51şÚÁĎ

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Missouri men’s basketball unveiled its 2025-26 nonconference schedule on Wednesday, lining up another home-heavy slate of lesser-profile programs before Southeastern Conference play begins.

It’s a similar schedule to past ones Mizzou has played under coach Dennis Gates, with marquee rivalry games in December but few games of significance otherwise.

Based on last season’s final NET rankings, the Tigers would have nine Quad 4 matchups this season, one in Quad 3, one in Quad 2 and two in Quad 1. That means MU’s NCAA Tournament resume will rely heavily on the strength of the SEC and, ideally, a near-perfect run through these nonconference games

As previously announced, Missouri will open the season at Howard on Nov. 3, the second meeting in a three-year series. Mizzou’s home opener will come Nov. 7 against Southeast Missouri State.

Two days later, the Tigers will face the Virginia Military Institute on Nov. 9, with a football game against Texas A&M sandwiched on the day between the SEMO and VMI games.

On Nov. 12, Minnesota will visit MU in the return leg of a series that started in 2023. Prairie View A&M will come to town on Nov. 17, followed by South Dakota on Nov. 20 and South Carolina State on Nov. 25.

Missouri will host Cleveland State Nov. 28 in a game that will be a reunion on many fronts: between Gates and the school that gave him his first head coaching job, where former Mizzou assistant Rob Summers is now the coach.

As part of a crossover challenge between the SEC and Atlantic Coast Conference, the Tigers will visit Notre Dame — which plays basketball in the ACC, not as independent — on Dec. 2.

This year’s matchup with Kansas will take place Dec. 7 in Kansas City’s T-Mobile Center.

Missouri will host Alabama State on Dec. 11 and Bethune-Cookman on Dec. 14 before heading to the Enterprise Center for this year’s Braggin’ Rights showdown against Illinois, scheduled for Dec. 22.

SEC play will begin in the new year.

Mizzou will play Arkansas, Oklahoma and Mississippi State both home and away. The Tigers have the Razorbacks and Sooners as permanent twice-a-year opponents, and the league’s rotation pits them twice against the Bulldogs.

While dates won’t be released until closer to the season, MU will also face Florida, Auburn, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Vanderbilt at home. Missouri gets Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana State, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas A&M on the road.

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New Mizzou men's basketball GM Tim Fuller starts job focused on meeting players, agents

• Eli Hoff | Post-Dispatch

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Mizzou spent more than $31 million on NIL for athletes in the last year, records show

• Eli Hoff | Post-Dispatch

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Bring your Tigers football, basketball and recruiting questions, and talk to Eli Hoff in a live chat at 11 a.m. Thursday. Scroll past the chat window for the transcript.

Transcript

Eli Hoff: Good morning, folks, and thanks for coming by this week's Mizzou chat. I'm sure we'll find plenty to discuss as always, but I'll start this off by making sure everyone saw this week's story on MU's NIL spending. If you haven't seen it yet, I'm confident you'll learn something.Ěý

Mizzou Sports News

Mizzou spent more than $31 million on NIL for athletes in the last year, records show

• Eli Hoff | Post-Dispatch

Now, your questions! Drop whatever's on your mind in the chat window.

Âá·É±ą±ô:ĚýEli, should I have any concerns on the lack of more 2026 football recruiting

±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ĚýI don't think so, but I also recommend a general feeling of nonchalance toward recruiting these days — not getting too excited or too worked up about it. Mizzou has another round of official visits coming up this weekend. The few weeks after that should net a decent number of commitments. Drinkwitz and co. will get up to 15-17 recruits (maybe more, we'll see) as expected. There are players who want to play at MU, it just depends what quality they're eyeing.Ěý

The reality is that recruiting has never mattered less than it does right now. Take a kid who commits, say, tomorrow. What are the chances he doesn't flip to another school and signs with Mizzou? What are the chances he stays out of the portal for the 2-3 years it takes to be a viable SEC player? The portal dictates so much as far as roster-building now. Hence why I think it's best to be happy for kids who commit and then turn attention to their older counterparts who will actually do the playing.

