GoHens Interview with Jordan Skolnick, Part 1

[Big R]

On February 17th, I conducted a video interview with Jordan Skolnick, Director of Athletics and Campus Recreation. Although he wears multiple hats, my focus was on the Athletics Director component of his job, and in particular, how that pertains to the football program.
As many of you may recall, I had conducted a similar interview in January of 2025 when he was still the interim Athletic Director, and in which we covered a wide variety of topics. Of course, this was before the House decision was finalized, so there were still a number of unknowns at the time regarding how that would play out.
In this year’s interview, we were able to discuss the ongoing effects of that decision as well as other subjects that I thought would be of interest to our board members. We were able to spend about 45 minutes on the video call, for which I was very appreciative, but I probably could have spent twice that long to get to all the topics I was hoping to cover.
In any case, I hope you find the discussion we had to be as enlightening and informative as I did.
I have broken the interview down into three separate segments that I will post over the next week or so.

Part 1 covers NIL, the House decision, scholarships (then and now).
Part 2 will cover recruiting and the differences between recruiting high school athletes and those in the Portal
Part 3 will delve a little into questions I had about Jordan himself and his vision for UD Athletics, with a bit about facilities as well.

At the end of each part, I will provide a brief summary of what I, personally, learned from that segment of the discussion.
Overall, I would like to suggest that you read this with an open mind rather than looking for things to either confirm or refute preconceived ideas. Also, keep in mind that written transcriptions are just that, and sometimes do not fully reflect the complete nuances of the spoken word or the visual cues that are available in a video discussion. So, if you have questions about anything you read, please let me know and I will try to respond as best I can within the context of the video discussion that we had to provide clarification from my perspective. Having said that, I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Part 1

GH: First of all, congratulations, Jordan. It's great to have you named Athletic Director. I'm sure you've been asked some of these questions in one way, shape, or form, so I apologize if they're repetitive.
Can you give us a 101-level class on the difference between NIL and what schools can give directly to student athletes? When you and I talked about it previously, it was before the House decision came out and I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what the NIL is, versus what schools can give directly to student athletes.

JS: Absolutely. So, with the House Settlement passing, and starting July 1st for schools, you had to decide if you were opting in or out. All FBS institutions other than Army, Navy, and Air Force have opted in. Opting in means that we can now provide dollars directly to student athletes from the institution to utilize their Name, Image, and Likeness. So, we get to determine how much, and to whom, and that is up to our discretion and up to our ability to fund it.
The rules that exist are:
(First), There is a cap on the amount that you can do institutionally that is the same for every school. It's based off of a percentage of the revenue of the average Power 4 school and so it ended up being, this year, $20.6 million. I think next year is $21.5 million. That number is up to the school if they want to do the cap or if they want to do less than that. Anything in between is totally fine. So that's institutional dollars that can go to use to the student athletes NIL.
(Second), Externally from that, third parties can still provide NIL dollars to student athletes. Those have to get approved through a system called “NIL Go”, which is run by the Collegiate Sport Commission. The Collegiate Sport Commission, or the CSC, is an entity outside of the NCAA that enforces whether or not these deals and their validity is something that they're willing to approve. So those are typically, again, third party deals that a student athlete is doing directly with a company and they're not coming from the school. So those are the two ways that NIL works. If it's above $650 the student has to disclose it, if it's below $650, they don't have to disclose it. So, that hopefully gives you a good sense of where things are currently from an NIL perspective.

GH: OK, so do conferences at all influence the amount of the cap that a school can give or is it totally up to the discretion of the school?

JS: So, because of antitrust law, conferences can't set additional caps on the amount you can give; they could say you can't opt into it, but they can't set another artificial cap, but they can set floors. So, they could say “at a minimum we are going to require schools to do “X” amount so that we're competitive within the landscape”. So, every conference has a decision to make if they want to set a floor, but they can't set a new ceiling outside of the one that has been set from the House Settlement.

GH: OK, and there is no limit on the NIL, right? I mean, if you've got a Texas Tech, or schools like that where they've got millionaires or billionaires that want to contribute to the NIL they can do that if they want, right ?

JS: The third party deals - correct - no limit to that, but they have to be what they would consider “market value”. But you could have a student athlete that got, theoretically, millions and millions of dollars based on their market value and based on what the company is willing to pay. So, there's no cap on the third party deals, they just have to get approved.

GH: Up here in the Harrisburg area where I live there was just an article in the Patriot News that was describing the amount of the NIL that Penn State had given out for fiscal year 2025, and it listed it by sport. Is that kind of public knowledge school-to-school or conference-to-conference, or is there a requirement to divulge that information or not?

