Penn State Basketball GM Admits NIL Has to Improve
· Yahoo Sports
Penn State's basketball season will get going on Monday night, with the hope that the team is going to be better than it was a season ago. Looking back at last year, there were some positives, but ultimately the roster was far too young for Mike Rhoades to compete in the Big Ten.
Many factors explain why Rhoades' roster was so young to begin with, and much of it came down to the fact that Penn State's NIL situation isn't as kind as that of many other top college basketball programs. The harsh reality is that until Penn State improves its NIL game in the basketball department, the roster will always have its downfalls.
Visit esporist.org for more information.
When speaking to reporters earlier in the week, Rhoades and his general manager discussed that. They both admitted that Penn State isn't exactly in the best spot with NIL, but it's gotten better.
“We’re going to do the best that we can with what we have, and go from there, and I’m not shying away from that,” Rhoades said at local media day on Wednesday, per StateCollege.com. “And you know I’m always gonna fight for our program and do it in a first-class manner and never embarrass our team and our university. But let’s keep finding ways to make it better and keep pushing forward.”
“Well, we’ve gotten more (NIL),” GM Scott Pera said. “Is it where it needs to be or where you want it to be in terms of the Big Ten? Not yet. We hope that that will continue to go this way. It would be one thing if it stayed here and went down. Then you’d have a lot more concerns. But we feel we’re hopefully evolving with what is happening. We wish it would happen quicker. Everybody does.”
Unfortunately for Pera and Rhoades, I think it's safe to say the Nittany Lions are never going to be in a position to have one of the top NIL budgets in college basketball.
Things could improve over the next couple of years, especially if the program starts to play better, but the reality is that a lot of this money will go to the football program, whether basketball fans like it or not. As of now, Rhoades seems to have built a decent roster.
There are some questions about this team and whether it will even finish last in the Big Ten, but Penn State is a much more veteran-led team than it was a season ago, which at least brings some hope in regard to being able to close out some games and having guys who have been there before.
We'll see soon enough what this team is, for better or worse.