JohnL:ĚýGood morming-How good is KU on paper this year? I don't care if we win another game this year other than beating the snot out of KU on 9/6! It's personal. Quite frankly...

±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ĚýGood morning, John, and I don't think you're alone in that sentiment. It's a bit difficult to get a read on the Jayhawks. Like with Mizzou, they've got a lot of turnover happening on that roster. Kansas does, however, have a very experienced QB in Jalon Daniels. He's one of the most veteran quarterbacks in college football at this point and there are some big expectations for him. That said, it remains to be seen how quickly this KU team will coalesce. The Big 12 is up for grabs this year — there aren't really any clear favorites, I'd argue — but the part y'all are most interested in is what Kansas looks like early on. Even if it's a hate-watch, the Jayhawks vs. Fresno State during Week Zero might be worth tuning in to for the purposes of answering this question.

Mjhtiger:ĚýHi Eli! Did Horn pitch any baseball games this past spring?

±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ĚýHe did, and he'll probably be selected in the MLB draft that is coming up soon. Horn made 5 appearances, pitching a total of 10.2 innings. He allowed seven hits, five runs (all earned), two homers, walked eight and struck out 14.

Slow day today, so we'll cap today's chat off there. Thanks for stopping by! We'll be back again next week.

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COLUMBIA, Mo. — The University of Missouri athletics department has spent more than $31 million on name, image and likeness compensation for its athletes during the past year, according to financial records.

Mizzou’s NIL spending reflects the university’s push to compete in football and men’s basketball under the terms of a modern college sports landscape that has spawned a lucrative market for athletes.

The records show that nearly two-thirds of the money in 2024 went to football players and about a fourth to men’s basketball. The remainder was split among baseball, women’s basketball and lower-profile programs.

MU’s spending in the past month alone shows how the school has tried to take advantage of a disruption in the NIL market, distributing an influx of cash to athletes before the landmark House v. NCAA settlement takes effect soon and imposes a de facto salary cap.

Missouri’s athletics director, Laird Veatch, has declined to specify how his department will share $18 million of revenue with athletes under the terms of that settlement. But Mizzou’s NIL spending breakdown provides a window into how it has distributed money to this point and how it may share revenue with athletes moving forward.

The Post-Dispatch compiled Mizzou’s spending through a series of invoices sent to the athletics department from Every True Tiger Brands LLC, the collective-turned-marketing agency that runs the school’s NIL operation. The athletics department turned the money over to Every True Tiger to distribute to athletes. The Post-Dispatch obtained the invoices, dating back to Sept. 1, 2023, through an open records request.

The invoice figures represent 90%-95% of all the NIL compensation Mizzou athletes receive, Brad Larrondo, the CEO of Every True Tiger, told the Post-Dispatch.

What they don’t capture is deals with third parties — such as football wide receiver Luther Burden III’s ad campaign with clothing brand Nautica or men’s basketball guard Caleb Grill’s TV commercial for a Columbia law firm — because they’re independently arranged.

NIL data points are typically murky and often exaggerated, making the clarity of Mizzou’s figures unique within college sports.

MU was billed more than $31.7 million by Every True Tiger from July 1, 2024, to date, a span that roughly aligns with both a sports and fiscal year. The number of athletes receiving NIL benefits varied month to month, ranging from 155 to 65, with an average of 125.

Every True Tiger is not quite like the collectives used to generate and distribute NIL funds at most schools. It is a self-described “marketing and branding agency” tethered to Mizzou, allowing the school to funnel NIL money to its athletes. The funds are listed in the invoices as “talent fees.”

The $31.7 million tally includes a 2024 football season in which the Tigers went 10-3 and a men’s basketball campaign that saw Mizzou return to the NCAA Tournament. It also includes spending on transfers for both teams’ upcoming seasons.

Because NIL nationwide is so murky, it’s not possible to compare Missouri’s spending with that of similar universities, whose figures are not available or have not been reported.

The NIL landscape will undergo a drastic change on July 1, when the settlement with the House takes effect. Major athletic programs, including Missouri, will share $18 million of revenue directly with their athletes each year. Previously unregulated NIL deals will now have to come from third parties and receive approval from a nationwide clearinghouse to ensure that they fall within an established range of fair values.

