The $6 Million Man

I grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man. For those of a certain age, you probably remember Lee Majors and the opening sequence as well as I do. Six million dollars seemed like an almost unimaginable amount of money to spend rebuilding one human being.

Of course, that was television, and it was the 1970s, but the title popped back into my head recently when I heard a rumor that UConn basketball star Braylon Mullins might be receiving as much as $6 million to return to Storrs for his sophomore season.

Now, before I go any further, I need to be clear that I have no idea whether that number is accurate. I haven’t been able to find anything credible that confirms Braylon Mullins is actually receiving $6 million, and I don’t want the accuracy of a rumor to become the point of this story. What we do know is that the amount of money now flowing through major college basketball programs is staggering. UConn’s roster has reportedly reached somewhere in the $10 to $15 million range, and there are programs spending even more than that. So whether Braylon’s actual number is $6 million, $3 million or something entirely different, the larger question that rumor caused me to ask hasn’t gone away.

And here’s where I probably need to confess that I am hardly an objective observer when it comes to college basketball. I’m a college hoops junkie. I played Division I basketball at Manhattan College, now Manhattan University, and I’ve spent most of my life around sports. No one jumped higher than I did when Braylon Mullins hit that shot against Duke to send UConn to the Final Four. It may have been one of the greatest endings to a college basketball game I’ve ever watched. I loved the moment, I love watching UConn basketball, and I certainly don’t begrudge Braylon Mullins or any other college athlete the opportunity to make money from their talent. For decades, everyone around these athletes seemed to be able to make money except the athletes themselves, and there was something fundamentally wrong with that.

But I also spend most of my waking hours thinking about a very different part of the sports ecosystem. My wife Kerry and I started 2-4-1 Sports more than 20 years ago because we believed kids deserved the opportunity to play more than one sport, and over the years that mission has increasingly taken us into communities where simply getting to play one sport can be a challenge. Today we work in schools and communities across the country, and now beyond it, trying to provide kids with access to sport, play, caring adults, social-emotional learning and the opportunity to discover things about themselves that they may never discover sitting on the sidelines.

So when I heard “$6 million,” I couldn’t help myself. I started doing the math.

I thought about what $6 million could do in Hartford or Baltimore or Washington, DC. I thought about the seven schools we’re beginning to serve in Norwich, Connecticut, and schools where we’re working with kids before the school day even begins. I thought about the children we’re now reaching with our partners in Zambia. I thought about equipment and coaches and teacher training and buses and gym space and all of the things that aren’t particularly glamorous but determine whether a kid actually gets the chance to play. I thought about how many thousands and thousands of children could have a meaningful sport experience with that kind of investment, and how many of those kids might discover fencing or soccer or basketball or running or some sport they didn’t even know existed.

That’s where my discomfort with what is happening in college sports begins. I don’t think NIL was a bad idea. In fact, I think the basic premise was right. The athletes creating billions of dollars of value deserved the opportunity to participate economically in what they were helping create. But somewhere between correcting that inequity and creating the system we have today, we’ve entered an arms race that I don’t think any of us completely understands yet.

There are obvious haves and have-nots within college sports itself. UConn can reportedly put together a basketball roster costing $10 to $15 million. My alma mater, Manhattan, can’t. Neither can hundreds of other schools. If Manhattan finds someone willing to give a kid $100,000, that’s a pretty big deal. But if that kid can make five or ten times that somewhere else, what exactly do we expect him to do? I certainly wouldn’t blame the kid for leaving. The result, though, is a system in which the wealthiest programs can increasingly acquire the best players, and the programs without those resources are being asked to compete in something that bears less and less resemblance to a level playing field.

There is another part of the equation that I think about even more because I live it every day. Where is all of this money coming from, and where might some of it have gone otherwise? College athletic programs are increasingly asking wealthy alumni, boosters and supporters to contribute enormous amounts of money to acquire and retain players. Some of those same people are extraordinarily philanthropic. They care about kids. They care about their communities. They care about sports. I can’t prove that a dollar given to NIL would otherwise have gone to a nonprofit like ours, and I wouldn’t pretend that I can. But money is finite, and choices about where we put it say something about what we value.

That’s really what I’m wrestling with. We have become remarkably comfortable investing extraordinary sums of money at the very top of the sports pyramid while organizations working at the bottom of that pyramid scrape and claw for relatively small amounts of money just to give children access to play. We celebrate a multimillion-dollar investment that helps our favorite college basketball team get to the Final Four, while a youth organization may spend months trying to raise $25,000 that could put hundreds of kids into programs.

I understand the difference. Believe me, I do. One is entertainment. One is philanthropy. Donors are allowed to spend their money however they choose, and I don’t think anyone should be shamed for loving their school and wanting it to win. I’m one of the people watching. I’m one of the people cheering. I’m one of the people who will remember that Duke shot for a very long time.

But a great basketball shot creates an incredible moment. Giving a child access to the right program, the right coach and the right opportunity can change the trajectory of a life.

That doesn’t mean we have to choose one or the other. Maybe it simply means those of us who love sports need to think more carefully about the entire ecosystem we’re creating. If you can invest $100,000 to help your alma mater land a point guard, could you invest $10,000 so a few hundred kids in your community get to discover why you fell in love with sports in the first place? If universities and their supporters can assemble $15 million basketball rosters, can some of that same passion and generosity find its way down to the places where the next generation is just learning to play?

I don’t have the answer for how we reel in the chaos of NIL, revenue sharing and the rapidly changing economics of college sports. I don’t pretend to. And I certainly don’t have anything against Braylon Mullins. He’s 20 years old, extraordinarily talented, and if someone is willing to pay him millions of dollars to play basketball, I understand why he’d take it. He’s going to be just fine, and I hope he hits a few more shots that make me jump out of my chair.

But I also know there are thousands and thousands and thousands of kids who won’t be just fine unless somebody decides they’re worth investing in too.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether a 20-year-old college basketball player is worth $6 million. It’s what else $6 million could be worth.