Charles Barkley Loves Auburn, But He's Not Wasting His Own Money On NIL, With NCAA Being A 'Bunch Of Idiots'
If you haven’t been paying attention, the NIL deals we are seeing in college athletics have started to cause friction between schools and the donors who are being asked to give money to help fund the NIL programs. For Charles Barkley, he made it clear on Thursday morning that the return on investment is not good enough for him to waste his own money on.
What we have seen over the past few months in college athletics has been a free-for-all when it comes to players trying to reset the market from an NIL standpoint. We've got players receiving anywhere between $6-$8 million for a single season of basketball, which just goes to show you how much some are willing to spend to win immediately.
For NBA legend Charles Barkley, an Auburn alum, it sounds as though he has told the folks at Auburn to stop asking for donations when it comes to the basketball program and putting together a roster to compete for a Final Four.
Appearing on the Dan Dakich show, Barkley had some pretty strong words about how he chooses to spend his money, and who he would rather donate to, rather than a college athletics program like Auburn.
"I just gave ten million dollars to HBCU's, that stuff is way more important to me," Charles Barkley noted to Dan Dakich. "I just gave million dollars to ‘Blight’, in my hometown of Brimigham, to rebuild houses. That stuff is way more important to me than joining the cesspool that is college athletics. We're such a shitty country, Dan. We've ruined college athletics, and I don't wanna even get in that cesspool.
"This notion that you have to come up with tens of millions of dollars to pay kids to play basketball, and have them be free agents every year and transfer to another school and get more money every year.