Thirteen Million Dollars Is Not Actually That Many Dollars

Thirteen million dollars is not actually that many dollars.

I mean, you can still buy a lot for $13 million. Over 26 million nuggets, for example. If you decided "aw heck, I can make do with just 25 million nuggets, what else can I get with the extra cash?" then congratulations because you can go ahead and order somewhere around 500,000 mini apple pies to go along with your meal (tax not included).

But if you aren't investing in nuggets or jpegs of nuggets or a link to a code that might verify that you paid money to get a link to a jpegs of nuggets, then, you might find out, that in the grand scheme of things 13 million dollars is not quite as much as you thought.

For instance, if you're trying to run a sports franchise. I am (foolishly) a fan of the Cincinnati Reds. It's just pure masochism at this point, but it does help to put perspective on life from time to time. Especially when you consider that the Reds, one of the worst 2-3 teams in Major League Baseball in large part because of a massive offseason salary dump that saw them give up all pretense of being a competitive baseball team in favor of their owner giving fans the middle finger for six months, still has an active payroll of roughly $117,000,000.

Players on the injured list alone are making over $28,000,000. Ken Griffey, Jr., a 52 year old man who retired 12 years ago, is pulling in $3,500,000 from the Reds this year.

Again: the Reds are terrible. I can't even bring myself to watch Joey Votto's twilight years because he's sitting on a pile of garbage in a barge stuck somewhere in the Ohio river. Votto is one of my favorite players of all time and occasionally still bangs, but is also old and not very good. He's making $25,000,000 this year.

"But aren't we talking about Ohio State football, and not a professional sports franchise?"

Well, yes and no. Doug Lesmerises has the skinny over on Cleveland.com about what Ohio State believes is necessary in NIL money to keep players in Columbus:

Day said the Buckeyes have been gathering information by talking to recruits and their families and getting a sense of what other schools might be discussing with NIL deals. He said he believes right now top-shelf quarterbacks require $2 million in NIL money. Major offensive tackles and edge rushers he said are about $1 million.

Tiddlywinks! Pshaw! Trifle! Especially for a pro sports team like the Ohio State Buckeyes football team. Because, as Ryan Day and Gene Smith insisted to the Columbus business community, that is in fact what it is now.

And if we view Ohio State football as a pro team, some things begin to come into focus very quickly. Is it weird that a wide receiver might demand more in NIL money than his positional coach makes in a year? Actually no! Because that's the way it works in pretty much every other sport, but especially in pro football, but even in retrospect if you think about even the recent history of the Buckeyes. We've joked about guys like former linebacker coach Bill Davis and former wide receivers coach Zach Smith being bad at their jobs (in spite of the clear talent on the roster that they were tasked with coaching), but who would ever complain if the actual value of a Michael Thomas over a Zach Smith was actually delineated instead of just being speculated on?

So yes, some of this is weird. By having Ohio State brass go to the Columbus business community with their hand out and explicitly stating what kind of cash is necessary to continue to field a great team, the Buckeyes are functionally admitting that this is a professional sports operation in all but name.

If that's the case, it's a steal. $13 million to keep C.J. Stroud and company in C-Bus, with zero cost to the university itself, is the best deal in the history of professional sports. Ohio State gets to keep a team together that generates enough revenue to cover dozens of other varsity sports, Columbus gets a winner, and players get rich. There are downsides for the sport as a whole, and what parity and competitiveness looks like in the future isn't something that I can answer in June of 2022.

But who cares?! Ohio State football should be sitting pretty for the foreseeable future. Now all OSU has to do is get Franklin county taxpayers to foot the entire bill for a new billion-dollar stadium and they're really in the big leagues.