Does Yaxel really expect us to believe that offered 7 to 9 million and he want to Michigan for less than 3?!?! JQ doesn’t even get a UK logo either.
Highest paid basketball players.
- Thread starter tcurtis75
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Does Yaxel really expect us to believe that offered 7 to 9 million and he want to Michigan for less than 3?!?! JQ doesn’t even get a UK logo either.
Only one of whom is in this Final Four.
JQ lmao. What a failure on all fronts, stupid stupid stupid risk by Pope.
I'm glad JQ didn't get the UK logo. Arizona State can claim him.
And only one other guy got anywhere close (really, really, historical collapse close).
sorta blows the $22 million rumors out of the water.
Boogie Fland is not deserving either. Heck , Florida had at least 3 players better than him .
Even if neither Walker Horn nor Zach Tow got a dime we still had 13 other players apart from Quaintance.
They needed less than $1.6 million each to hit $22 million total, or any combination that averaged to that.
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If JQwashighest
20 divided by 13 =1.538 . So the other players had to average 1.538 million each to come up with 22 million. You guys still think that is believable....lol
Oops yeah my math was bad it’s under 1.6 not under 1.4
But here’s the thing. You’re more than welcome to laugh at the $22 million number. There’s just nothing in the graphic above that precludes the $22 million number.
That is true. My point is no one even knows what 1 single player was paid, so how can they know how much a team was paid. It isn't reported anywhere. Everything reported is from an anonymous source or says estimated to be...no one knows. And you clearly have players lying about offers like yaxel
So you think the highest paid players in college basketball came in at $1.7M or more, and you think we have the next 13 highest paid players in college? LMAO....or.....maybe the $22M is BULL**** that you are slurping up with a straw
JQ was on list - odd how 4 of that 10 had injuries with 3 missing rest of season
Could you imagine if you were the sucker (Joe Kraft or Brett Seltzer etc) that paid 2M to get that guy. I would be the last money that I ever gave Mark Pope.
This is why the 22 million figure doesn't make sense. If jq was one of the highest at 2...20 million amongst the other 11 would put them all in the highest paid
I don’t know if this list is accurate as I thought Oweh was getting 3 mil and JQ around 2. Now I don’t believe the 2mil but, don’t believe this is accurate either.
Some of those were multi-year deals. So let's say for the sake of argument, we spent 20 million for 1 season. You had at least 13 guys on NIL deals. That's about a 1.5 million average. Yes, it is very possible. Oweh got every bit as much or more than JQ. Reports are it was a multi-million dollar deal. Hawthorne got paid to redshirt, and our NIL package was bigger than West Virginia's to land the kid.
LMFAO....if you believe that, the collective IQ of the entire state just dropped a little
you all and everyone else in here, WTH makes you all think the person that did this graphic knows for sure??? its not like the police, FBI , Government or someone with true ability to request and get the actual legit data/info is putting this out there.
always take this stuff with salt mines worth of salt.
Tell the Herald Leader about it too. Get your articles out there refuting it good sir.
Definitely.
I myself was always sure intuitively that Pope got the whole roster for $7 million to maybe $12 million absolute max and that is was a quite decent selection for that price assuming everyone was healthy.
What swayed me was first the Herald Leader reported they had "been told" $22 million and printed it in October. They didn't name their source so I had no way to know if the source was reliable (and would have guessed it wasn't). But the issue there is that is a fairly high profile publication to where I can't believe anyone important at U of K would have been ignorant of them publishing something like that in a front-sports-section-page article. Somebody had to have told them if they didn't see it themselves. But no one from the university pushed back on it at all. That was a bit odd.
Thein in December Pilgrim and Polacheck released their scoop where they said, among a lot of other things, one of their sources told them personally the $22 million number was accurate. Still unnamed source; still not at all convincing to me in itself.