JS: We have to report all of our deals to the CSC so they can make sure that we are underneath the cap. All schools have to report that. They don't have to publicly report the disbursement in terms of what student athletes or what teams or how much money is going, but all the details have to go to the CSC. I believe that the CSC will release the information in aggregate at some point after this fiscal year wraps up to show things like – ‘here's what the average Group-of-6 school is spending’, ‘here's what an average point guard is making’ … I think they are likely to do that, but that's their decision. It's what we've been told, is that they're going to likely create some type of clarity from a market-value standpoint, which I think would be really beneficial because, as you could imagine, as an athletic director at this institution, we constantly get reports and rumors as to how much schools are paying certain athletes for their NIL. And it's not 100% clear as to whether that's an actual number, or if the agent is driving the number up to try to make it sound like they have a greater value, or if they're including things like bonus incentives which they're not guaranteed to get, but they're just including that in the overall deal. So, we've got to be careful when numbers are floated out there to know how accurate they are. So, if the CSC is planning to give some pieces of aggregate information to schools, that will be really beneficial for us.

GH: What about the amount that schools can give directly? Does that have to be reported? That may be what Penn State was reporting.

JS: So, the easiest way to talk about these is talking about them institutionally or third-party, because they're both NIL. So, institutional is what I was referring to with the cap. The third-party deals - those have to get reported by the student athlete. We also might get those in aggregate as well, but for those, the athlete has to be the one to submit them themselves.

GH: Someone asked me this, and I said I would ask you, but probably not get an answer from you – do schools within conferences, let's take the CUSA as an example, do they know what other schools in the conference are giving in terms of NIL?

JS: We have rough numbers. I think we will have some clarity at the end of this year, but we won't have specifics, and the truth is that it's less important for us to know what every school is doing - it's important that we all know that we are investing in it in a way that allows for us to be competitive across the landscape. But we are not all openly sharing all the numbers because I think, as you could imagine, there's a competitive disadvantage to having your number out there - whether it's really strong or whether it's low, because the more information that's out there when it's just you - it puts you in a precarious position and how people recruit against you, and how people use that information in different ways. So, people are pretty guarded about it. But I think we'll get some data here after the first year that gives us a sense of a rough number that everyone's in.

GH: OK, and in our conference, everybody knows that Liberty is probably way above everybody else, right?

JS: That is what I think is an assumption, but I think it's also important to take all of that with a grain of salt, because how schools think about their dollars institutionally, and whether that includes things like cost of attendance and “Alston” and their scholarship and NIL or revenue share. They all look at it very differently, so I don't think it's easy to just say Liberty is ahead of everybody else. It doesn't mean that they aren't, but I think there's a lot more to it. Now, you're also allowed to increase your scholarships so there's no cap on the number of scholarships you can provide per sport. There's a roster limit, but you know there's going to be teams that invest in scholarships in a different way than they do NIL. So, it's a little bit of apples and oranges, but I don't think that it's wrong to presume that Liberty is at the top in the league.

GH: You just said “invest in scholarships” what's that mean, exactly?

JS: Well, you can add scholarships now so there's no more caps. So, if you take a sport like football, 85 was the old max and now there's a roster limit of 105. You could go to 105 in scholarships, but you have to consider Title IX as well. So, if you were to add 20 more scholarships in football at a school like the University of Delaware, then you would have to think about adding another 30 scholarships to women's sports because we have more females than males on our campus. So that's what I mean about investing into scholarships, that some schools will look at that instead of NIL because it might be the strategy that they use.

GH: And, I as I recall - and I could be wrong on this - when we were in FCS we could give partial scholarships, and when we were first going to come over to FBS, they had to be full scholarships. But with House that kind of goes away you can give partials again - is that the way it worked?

JS: So, technically, you could always give partials - you just couldn't split them up amongst more than 85 people. So, 85 people could be on scholarship - you could give them all fulls, you could give them all halves. There'd be no reason to do that, but now there's no limit on that at all so any student could be on a full ride as long as you can afford it and as long as it obviously meets Title IX when you look at it holistically in terms of your participation compared to the student body.

End of Interview Part 1

My reflections and comments.
First of all, you may be able to tell from my questions that I had an initial misunderstanding of NIL. I thought that NIL referred only to the component that Jordan refers to as “3rd party”, and that the monies paid directly to student athletes from colleges and universities was something different. So, I learned that “NIL” is an umbrella term for both Institutional and 3rd party payments.
Secondly, I was only vaguely aware of NIL Go and the Collegiate Sport Commission (CSC).
Thirdly, when Jordan referred to “Alston”, he said it as though he presumed that I knew what he was talking about. I didn’t, but I didn’t want to show my ignorance or get too far off track, so I just decided to look it up after the interview.
I assume some of you are familiar with it, but for those who don’t, here is the AI-generated answer from my Google search:

NCAA v. Alston (2021) is a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found the NCAA violated antitrust laws by restricting education-related benefits for college athletes. It permits schools to provide up to $5,980 annually in academic-related compensation, often called "Alston awards," such as for computers, tutoring, or internships.

