How NC State football created its revenue-sharing strategy ahead of 2025 season

By Noah Fleischman

When NC State decided to fully fund its revenue sharing budget to the $20.5 million level that the House settlement allowed, Wolfpack Athletic Director Boo Corrigan wanted each head coach on campus to decide what they would do with the money that was allocated to their respective sport. 

Corrigan told all 17 coaches of his plan to do so last October to give each ample time to prepare what they wanted to do with it. When it comes to football, the team that’s expected to receive the highest share of the Pack’s funds, NC State coach Dave Doeren didn’t want to rush into the new era. 

Instead, Doeren and General Manager Andy Vaughn tapped into their network of fellow college football programs, NFL front offices and NIL agents around the country. Their goal was to figure out what a market rate for each position would be in the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC in order to assist their own budgeting. 

It wasn’t a quick process, but the Wolfpack wanted to have a system that would be replicable from year to year while being competitive on a national level between high school recruiting, the transfer portal and retaining its own talent.

“We did a lot of homework. It takes time to accumulate the data,” Doeren said last month at the ACC Kickoff inside the Hilton Charlotte Uptown. “Then, we sat down as a staff and asked what do we value? We value the left tackle, the quarterback. Going into that as a staff and saying, this is how they do it in the NFL, this is how they do it at another school, to come up with what we think is best for NC State.”

Once the research stage was completed, NC State was able to generate a revenue-sharing plan immediately after the 2024 campaign ended. As the Wolfpack’s top players — most notably sophomore quarterback CJ Bailey and senior tight end Justin Joly, two poaching targets for other teams around the nation — re-signed with the program’s NIL collective, they also inked revenue-sharing agreements to be prepared for the House settlement as a proactive measure. 

And as soon as the settlement was approved this summer, allowing revenue-sharing payments to begin on July 1, NC State was already ahead of the curve. But just because it was given a sum of funds from the athletic department to use, the football program didn’t want to hand out participation trophies. 

Instead, the money was given to those that the Wolfpack coaching staff and front office believed deserved it from the 125-man roster, which can have up to 105 players on scholarship, though Doeren declined to say how many NC State will use this fall.

“At NC State, it’s earned, not given,” Doeren said. “We’re trying to reward the guys who have earned it. It’s positionally, and it’s also what they’ve done. Not everybody gets something. We have walk-ons, we have guys just on scholarship and we have guys that have both.”

But as Doeren and Vaughn worked to craft the right plan for NC State, they wanted to make sure it didn’t divide the locker room. The NIL era has done just that within programs around the country. Examples aren’t hard to find, just look at what happened at Maryland last season. 

Terrapins coach Mike Locksley seemed to struggle with balancing paying his current players who helped win in a Maryland uniform while also making competitive offers to transfers and incoming freshmen. That appeared to cause a rift in the team’s locker room.

“I’ll tell you, a year ago Coach Locks lost his locker room,” Locksley said at Big Ten media days in Las Vegas. “For me to stand in front of a group of media and tell you that I lost my locker room — and it wasn’t because I wasn’t a good coach. It wasn’t because they weren’t good players, because we were better than a four-win team.

“We had haves and have-nots for the first time in our locker room, and the landscape of college football taught me a valuable lesson. That valuable lesson is that it’s important for me, even in the midst of this change, to continue to educate our players on the importance of what playing for something bigger than yourself is all about. And I can tell you that if I’ve got to put my desk in the locker room this year, I will.”

That’s the exact situation that Doeren wanted to avoid in Raleigh. It was also similar to a longtime NFL player’s experience that the Wolfpack’s 13th-year coach leaned on during his research-gathering process. Doeren was told stories about how some NFL rookies were making substantially more than veterans before collective bargaining, and how that eventually divided locker rooms as a result. He didn’t want that to happen within his own team, which boasts a family-like culture each season.

“This is a completely different conversation, but it would be nice to have some kind of arrangement where there are rookie caps to protect the teams from themselves,” Doeren said. “I think a guy that’s been on the team for three years, that’s playing well, earned it on the field should make more than a guy coming in the door. I think that’s the proper way to do business.”

NC State approached the first year of the new revenue-sharing model with the idea of taking care of its own first. It could change in the future, but Doeren, an old-school coach, will likely continue to reward those who impact winning for the Wolfpack throughout the season.