As such, Mizzou’s NIL operation will look different moving forward.

Spending flurry before July 1

Of the roughly $31.7 million spent on NIL in the last year, nearly $10.3 million came earlier this month — just weeks ahead of the House settlement’s effective date.

Mizzou has sent just shy of $25 million to Every True Tiger so far in 2025, more than doubling the school’s $12.4 million spent across all of 2024. The last six months of invoices were the six most lucrative of the 22 obtained by the Post-Dispatch.

This practice of “front-loading” deals with athletes, believed to be common across major college sports, allowed MU to provide extra compensation to athletes signed for next season before it is restricted by the settlement’s revenue-sharing cap.

Starting July 1, schools will be limited in how much revenue they can share with athletes, and external NIL deals will be subject to increased scrutiny. In the meantime, athletic departments like Mizzou’s have taken the closing months of the NIL free-for-all to give a rising amount of money to athletes competing in 2025-26 — and continually up the ante to keep pace with others doing the same.

“As we were all anticipating this coming, we all recognize that we needed to best position ourselves,” Veatch said of the front-loading practice. “Like you can see, we were aggressive in that approach. I don’t feel like it’s necessarily inconsistent with a lot of those schools out there.”

“It was an absolute necessity,” Larrondo said. “That was the standard you were trying to meet. ... We weren’t uncommon in that.”

Every True Tiger’s 2025 invoices haven’t broken down spending by sport. But it’s likely that football players who signed deals in the winter and men’s basketball players who signed in the spring have received a significant portion of the compensation they’re due already — months before their seasons start.

What each sport received

In 2024, Mizzou sent about $12.4 million to Every True Tiger. Just under $8 million, or 64.3%, went to football. Men’s basketball received $2.9 million, or 23.5%.

Baseball received $488,500, or 3.9% — the third-most of any program. Women’s basketball received the fourth-most, at $348,100 or 2.8%.

Softball (1.5%), wrestling (1.2%) and track and field (1.1%) were the only other programs to receive more than 1% of the total spending.

The records do not detail which athletes within those programs received the money. And for 2025 spending, the invoices did not break down how the money was distributed by sport.

The NIL breakdown is not a perfect science. Looking at the 2024 calendar year, for example, it encompasses one football season but parts of two basketball seasons.

Still, it’s something of a baseline and the clearest possible view into which sports were NIL priorities.

While it’s not yet clear how Mizzou’s spending trend will carry over into the revenue-sharing era, expenditures on football and men’s basketball clearly spiked during transfer portal windows, as the programs acquired new players and signed current players to new deals.

In January 2024, when the football program signed most of its transfers for that year, it was the only sport included on that month’s Every True Tiger invoice. MU jumped from spending about $561,000 on football in NIL in December 2023 to about $767,600 in January before dipping back down to $420,000 in February.

In May, while most of the nearly $3.6 million spent on NIL across the athletics department wasn’t broken down by sport, the tail end of the men’s basketball transfer portal cycle was marked by two players receiving a combined $170,000 that month — seemingly on top of what the team had planned to distribute.

Future of Mizzou and NIL

NIL spending is about to change dramatically just a few years after it began. Mizzou will share the $18 million in revenue, plus add about $3 million in new athletics scholarships — $2.5 million of which will count toward the overall House settlement cap of $20.5 million.

Every True Tiger will still exist, in part to help with revenue-sharing cap management but also to help arrange third-party NIL deals that will allow athletes to earn more than what they get from their school. It’s a process that will include collaboration with Learfield, which holds MU athletics’ multimedia rights.

“That’s a lot of what we’re talking about internally, with Brad Larrondo, with ETT, but also with Learfield,” Veatch said. “How do we all come together to help facilitate those deals at a high level? One of the kind of operational advantages we’ll continue to have is (that) Brad and our ETT program, they have such good relationships directly with student-athletes. They’re able to facilitate those revenue share contracts, and at the same time, they can be front-line in terms of fulfilling all those things with student-athletes, coordinating with them.”

Local and regional businesses will be vital, too, if they can sign Missouri athletes to the kind of third-party deals that will be approved by NIL Go, the clearinghouse.

