COUGAR COLLECTIVE PRESIDENT Luke Wetzstein had just returned home from a weekend in Pullman when he hopped on the phone last week with Cougfan.com for a wide-ranging conversation about the changing landscape of college athletics and what it means for the official NIL collective of WSU athletics.
Fresh from hosting a Friday night happy hour that raised more than $13,000 in the lead-up to the Crimson and Gray Game game, Wetzstein was both buoyant and in need of a breather.
“Hopefully my voice will hold up for your call,” he said.
There’s no shortage of NIL collectives across the country simply trying to hold up these days, operating in a gray area while awaiting Congress to possibly find a path to any sort of regulation around the unfettered spending and free agency that now exists.
With college athletic departments now permitted to share up to $20.5 million directly with athletes each year, thanks to the House v. NCAA settlement, many universities have coalesced their player personnel budgets — revenue sharing and NIL operations — in-house.
Others are using collectives as external partner to complement the internal revenue-sharing endeavors. And other collectives have shut down altogether.
WSU isn’t close to meeting the NCAA’s revenue-sharing cap, and the Cougar Collective is still very much operational, working as WSU’s official NIL partner but not as an in-house operation.
THE COUGAR COLLECTIVE has about 2,800 recurring donors contributing at least $18.90 per month via the 1890 Club. The total number of contributors surpasses 3,000 when one-time donations are factored in, according to Wetzstein.
And the hope is that the total could grow to 4,000 with a successful football season under first-year head coach Kirby Moore.
In the near term, Wetzstein aims to lure back former 1890 Club members who canceled in January following the football season, while promising a return in the fall.
More pressing, however, is tackling the process to officially merge the Cougar Collective with WSU. It’s been a long-discussed plan that was put on hold in November as WSU searched for a full-time athletic director. With Jon Haarlow now in place without the interim tag, Wetzstein said WSU could bring the Cougar Collective in-house later this summer.
“We know that’s coming soon,” Wetzstein said. “I think my take in my gut is sometime after July 1st, but before football starts. You’ve got about a seven-to-eight week window there. That’s when this is all going to come together.”
FOR THE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT, working with the Cougar Collective is a delicate balance. On the one hand, it wants to raise money directly for revenue sharing through the CAF’s sport-specific excellence funds.
On the other, the department doesn’t want to sunset an organization that has helped raise millions for WSU student-athletes since it was launched in early 2022. Nor do they want to upset the 1890 Club members who donate to the Cougar Collective but have yet to donate to the CAF.
So, how to merge the Cougar Athletic Fund and Cougar Collective gracefully?
While at Missouri, WSU football general manager Brad Larrondo helped oversee integration of the NIL collective Every True Tiger Brands with the SEC school’s athletic department. Wetzstein said he hopes Larrondo can be key to bringing the two entities together, and helping supercharge fundraising efforts ahead of the upcoming first season of the new Pac-12.
THE COLLECTIVE HASN’T FORMALLY talked with Haarlow to discuss specifics, but they’ve been encouraged with Haarlow’s willingness to engage after suffering through a frosty relationship with former athletic director Pat Chun, now at Washington, and having limited interactions with former AD Anne McCoy.
“It’s got to be collaborative and a joint kind of thing,” Wetzstein said. “And they don’t disagree. They understand it. And they need us to be still independent to a degree. Now, we want to be cooperative. And if we need to be answerable and reportable to them, that’s great. We kind of already are, to be honest. We’re not cowboys.”
But Wetzstein did compare the Cougar Collective to a U.S. military special forces unit. Since they are unbound by bureaucracy, they can step in quickly to help support WSU athletes.
And it’s proved useful even in this revenue-sharing era. For instance, Wetzstein noted, in the run-up to the second semester of this school year, timing was too tight for WSU to secure new housing quickly for one of WSU’s returning offensive linemen — a lineman undoubtedly courting offers from other schools. So the Cougar Collective jumped in and arranged housing in a day, he said.
THE NEXT FEW MONTHS FOR Wetzstein and the Collective board will be busy for other reasons besides the expected merger with WSU. Here’s a sampling:
In other words, business as usual. Sort of.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Lewis is a former sportswriter for Sportspress Northwest, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Sports 710. He graduated from Washington State University in 2013 and is a proud alumnus of the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication. He currently lives in the Seattle area and works as a communications professional in the tech industry. He has written periodically for Cougfan.com since his college days.