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If you are earnestly trying to buy the University of Nevada, Las Vegas men’s basketball team following head coach Josh Pastner’s impassioned sales pitch, you are too late.
Pastner was quoted in a local news interview that went viral on college basketball Twitter and other online spaces about letting someone “buy” the UNLV team for, in his words, $10 million. He later clarified that stance in an interview with Yahoo! Sports, noting the obvious tongue-in-cheek he had. He meant that the team needs “support, but we’re really not for sale. The model’s not set up for that.”
We here wanted to have some fun though, and speculate just how much someone would buy the actual UNLV men’s basketball team for. Vote in the poll below to tell us! Read on to find out what I would pitch in if I wasn’t a low-wage blogger.
In our sponsored poll above this paragraph, we laid out 0-1 million USD, 2-5 million USD, 5-10 million USD, and 10+ million USD as the options. I won’t lie; we might have shortchanged the value here. My pick is north of $10 million, and here is why…
According to nil-ncaa.com, the average NIL cost for what the site calls “mid- to high major” is $2.3 million. I am going with that stat because, well, UNLV is pretty firmly a mid-major, not a low, and not what we usually call a high-major team.
Now, when you think of Runnin’ Rebels men’s basketball, sadly, the glory days are long gone. The program hasn’t made the Big Dance since 2013. The Lon Kruger Era in the mid 2000s and into the 2010s is remembered fondly by the millennials and elder Gen Z’ers among us (me, that is me), while our Gen X sisters and brothers will yell about Larry Johnson and Jerry Tarkanian — as they should; the Rebels won the NCAA Tournament in 1990 while playing in the Big West Conference.
When you buy the UNLV program, you’re not just buying a team. You’re buying an institution. An insititution that has produced such narratives, like Tarkanian’s agent, who was mysteriously found dead while the coach was being recruited by the Los Angeles Lakers; and who could forget the program that hired Chris Beard for a record-breaking 19 days before he left the program high and dry and chose Texas Tech instead (reminder: what happened next).
OK, those aren’t great reasons. But while we watch the vultures of private equity and venture capital circle college athletics, maybe the hope for One Good Rich Guy can really be true. Pastner noted that, at least according to an article he read from The Athletic, you need $10-12 million to make the NCAA Tournament.
So, does anyone want to pitch in?
