They saved the program. Now they're being asked to save it again.

Darrien Starling wrote something this week that every Group of 6 booster in America should read.

In his piece for Before Saturday, Starling describes the phone call that has become routine in college football — the one where a coach calls a major donor and tells them a player is considering the portal. The ask is specific. A dollar amount. A timeline. Meet the number or lose the player.

In the case Starling describes, the donor met the number. And the player left anyway.

That's not an outlier. That's the operating reality at dozens of programs across the country — and it is grinding the people who fund these programs down to nothing.

I know because I've been in those rooms.

I spent six years inside the NIL ecosystem — selling the technology platforms that power it, building a sales vertical targeting more than 100 D1 athletic departments, running content strategy across more than 40 NIL collectives. I was at INFLCR when the client list grew from four programs to more than 200. I built Talkwalker's entire D1 collegiate business from scratch. I worked on the licensing side. I worked on the collective side. I've seen the donor lists, the retention budgets and the spreadsheets that never make it into press conferences. And I’ve talked to countless administrators, coaches and boosters across the spectrum of college sports, all feeling the same tension.

What Starling describes isn't new to me. But what's changed is where I'm watching it from now — covering the programs on the receiving end of all this, the Group of 6 schools where the money was already stretched thin before NIL existed.

The American is a showroom

The donor fatigue problem exists everywhere. But it hits different in the American Athletic Conference.

The American has been the most poachable talent pool in college football for years. It's not complicated. The conference sits in the geographic heart of Power 4 recruiting territory — the South and the East, where SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 schools are packed into every corridor. These programs don't have to go looking for American roster talent. They play against it. They see it on film. Many of these players were on their recruiting boards in high school.

When a running back at UAB or Memphis or Tulane breaks out, every SEC program within 300 miles already knows his name. The portal opens and the phone rings. Not the coach's phone — the donor's.

That's the cycle. Develop a player. Watch him get noticed. Get the call from your coach asking you to meet a number to keep him. Meet it or don't. Watch what happens either way.

It's a conference-wide reality. Memphis has been losing developed talent to the portal for years. Tulane made the Cotton Bowl and watched half its roster scatter. East Carolina, USF, Temple — same story, different year. The American develops players better than any conference its size, and the reward is watching those players leave for programs with bigger checkbooks.

The UAB math

If you want to understand donor fatigue at the Group of 6 level, start with UAB.

Full disclosure — I'm a UAB alum. I started my career in the UAB sports information office as an undergrad communications student. I gave to the football fund when the program was cut. This isn't an outsider's critique. It's a conversation I'm part of.

And when that program was killed in 2014, I was furious — not just for the football players, but for all the students whose careers depended on the program's existence. Kids from places like like my hometown of Fort Payne, Ala., who came to UAB and honed their skills in sports information, athletic training, broadcast production and event management because a Division I football program gave them somewhere to do it. When the program went away, those opportunities went with it. The front porch doesn't just serve the university. It serves the people who work inside it.

The UAB community — fans, boosters, businesses and civic leaders — raised an estimated $27 million through the "Finish the Drive" campaign to bring back football after the program was killed in December 2014. That included $7.5 million raised privately in the early weeks and $12.5 million in pledges by May 2015, with support from the UAB Football Foundation, the City of Birmingham and the student government association. That wasn't a fundraising campaign. That was a civic movement.

They didn't stop there. Local business leaders and fans funded a $22.5 million football operations center and pavilion. The city, UAB and major corporate community invested $175 million in Protective Stadium, which opened in 2021. Beyond football, donors helped fund more than $45 million in facility upgrades across basketball, soccer, softball and other sports — a new basketball practice facility, a soccer stadium that now houses a professional team, grandstand expansions, turf upgrades. And Bartow Arena is undergoing a $15.4 million renovation that started this month. Add it up and this community has invested a quarter of a billion dollars into UAB athletics infrastructure in the past decade. Every sport. Every facility. The same donors, over and over again.

And UAB is hardly alone. That's the reality across the Group of 6. These communities were already locked in facilities arms races they couldn't win. Now you're throwing NIL on top of it.

And now those same people are being asked to fund NIL packages for players who might not be on the roster in 12 months.

That's the part nobody says out loud. These donors were maxed out before NIL. They gave to save the program. They gave to build it. They gave to sustain it. And now the ask has changed from "support the program" to "pay this specific player to stay" — with no guarantee the investment holds.

A booster who wrote a five-figure check to bring back football is now being asked to write another one to keep a player from leaving for a Power 4 school that can triple the offer. That's not sustainable. And everyone involved knows it.

To be clear — UAB is stepping up. The university significantly raised its revenue-share support in 2026, and every school in the American is committing to conference-mandated league minimums. Some like USF and Memphis are investing significantly more. That matters. But the question is whether it's enough — and if it's not, what do you do about it? You have two bad options: keep draining your donors, or drain university coffers chasing a spending arms race you will never win against programs with SEC television money.

Neither works. There has to be a third path.

The question nobody’s asking

The conversation around NIL has been dominated by the Power 4 — the arms race at the top, the mega-collectives, the programs spending eight figures on roster construction. That's where the attention goes because that's where the biggest numbers are.

