The NIL phenomenon is bringing NFL fixtures to the NCAA, and stirring things up for one of college football's biggest rivalries.
With Stanford putting former Colts quarterback Andrew Luck fully in charge of the program as General Manager, multiple donors to the Cal NIL collective are shutting off the free-cash faucet until former Panthers and Commanders head coach Ron Rivera has the same power.
In Palo Alto, the head coach reports to Luck. In Berkeley, no one reports to Rivera. Football coach Justin Wilcox reports not to Rivera but to athletic director Jim Knowlton.
The president of the California Legends Collective, Kevin Kennedy, doesn't like the fact that Rivera is being underutilized.
“You don’t hire Mario Andretti and ask him to sit in the passenger seat, right?” Kennedy told Gabe Fernandez of SFGate.com. “There’s a reason that you bring someone like that on staff: In order to give him control.”
And Kennedy wants to leverage the power of the NIL collective to get control for Rivera.
“I think we feel a certain sense of obligation to inform the donors that we have brought in and cultivated for the past several years who have helped fund the collective and help generate the success that we’ve generated,” Kennedy said. “We owe them full insights into what we’re personally doing with our investments. I think it behooves all of us, and we firmly believe that, to have just clear reporting lines, and have it be clearly specified that Ron Rivera is in control of football.”
It prompted Kennedy to stop making donations to the collective, and to encourage others to do the same, until they get answers to questions such as how can Rivera be overseeing football if he has no oversight of any specific employees?
“Until I know the answers to the questions I posed above, I won’t personally invest more money in this enterprise,” Kennedy wrote to the collective's donors. “More importantly, I cannot in good conscience ask any of you to do the same. I simply do not believe that Cal football can possibly succeed without some significant changes to how we have operated to date.”
Another California Legends Collective board member, Greg Richardson, publishes Bears Insider. He has used that platform both to promote Rivera and to attack Knowlton's ongoing role as A.D.
Fernandez posed specific questions about the situation to Cal chancellor Jim Lyons. The questions weren't answered; instead, a statement was released by Lyons: "I am confident we have the right people, in the right places, doing the right things in support of a Cal Athletics football program that can and will excel. The world of intercollegiate sports is changing rapidly, and Cal will continue to adapt rapidly to that.”
The people paying the money — or, for now, not paying the money — want the adaptation to happen more rapidly. Starting with Ron Rivera getting authority that matches his mission.
