Texas Tech Red Raiders football players to receive 1-year, $25K NIL contracts from the Matador Club

A week after announcing a $200 million facilities project, the Texas Tech football team got another boost Monday when the Matador Club, a local collective, told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that it will sign 100 Red Raiders players to one-year, $25,000 NIL contracts.

The deal will be for all 85 scholarship players plus 15 of Texas Tech's walk-ons, according to Cody Campbell, an oil and gas executive who is a member of the Matador Club board of directors and a former Texas Tech offensive lineman.

Campbell said that players will be expected to do community service and charitable work in the Lubbock area, and that payments will start to go out the first week of August.

«Collectives have done things a number of different ways,» Campbell told the newspaper. «You see some of them paying large amounts to individual players. You see others doing different things. But what we want to do, really, is support the entire program. This is kind of a base salary for the guys. They're not going to be restricted from doing any other NIL stuff with anybody else. In fact, we're going to encourage and help them to do that.»

On Sunday, first-year Red Raiders coach Joey McGuire hinted at the arrangement and told reporters at the Texas High School Coaches' Association convention that NIL has the potential to disrupt locker rooms as incoming freshmen or prized recruits may land bigger deals than current starters.

«It's not at Texas Tech,» McGuire said. «Because I don't believe in that. I don't believe that you can have somebody come in that's never taken a snap in red and black… I don't understand that. That's not going to be us. There's gonna be a pretty big deal coming from Texas Tech where we create some equality in our locker room. And I