Usage Examples in College Athletics
Alston Awards: Universities directly provide financial bonuses (up to $5,980 per year) to student-athletes who meet academic criteria, such as maintaining a specific GPA, retention, or earning points through a, academic-focused system, as seen at institutions like UCLA.
Education-Related Benefits: Schools can now offer non-cash benefits like laptops, scientific equipment, or internships that were previously capped by NCAA rules.
Beyond Scholarships: The ruling allows for benefits above the traditional full cost of attendance scholarship

Synonyms and Related Terms
Alston Awards (often used synonymously with the financial payout)
Education-related benefits/compensation
"Grant-in-Aid" litigation (the case's name in lower courts)
Academic achievement awards

Significance
The 2021 ruling, which came shortly before Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rules went into effect, fundamentally altered the NCAA's amateurism model. It allows athletes to receive more value for their services and has fueled further legal discussions regarding whether student-athletes are employees.

My final comment is that I didn’t realize that Title IX is not a one-for-one equivalence when it comes to scholarships. Apparently, the ratio of females-to-male enrollment also plays a role, which is why Jordan said that 20 male scholarships could equate to 30 female scholarships.

[BigBlueRooster]

Thanks for posting these interviews. You do a great job. Lot's of good info here. Though admittedly the more I learn about NIL the more I realize I still don't know.

[72 Hen]

Thanks for taking the time to do this. You asked a lot of good questions. Looking forward to the next part.

[hengeek]

I found this to be very educational. Thanks for taking the time to do this and other things. Please keep them coming.

[finpxz1]

As always…thanks for all you do Rich. Great work!!!

[Caldwell Chicken]

Very informative! Thank you!

[wildman]

Thanks, Rich! Very enlightening, as usual.

[Info Hound]

Really excellent writing, Big R. Thank you!

In this new era of spending in college athletics, it really makes me wonder how this can all work out financially for the vast majority of Division I programs.

I try to do my part in ticket purchases, "pledge per win" commitments, "Excellence Fund" donations, etc. but it is all really a drop in the bucket. All I know is that I love my Blue Hen football, and that is where the emphasis needs to be.

[HENJOHN]

Great Job Rich!!

[Hens79]

Really excellent writing, Big R. Thank you!

In this new era of spending in college athletics, it really makes me wonder how this can all work out financially for the vast majority of Division I programs.

I try to do my part in ticket purchases, "pledge per win" commitments, "Excellence Fund" donations, etc. but it is all really a drop in the bucket. All I know is that I love my Blue Hen football, and that is where the emphasis needs to be.

Agree with all.

It always was about $ and now it really it is. I am not sure how this is sustainable as there are very few rules or regulations. I am all for the young men being able to make money because fans come to see them play. But there just needs to be more structure.

I will follow one of my motto’s in life and that is I’ll do the best I can to support UD football even though it is a drop in the bucket. It is just sad that a few really rich dudes have so much influence on everything in society.

[Cluck U]

BigR...that was outstanding!! Thanks for identifying and clarifying all the moving parts. You are really good at this.

Justin should add, "professional juggler" to his resume.

We (everyone) are all in for quite a ride...and the CSC is going to become another legal battleground (and the CSC will lose) the first time they deem a deal as not fair. There's no way for any entity to deny someone's "fair value" when that number is a made up number. If someone wants to pay a kid a boatload of money to watch him play for a favorite team, then that is his fair value.

On a UD note, it is a bit sad, but on par, that UD won't release financials (quelle surprise) while Penn State simply opened up their numbers for their local newspaper. My d*** is bigger than their d***...lookie here.

The P4s are going to have the money to plow into all of the revenue sports and more (same as it ever was) while UD's emphasis on their gender blend will continue to put the less attended men's sports in the back seat as football gobbles up much of men's 40% portion of the available scholarships. There was early talk about portioning out general NIL money similarly to the Title IX requirements...but that idea should be shoved into the trash since the mandatory scholarship distribution is still in place. Have to get extra money somewhere else if we want to compete in baseball and lacrosse.

In any case, the kids are getting paid and they have several avenues with witch to make money. Kudos to them. Hard to balance school work and their athletic commitments...especially at a solid school, so it is good that they are getting the extra reward.



*** deal. Sheesh, get your mind out of the gutter!!!

[Cluck U]

It is just sad that a few really rich dudes have so much influence on everything in society.

Hey, don't blame Rich...his parents named him.

[beancounter]

The question I would like to see asked, and I am sure no one will, is how does a defensive coordinator, whose defense ranked 11th out of 12 in the CUSA, get a promotion?

[UDFootballFan]

Great info; mind blowing what college sports & the NIL is doing right now

[UDFootballFan]

The question I would like to see asked, and I am sure no one will, is how does a defensive coordinator, whose defense ranked 11th out of 12 in the CUSA, get a promotion?

Yes! Thats a great question. In the human world, most who fail and fail miserably wont have a job for long. At Delaware though, you get raises and promotions.