With internal spending on athlete compensation now capped, Missouri will look for money to come in from the outside.

“We’re going to need our businesses, our sponsors to really embrace that as part of the new era,” Veatch said. “It’s going to be on us, as athletic departments, (and) Learfield, as our partner, to continue to integrate those types of opportunities in meaningful ways for sponsors. ... I see that as the next area of innovation and where we can really help try to give our sports and our programs another competitive leg up.”

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In Mizzou baseball’s quest for improvement, the Tigers have taken plenty of steps toward a brighter future.

MU athletic director Laird Veatch already has voiced a desire to invest more into the program. In the transfer portal, the Tigers have landed a pitcher from one of the top NCAA Division II schools in the country and a former Southwestern Athletic Conference freshman of the year.

The revamp has also included new coaching hires, and the Tigers made one official Tuesday with the acquisition of lauded pitching coach Drew Dickinson. The move comes in the wake of Tim Jamieson’s departure from MU as the longtime head coach-turned-pitching coach stepped down in May.

Dickinson, who starred as a pitcher at the University of Illinois, was drafted by the Oakland Athletics in 2002 and played seven years in the minor leagues. After his playing career ended, Dickinson became a successful pitching coach at both his alma mater and, most recently, Virginia.

In Charlottesville, Dickinson played a big part in UVA’s consistent excellence on the mound during his six-year stint with the Cavaliers. They sported a team ERA of 4.02 from 2021-24, which ranked No. 10 in college baseball. Dickinson also oversaw the developments of 2021 second-round pick Andrew Abbott, 2022 third-round pick Nate Savino and 2023 fifth-round pick Connelly Early.

“Drew’s incredible track record speaks for itself,” MU head coach Kerrick Jackson said in a press release. “He’s developed elite arms, competed deep into the postseason and helped build one of the most consistently productive pitching staffs in the country.”

The Cavaliers reached the College World Series three of the last five seasons with Dickinson leading the pitching staff. This season, Virginia missed the NCAA postseason but the team’s pitching staff had a 4.68 ERA that ranked third in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Previous to Virginia, Dickinson was an assistant coach for eight years with the Illini, including Big Ten championship team that posted a 50-10 record in 2015 and reached the Super Regionals in the postseason.

Under Dickinson, Illinois saw a pair of pitchers go in the first round of the MLB Draft: Tyler Jay in 2015 (No. 6 to the Twins) and Cody Sedlock in 2016 (No. 27 to the Orioles).

Earlier this month, Brian O’Connor left after 22 seasons as Virginia’s head coach to take the same position at Mississippi State.

“This is an incredible opportunity, and I’m beyond excited to join Mizzou baseball,” Dickinson said in a news release. “This program has a proud tradition of producing high-caliber pitchers, and I can’t wait to build on that legacy while competing in the best baseball conference in the country. I’m grateful to Coach Jackson for believing in me and trusting me to help shape the future of this staff.”

Dickinson’s hire comes at a time when Mizzou desperately needed reinforcements on the pitching staff, both with players and coaches.

Mizzou’s 2025 team had an ERA of 9.19 this season, the second-worst mark among power four teams. The next-closest power four team in ERA was BYU at 7.04. The Tigers have finished in the SEC’s bottom four in team ERA every season since 2020.

Mizzou’s pitching cupboard is far from empty, even with the loss of top starter Will Libbert to the University of Mississippi via the transfer portal. Keyler Gonzalez, who played two seasons at Division II Nova Southeastern, announced his transfer to Mizzou earlier this month. The Sharks have historically been one of NCAA Division II’s top programs, producing a couple of major league standouts in J.D. Martinez and Miles Mikolas. Across both seasons, Gonzalez tallied a 3.78 ERA in 133.1 innings pitched. Mizzou also added nine pitchers in the 2025 recruiting class, four of which are from Missouri.

COLUMBIA, Mo. — How else would the first-ever general manager of Missouri men’s basketball divvy up his early days in the role than with percentages?

In a sport that to a large degree centers around the numbers that go in front of a percent sign, new Mizzou hoops GM Tim Fuller has broken his first 100 days down by the percentage of them he’ll spend on different tasks.

