Welcome to your Thursday FOIAball.
I hope you enjoyed your free Wednesday Deep Dive. Those are normally only for paid subscribers. Call it a little treat to start the summer.
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Today, we’ve got a bit of a two-parter for you, which I’m gonna weave together so seamlessly you won’t even notice. So why did I mention that? I dunno. I’ve found that I really enjoy writing these little soliloquies at the start of every newsletter. It’s my way of greeting each and every one of you, every single time you decide to spend time with me. Hello!
I hope you like them. Look at how much worse they can be! That’s how Chris Cillizza starts every newsletter. Appalling.
Rest assured, I will never do anything like that 🛌 .
Now onto the newsletter ✍️ .
The single spreadsheet entry that blows up the entire NIL myth
It’s brutal out there in job land. Everyone knows someone who’s been let go, laid off, downsized, RIFed, or DOGEd. (DOGEed? I’m not sure which stylization I hate more. They both suck.)
Aside from rising up and overthrowing the whole thing, rebuilding the global economy in a more equitable, honest, and charitable way, there’s little we can do.
(That said, paying for a publication that has no fear whatsoever about reporting on the billionaires running society is a pretty good way to start.)
With our leaders content to feign concern, we’re left with only our kind words and sympathies for those who’ve been rendered incomeless by market forces that work for like seventeen total people.
Being in media, I'm intimately familiar with the platitudes: this isn’t your fault, you’re great at this, you’ve got this, your company was stupid for letting you go.
I was wondering if the same thing happens to fired head coaches. Is a message of support and belief necessary when they’re still guaranteed millions? What do you say when it very clearly was their fault, when they’re very clearly not great at this, when maybe they don’t got this?
Last year gave me plenty of opportunity to find out, with major programs canning high-profile coaches left and right. Unfortunately, my requests for texts to their work phones were mostly rejected.
I forgot all about it. But one school just got back to me, responding to a FOIA I sent on Sept. 16, 2025.
But first, I need to talk about a request I sent the same school one day earlier, on Sept. 15. Which they also just finished answering.
If you’re relatively new here, back in November, I uncovered how UCLA and its NIL collective were steering big-time donors to a charity for at-risk youth. All so they could get a tax deduction. Great, wonderful stuff. The collective, Bruins for Life, took down its website after I reached out. Seven months later, it’s still down.
The records I used for that story were part of a rolling production. Occasionally, schools will give you responses in batches, providing some documents they’ve cleared while continuing to review others.
UCLA said they’d get the rest to me in early January. Instead, it arrived in May. I’m not sure the reason for the delay (I can speculate!), but the second batch was mostly the same stuff. Lots of emails where UCLA’s development team told donors that, to make a tax-deductible donation to the football program, they should send their money to the charity Shelter 37.
The day after I published my story, Shelter 37’s 2024 IRS Form 990 dropped. The charity, run by Bruins for Life co-founder and former UCLA player James Washington, brought in $838,000 in donations in 2023. The next year, it was $4,854,386. That’s a, let's just say, Nico Iamaleava-sized leap in revenue. A full $3,600,000 of it was specified for NIL.
Yesterday, speaking to Congress about the Protect College Sports Act, former Alabama head coach Nick Saban said what pretty much everyone knows, but that the people in power refuse to admit.
“I think name, image, and likeness has become pay for play,” Saban said, adding that he knew NIL collectives as an “organization that raises money basically from alumni to be able to pay players and disguise it as marketing opportunities.”
He’s right. But how do you prove it? Well, the College Sports Commission is struggling to process deals from these associated entities, saying they haven’t been given enough information.
Maybe they should hire me to do the legwork for them. Brian Seeley, gimme some of that seven-figure salary you're collecting. Because in the second batch of UCLA docs was a spreadsheet of donations to Shelter 37, covering $512,000 given by 12 individuals.
One of the entries was for $100,000. Appended to it was a note. It reads, "Payment Will be direct to Student-Athletes."
I mean, maybe that means something else. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
All that money, though, couldn’t stop head coach DeShaun Foster from getting dismissed three weeks into the 2025 season.
The school raised dang near four million dollars for him to be better at his job. And he blew it.
But guess what school just sent me copies of the condolence texts their head coach got after getting fired.
See, I told you I’d tie it all together.
I gotta say, those wouldn’t really make me feel much better. But then again, the more heartfelt messages would probably be on his personal phone.
Unfortunately, we can’t FOIA that.
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We’ll see you next week.
