Miami’s women’s basketball coach, served a three-game suspension after it was discovered that she facilitated a meeting between the booster and social media stars.
Coaches are not supposed to be directly involved in the NIL process — as if anyone believes those who preside over the highest levels of collegiate sports have nothing to do with six- or seven-figure wealth being transferred to star players.
The Hurricanes’ women’s hoops program was also fined $5,000 plus 1 percent of its budget — in other words, ashtray money for someone like Ruiz or another booster to reimburse through other channels.
The whole charade feels like an invisible fence that shocks dogs when they roam a few inches too far.
Ruiz has been so overt in his sponsorship of Miami athletes that the NCAA buzzed the program and hit them with a level of sanctions that will hardly serve as a strong deterrent for anyone else.
What’s the point?
And why did the NCAA make something as insignificant as a dinner its hill to die on?
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