The first 10% were about the players currently on the MU roster. Fuller has familiarity with the program, having worked as an assistant coach for the Tigers from 2011-15, but some present-day Missouri players were in elementary school then.

So Fuller has spoken to the team and met them, trying to understand them for the players “to have a chance to get to know me,” he said Saturday, meeting with reporters after a football and basketball alumni game on the Mizzou Arena hardwood.

The next 30 days — or 30%, as Fuller framed it — are about agents, a key part of his freshly crafted job description. In the name, image, likeness age of college sports, agents are involved in recruitment and negotiations. Missouri coach Dennis Gates felt it was time he had someone on his staff who specialized in working with them.

When Gates decided he wanted to fall in line with a national trend and hire the program’s first general manager, the agent relations angle was key.

“One of the interesting elements of this is the interpretation or definition of GM at different places is different,” MU athletics director Laird Veatch said last week. “That’s why, with Coach Gates, that was important to him: He wanted to have that kind of role on staff and have somebody that can really help him interact directly with agents and manage some of those elements.”

While agents are new to college hoops, they’re not to Fuller. He worked with them as a marketing executive at Nike, then in closer proximity to the modern NIL landscape with the Overtime Elite preps setup and then as an assistant to Kim English at Providence.

Fuller is first connecting with agents who are already on friendly terms with the Mizzou staff. Then he’ll broaden their horizons.

Both Fuller and Gates will travel to Las Vegas later this summer for the NBA Summer League, where two former Tigers in Tamar Bates and Caleb Grill will likely be trying to play their way into NBA roster spots. It’ll be a business trip for Gates and his new GM, too.

Fuller is already lining up meetings with agents in Vegas to introduce them to Gates and Missouri, making the connection well before the Tigers might have interest in an agent’s transferring client.

“Just so we can start to understand what their expectations are moving forward in this new day of college basketball and also share our expectations in terms of the quality and types of athletes and people that we want to be part of the program,” Fuller said.

Fuller and Mizzou are investing in relationships with three groups of people, he said. One is the agents who will become particularly influential when the transfer portal opens up each spring. Another is the high school players who can make up recruiting classes down the road.

Of growing interest to the Tigers, among other programs, are international prospects who see an increasingly professionalized college basketball as an attractive alternative to working up through European professional ranks. Missouri was linked to a couple of international prospects during this year’s transfer portal window, though none of those contacts came to fruition. Now, though, MU could be laying the foundation for a future foreign player or two.

Staff will head to some FIBA events soon to court international players, Fuller said.

For now, this is Fuller’s focus. Well after his first 100 days, he’ll start getting ready for his first transfer portal window as the Tigers’ GM — when he can relieve some of the acquisition burden on a staff that hopes to have postseason competition to prioritize at that point of the season.

Fuller’s responsibilities and Gates’ vision for the general manager position might change. Both expect there to be an evolution of what the job entails. GM roles are far from standard in college sports.

At some places, like Stanford and Cal football, the head coaches report to the general manager. That’s not the case with Mizzou men’s basketball: Fuller is on par with the coaching staff, reporting to Gates. With other programs, like MU football, a GM can seem redundant.

Since football coach Eli Drinkwitz gave up play-calling duties in 2023, he has more time for the personnel aspects of running a program that might otherwise fall to a GM. Plus Brad Larrondo, the CEO of Mizzou’s NIL marketing agency Every True Tiger, moved to that role from the football program.

All of that would make a football general manager rather redundant — and therefore an unlikely job for Drinkwitz to create at the moment.

That’s why Veatch doesn’t necessarily expect one GM hire at Missouri to turn into a whole flock of them.

“It is going to be different depending on the coach and the sport,” Veatch said. “I think that’s important, that we meet coaches where their needs are. Some coaches are positioned differently to manage this than others, so we need to support them in whatever they need.”

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In case you hadn’t heard, it’s a brand new day in college sports. You’ve undoubtedly felt the tremors, the equivalent of shifting tectonic plates in a changing sports landscape.

Thanks to a federal judge’s approval of a settlement agreement in the House v. NCAA case about 10 days ago, everything has changed.

