College Football’s Billionaire Backer Era Begins

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: The third-richest person in the world just bought the University of Michigan its next star quarterback. 

If you missed this whole news cycle, here’s the gist: Michigan scored big last month when top high school QB Bryce Underwood flipped his commitment from LSU. What sealed the deal was reportedly a $10 million to $12 million promise (the precise price tag is not publicly known) from boosters at Champions Circle, the Michigan NIL (name, image, and likeness) collective. 

NIL collectives are a product of the new college sports Wild West created in July 2021 when the NCAA started allowing college athletes to earn money from endorsement deals; schools can’t directly pay athletes to play a sport (though even that might soon change with the House settlement), so instead, the collective gives the athlete an endorsement deal. This way the school can say it’s not engaging in “pay-for-play” since the school isn’t paying the kids, the alumni are—but I don’t see a huge difference.

In its official statement about the flip, Champions Circle thanked “Larry and Jolin Ellison.” That was a surprise—the Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle founder? Yes, the Larry Ellison, FOS confirmed with two cofounders of the collective. 

There was additional weirdness and intrigue: Champions Circle deleted its initial statement (too late, everyone saw it) and reposted it with the name “Ellison” removed. This time, it simply thanked “Larry and his wife Jolin.”

But who is Jolin? She’s a 2012 Michigan grad named Keren Zhu who lives with Ellison, FOS learned over the Thanksgiving holiday. (WSJ was first to report Jolin’s identity Tuesday morning.) She appears to be his sixth wife (it’s not 100% clear whether they’re married apart from the collective calling her his wife) and was the obvious driving force in getting Ellison, who did not attend Michigan and has no other ties to the school, to cough up millions. (Michigan alums Tom Brady and Dave Portnoy were also involved in the wooing.) 

Putting aside the Jolin part of the equation, the broader signal in all this is that college football is entering its billionaire boys club era. 

Sure, you could retort that rich people donating money to their school is nothing new. Just look at how many college campus buildings bear the names Koch, Schwarzman, Griffin, Bloomberg, Munger, and so on. 

But now the money is raining down onto football fields, and the process strikes me as more naked than it’s ever been. Now a rich guy can buy you a quarterback because his wife asked him to—just do it through the collective and call it an NIL deal. 

Let’s also note that Michigan having a competitive football team is to the advantage of the Ellison family business: Ellison’s son David heads up Skydance and will be CEO of Paramount after those two companies merge; Paramount owns CBS, which airs Big Ten football games. 

Ellison isn’t the only example, just the most famous and richest so far. Nike billionaire Phil Knight has donated more than $1 billion to his alma mater Oregon and appeared in a recent video that announced Na’eem Offord, the No. 2 cornerback recruit in the country, has flipped his commitment from Ohio State to Oregon. Offord told CBS Sports that Knight “played a big role, like a huge, big role.” In July, former UCLA football coach Rick Neuheisel said Oregon enjoys “unlimited” NIL funding thanks to Knight. Like Ellison with Michigan, Knight has a vested business interest in the school’s football success: Oregon is a Nike school.

SMU’s football team made the ACC championship game this year, its first in a new conference, largely thanks to NIL money from alums like Bill Armstrong and other oil barons. Armstrong himself told ESPN in September, “I bet a lot of these schools look at SMU and go, ‘Oh, shit, here come all the billionaires.’”

Indeed, here they come. $10 million (or whatever the number was) is like pennies for Ellison, whose worth is estimated by Forbes at $236.4 billion as of Dec. 6. How much more will he give? There’s no cap (yet) on how much one alum can give to an NIL collective. Jolin might have Larry buy a whole new football team. 

What’s to stop Sergey Brin and Larry Page from buying Stanford a great team? Same goes for the Walton family (Arkansas alums), Michael Dell (Texas), and any other rich alums (they don’t have to be billionaires!) who want their alma mater to win. 

To those who fully support the new capitalist approach to college athletics (the players should earn as much money as they possibly can), I’d ask: Is this the landscape you want? If you went to a school benefiting from all this, you may say yes. My Michigan alumni friends tell me they love the Ellison news. Why wouldn’t they? LSU fans, less so.

That’s college football recruitment now: The highest bid wins.