But the real stress test is happening one level down. At programs where the donor base is smaller, the ask is constant and the return on investment is uncertain. Programs where development is the model — recruit undervalued talent, develop them into starters, hope they stay long enough to win with them — and the portal has turned that model into a feeder system for richer schools.

The question nobody's asking is the one that matters most: What happens when the communities that built these programs can't afford to keep funding them under the new rules?

Because the answer isn't that they'll spend less on NIL. The answer is they'll stop giving altogether. Not out of spite — out of exhaustion. You can only go back to the same well so many times before the well runs dry.

The front porch

I'm not arguing that NIL is bad or that the portal should be closed. Athletes deserve to be compensated. Mobility is a right. The old system was exploitative and everybody with any honesty about it knows that.

But the cost of compensating those athletes should not be falling on boosters. It should be a cost of doing business for the universities themselves.

There's a reason people in higher education call athletics the "front porch." It's because it is. It has been proven time and again that athletic success — and in some cases, athletic existence — improves universities. It drives enrollment growth. It builds stronger alumni connections. It delivers millions upon millions in earned media exposure that cannot be achieved by any other means.

Take UAB. I'd argue that outside of its world-class medical school and research complex, no single entity has been better for the university than the formation and success of UAB basketball. That might only be rivaled by the saga of The Return — when the community rallied to bring football back and, in the process, generated more national attention for UAB than any marketing campaign ever could.

The athletes who wear those logos are the most prominent brand ambassadors these universities have. Unless you're a school that puts its alumni in the White House or on the Supreme Court, nobody is doing more to put your institution's name in front of millions of people every Saturday than the players on the field.

Compensating them should be an institutional investment — not a donor burden.

And before anyone asks where the money comes from, start by looking at how the money already moves.

Scholarships have real costs. Books, tutors, housing, meals, travel, facilities, training, coaching — those are actual expenses. But tuition? At most Group of 6 schools, which are nowhere near capacity, the tuition line on a scholarship is not a real cost. The seat was open. Yet universities charge their athletic departments full tuition price anyway, because it helps athletics maintain its non-profit status. That's an accounting structure, not an economic reality. And it's worth examining whether that structure still makes sense when the same institutions are asking donors to cover player compensation out of their own pockets.

I don't have all the answers. Nobody seems to, which is why this has turned into such a chaotic mess. But a good place to start would be to stop treating this as an athletics-only problem and start looking at it holistically — across the entire university ecosystem.

These athletes are influencers. They have NIL rights. They have audiences. They have reach that most university marketing departments would kill to access. So tap into marketing budgets instead of donor pockets. Let the admissions office, the alumni association and the university communications team leverage those athletes the same way a Fortune 500 company would leverage a brand ambassador — because that's exactly what they are. And in the process, help those athletes develop real skills in marketing, media and brand management that serve them long after their eligibility runs out.

Who is a better person to recruit students for the School of Business than an athlete who is in that School of Business? Make that part of what they do for their compensation.

There has to be a middle ground here — one that innovates the full brand power of athlete association across the entire university landscape. Find new ways that compensate the athlete, develop them professionally and benefit the institution just as much as what they do on the field or court.

Keep the donors focused on the buildings that endure. The facilities. The scholarships that create degrees. The research that fuels advancement and drives business. The infrastructure that outlasts any single roster. Stop asking them to fund the player who might be gone by January and start asking the institution to invest more in the asset it benefits from most.

The financial infrastructure supporting this new era was designed for programs with television contracts worth hundreds of millions and donor bases that stretch across entire states. It was not designed for a collective at UAB or Charlotte or UTSA trying to retain a breakout player against a program with 10 times the budget. But the answer isn't to keep squeezing the same donors. The answer is for universities to recognize that the athletes driving their brand, their enrollment and their relevance are worth paying for — directly, and from the right budgets.

Where this leaves us

Some will read all of this and say the answer is simple — just accept that you can't compete with what are essentially professional sports enterprises in the Power 4 and go play in a kiddie division. But that's not the answer. Nobody's asking Group of 6 programs to match the SEC dollar-for-dollar. The ask is to stop borrowing the SEC's playbook when you don't have the SEC's money.

The people who saved UAB football — who built it from the ground up and funded every brick of every facility — aren't the problem. Neither are the administrators making the calls. The problem is that nobody, at UAB or anywhere else, has innovated past the old playbook. Be realistic about the gap. Then innovate to maximize what is possible where you are. The model that paid for college athletics before NIL is not the model that will sustain it after. And until programs stop turning to the same solutions that funded an outdated system, the fatigue is only going to build.

Darrien Starling's piece captured the moment. The donor who met the number and lost the player anyway. That's not a failure of generosity. It's a signal that it's time to ask a different question — not "who's going to match this number?" but "how do we leverage the full power of athlete NIL across the entire institution so we stop having to ask?"

The third path is there. Somebody just has to build it.

Tim Stephens is the founder of Diehard Sports Network. He spent six years working inside the NIL ecosystem across technology, licensing and collective operations before launching Diehard to cover the programs national media abandoned.