Well, change might be a bit strong. Things will definitely take a different shape.

But what if this whole thing is overly optimistic and idealistic? What if the more things change, the more they fall back into familiar flaws.

Now, colleges can pay players directly through licensing deals, a cap has been created on the amount of money schools can distribute to players, third-party name, image and likeness (NIL) agreements will continue, but a newly created College Sports Commission — referenced in the settlement agreement as the “Designated Reporting Entity” — will assume oversight over NIL deals and serve as a clearing house for any third-party deal for more than $600.

“I think we all have to make a commitment, particularly as leaders — as athletic directors, presidents — and I think that’s what you’re seeing and will continue to see,” University of Missouri athletic director Laird Veatch said during a media availability Thursday at Mizzou Arena. “Even when you talk to coaches, particularly behind the scenes, they’re tired of operating in the environment that we have been.”

The previous dynamics caused never-ending headaches for athletic departments and coaches and athletic departments.

NIL guidelines varied from one state to the next. Deals made through other entities on behalf of a school or program became the subject of disagreement and disgruntlement among players. The requirements and responsibilities for players to earn NIL payments varied wildly. Not to mention, players could be lured off of another team’s roster by the promise of a bigger dollar figure.

This new system seeks to formalize the rules and regulations across the nation.

If you’re a power conference school like Missouri in the SEC, this saves you and your partner schools from yourselves. In the name of competition, you might have bankrupted or nearly bankrupted your colleges in effort to compete in an ever-escalating recruiting arms race.

If you’re a school outside the power conferences yet you want to vie for the top talent and have a chance to achieve the highest levels of success, this seemingly levels the playing field. You’re no longer just waiting to find out that you and your supporters have been outspent.

Now, everyone has the same financial restrictions and the same chance to land talent. That’s what’s behind comments like the ones 51şÚÁĎ University athletics director Chris May made to the Post-Dispatch recently, when he said of the settlement, “It allows us to compete at the highest levels, especially when you add on the layers of recruiting and now revenue sharing.”

The wave of optimism is understandable. In a perfect world, every school now stands on equal footing and there are new guardrails.

Of course, this could be just another form of what we’ve all seen fail before.

Even Veatch’s optimism came with significant caution layered into it.

“I do think we have an opportunity to take a significant step, and we do have some structure and foundation here to work from,” Veatch said. “We do need to be committed to it and give it an opportunity to work and be successful. This is only going to be as successful as the members decide to make it. And if we are committed to it and give it a chance, then that’s a starting place.

“Will there be lawsuits? Will there be continued outside pressures? Absolutely, and that’s why it is a step. But it’s not the last or final step. It is also why we need congressional support. Why we need to have, at some level, some federal action that gives us a level of protection so we can continue to move forward with the collegiate model in a new way in a new day.”

Even if we set aside the fact that there seems to be an overwhelming willingness to put governors on the money the athletes — and only the athletes — make from this multi-billion-dollar industry, there’s still some very fragile pillars holding up the foundation to this new approach to college athletics and the compensation of college athletes.

The College Sports Commission, an entity that didn’t even officially exist at the start of this month, will basically take on roles once held by the NCAA. That’s widescale oversight, rules enforcement and investigation of potential violations of the new compensation and revenue sharing system, placed in the lap of this commission starting July 1.

When the NCAA served as the governing body, coaches, boosters, family members, amateur coaches, representatives of outside companies, AAU coaches and agents all played parts in circumventing the rules.

Whether it’s stories of hundred dollar handshakes or the infamous SMU football pay-for-play scheme of the 1980s or larger more complex scandals like the FBI arresting college basketball coaches in 2017, the pursuit of college sports glory has a history of outweighing “the rules.”

So, once again, this whole thing hinges largely an overwhelmed governing body and the collective will of fiercely competitive people to play within the rules.

Why? For the greater good.

“We have to get to a point where we’re at least operating from the same set of rules,” Veatch said. “I believe we’re all embracing that piece of it. We’re all going to continue to push, and we’re all going to be aggressive. Mizzou will be too. We’re going to do what it take to win and be aggressive, but we also have to be committed to being a part of a larger whole.”

I guess everybody is allowed to hope.

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