The big thing that swayed me was that the day after that Pilgrim and Polacheck article was published by KSR, somebody here on Rafters posted a copy of a post Jack Pilgrim himself had made over on the pay side. In that post Pilgrim went further, said he had more info that he didn't want to share at large but would share with Kentucky fans since we cared so much. He said specifically that the Kentucky men's basketball coaching staff (or on of them—it's been four months now and I don't remember exactly how he worded it) had told him specificallly not only that they $22 million figure was accurate, but also that they had leaked it themselves, in an attempt to put to rest fears any kids they were talking to might have had about whether Kentucky could really pay them a lot. And that then the staff was actually surprised when that $22 million number started to work against them.
And still no one pushed back. And I began to think, very high profile people have been saying this all along: people like Rob Dauster and Jeff Goodman—people who don't have any agenda against Kentucky and actually like Kentucky, like the staff, and would have been happy to retract or clarify or whatever if anyone from the staff had ever asked them to: no questions asked, I'm sure. And I had been blowing those people off because I was like, "you're just repeating a rumor" and sometimes they would even say "reportedly." But again, it was more about the fact that when they said it they all said it liked they believed it. And that was obviously convincing a lot of people and eventually I started to see their comments the same way: if the number was false, why hadn't Mark just called them, who loves those guys and has been on their show multiple times.
So yeah: there is still no officially released number. I myself remain only mostly convinced and don't care what anybody believes. But when people say the math doesn't work, the math works fine. And when people say it's impossible they spent that much: no, it's not impossible and in a lot of ways that number actually fits the data better, including the reporting.
That's a circular argument, my brother.
If the $22 million is accurate then we're paying more than almost everybody else is paying. And if we're paying more than almost everybody else is paying, then of course $1.55 average is not that big a deal to expect. (And of course that average payout goes down if we didn't stiff Tow and Horn. I kind of doubt Pope completely stiffed Tow and Horn when he freaking bought Rupp Arena ice cream out of his own pocket just because.)
Of course if we're not paying more than almost anybody else, then we're probably not paying all our players average somewhere not too far under the cap of the tenth highest paid player in college. That's true. It's just circular.
We either are or we aren't.
And don't forget that those numbers ⬆⬆⬆ up there are provided entirely without any support, with no citations or references because there isn't anything anyone could cite. Awful hard to knock down someone else's argument by saying the numbers they're judging from have anonymous sources when your own numbers don't have any sources at all.
It all comes down to neither of us know; both of us have our suspicions; I'm comfortable with you having your suspicions; you feel the need to laugh at me for my suspicions.
Yes I don't put any particular stock in those numbers. My point was only to show that the math works fine for $22 million even if those numbers are true, despite what some people here are saying about the math.
Some of the highest paid in country are right around 2 million, no way does average work out to 1.6 🫣
Wym if the graphic is true if top 10 kids are getting 2 mil ish, no way the average across all roster our spots is 1.6 mil. If so we're paying bench scrubs as much as legit good top player in the nation money... Do you believe that?
Our 22 mil seems like more like 7-8 to me.
I mean...Were we paying DA and Chandler and Oweh that...sure....but youre also talking about paying Noah, BG and Jelly that
First, how did we spend $22 million if this is true? Most lists I see have Mikel Brown with these types of numbers. Darius Acuff? Peterson? Koa Peat? Cenac?
Don't know why you included me. I call BS on every post listing nil numbers
Math doesn't work. Also, everyone taking something as true with no proof is ridiculous. It's also been reported that number is highly inflated because it included the total of several multi-year deals. Who knows if any of it is true. Lastly, if you think Goodman is pro UK... SMH.... anything but. Believe what you will but you not anyone else will convince me it is true without some actual proof.
That $22 million BS was floated out to deflect attention away from Pope’s abysmal recruiting acumen! UK probably didn’t spend $12 million in reality, while Duke far and away had the highest player payroll, but you will never hear the media talking about that.
From my reading, the donors actually do often have a say in how NIL money is spent. So, if that is true at UK then it isn't like the money was donated to a church or non-profit and the donor gets upset because it was used irresponsibly. So, my question is for those who know: How much are the donors involved in the money that they are providing? I do recall a business offering $1M to Reed Sheppard via UK. In that case, it wasn't a general donation.