At a press conference this week to introduce the University of Houston’s new athletic director, Eddie Nuñez, Tilman Fertitta presented a new vision for the university’s recruiting practices.
Joseph Duarte, the billionaire hotel magnate and chairman of the UH System Board of Regents, first emphasized in the Houston Chronicle the importance of giving money to student-athletes.
“We need to raise a lot of money for NIL,” Fertitta said, according to Duarte. “If we don’t raise money for NIL, we won’t succeed.”
Fertitta pointed to the growing influence of NIL (name, image and likeness deals) contracts and the proliferation of paid minor league options for aspiring professional athletes as driving reasons for the university to change how it spends its athletic budget. The owner of the Landry’s Inc. empire cited UH’s 2023 groundbreaking on a $140 million football operations center as an example of potentially poorly spent money.
“That’s how much college sports have changed,” Fertitta said, according to Duarte. “Now you can scratch your head and say, ‘Do we really need to spend $140 million on a football facility, or should we take the money from all these donors and use it for NIL?’ When you talk to college athletes today, they don’t care about the building anymore. They care about, ‘How much am I getting paid?’ Think about that, because you know what they would all tell you: ‘Give me the money.'”
It’s a remarkably candid assessment of UH’s use of funds by Fertitta, a major donor to the Cougars and University of Houston dropout who has generously supported his alma mater. The billionaire pledged $20 million to UH in 2016 to renovate the school’s basketball arena, marking the largest single donation in UH sports history. He followed that up with a $50 million pledge to UH’s medical school in 2022. The Houston Rockets owner continues to be the biggest and most public supporter of Cougars sports, hosting superstar rap artist and honorary Houstonian Drake at a UH basketball watch party on his property at the Post Oak Hotel earlier this year.
The school’s athletic finances, however, continue to lag behind its growing ambitions. The Cougars boasted the smallest athletic budget of the Power 4 conferences after joining the Big 12 for the 2023-24 sports season. UH Chancellor Renu Khator told PaperCity Magazine’s Chris Baldwin this week that she hopes the school will “double” its athletic budget in the coming years — but that could be a controversial endeavor. UH’s athletic department ended the year with a $10 million budget deficit, which the university is addressing through an internal loan taken out by one of its “quasi-foundations.”
“The university has made it clear that UH Athletics expects revenue growth and is excited to see our new athletic director help achieve that,” the university said in a statement to Baldwin.
With the athletic department losing money and millions being spent on facilities that are no longer needed, it will be interesting to see how Fertitta’s NIL arguments play out.
