Kentucky Boosters Make Big NIL Money Promise To Ensure Mark Pope Can Compete With Arkansas And John Calipari
Mark Pope is going to replace John Calipari as the head basketball coach at the University of Kentucky. The 51-year-old is going to have significant financial backing from Day 1 on the job.
Two Wildcats boosters stepped up to provide him with a very solid base for recruiting.
According to Matt Jones of Kentucky Sports Radio, two different donors have joined forces to make a $4 million pledge to the university’s NIL efforts in direct response to the Pope hire. This will put Kentucky basketball in the upper echelon of Name, Image and Likeness wealth for a Power Five program. Most P5 budgets range from $1-4 million annually. To be on the higher end upon arrival is a great foundation on which to build.
Mark Pope will use NIL for retention, unlike John Calipari.
Interestingly enough, Calipari left Lexington for Fayetteville in part because of NIL. A few major players, like John Tyson of Tyson Foods, stepped up with a big money promise that was not matched. He will have somewhere between $5-7 million in Name, Image and Likeness funds to use during his first year.
It sounds like Kentucky is going to get Pope pretty close to that number. The two boosters pledging $4 million out of the gate puts him more than halfway there. Others are surely going to step up in coming days.
And there is another unique dichotomy between the two rosters.
Arkansas does not have even one single scholarship player set to return next year. Calipari will have to rebuild the entire roster from the top-down, and it seems like he is going to flip one of his former five-star pledges from his previous program.
On the flip side, Reed Sheppard (whose father won a national championship with Pope as a player at Kentucky), Rob Dillingham, Justin Edwards, D.J. Wagner, Adou Thiero, Ugonna Onyenso, Zvonimir Ivisic, Aaron Bradshaw, and Jordan Burks could return to Kentucky. Having this initial $4 million pledge will be a very crucial piece to the puzzle if the Wildcats’ new head coach is able to keep keep them in town.
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