The House settlement, a landmark agreement that allows universities to directly pay athletes, was approved by a California judge Friday night.
Within hours, at 9:58 p.m., San Diego State had announced the launch of the Student-Athlete Recruitment and Retention Fund that athletic director John David Wicker said “is a vital step in ensuring we continue to compete for championships while also aligning SDSU Athletics with the future of college sports.”
It was met with a mix of frustration and confusion from many athletic boosters.
Frustration, because of “donor fatigue” or as one fan put it bluntly on a chat board: “How many things do I have to contribute to?”
Confusion, because the SARRF sounds an awful lot like the MESA Foundation, the NIL collective that amassed close to $3 million this season for, well, student-athlete recruitment and retention of the men’s basketball team.
At some universities, outside collectives are already being folded into the athletic department, now that the House settlement shatters the last illusion of amateurism and permits up to $20.5 million per school per year in revenue sharing with players starting July 1. At SDSU, for the time being at least, the MESA Foundation and football’s Aztec Link will remain in place, and donations to them will accumulate Aztec Club “points” that determine ticketing priority.
“It’s a recognition by the university,” MESA founder Jeff Smith said, “that our dollars can do the exact same thing as their dollars through the athlete retention fund that doesn’t really have the ability to be up and running and be impactful just yet.
“If people make the mistake of believing that now that the school has the ability to participate in athlete compensation because of the House settlement, they no longer have to through MESA, then all the work that’s been done with the program for the last three years will be for naught and all the concerns we’ve had about losing players in the offseason will become reality.”
The athletic department’s response about which to is: All of the above.
SDSU needed to create an in-house donation mechanism to compensate athletes because most sports don’t have outside NIL collectives, and even football’s Aztec Link started later than MESA and has struggled to generate the kind of war chest needed to be competitive in the brave, new world of college athletics.
A FAQ section accompanying the announcement of SARRF offered this answer to whether MESA and Aztec Link will now go away:
“Not at all. Both collectives will continue their important work and complement the efforts of the new fund. Together, they ensure SDSU has a robust and multifaceted system for student-athletes.”
The SARRF allows donations to be designated for specific teams (but not specific athletes), so in theory the money from the SARRF and MESA ends up in the same place. There are subtle differences between them, though.
SARRF is istered by the Campanile Foundation, the university’s nonprofit fundraising organization. That typically means a percentage of any donations is siphoned off for overhead costs.
MESA, which also offers tax-deductible contributions, is an outside entity with only one full-time employee – president Caroline Ripley – and a few student interns. Smith and his wife, who in three years tirelessly grew MESA from nothing to raising enough money to help retain the bulk of last season’s roster in an era of unlimited player movement, serve as volunteers.
That allows MESA, Smith says, to distribute about 93% of donations to players. (SARRF’s FAQs do not disclose what percentage of the fund will be diverted to the Campanile Foundation or other istrative costs.)
Another difference: MESA’s meet-and-greet events with men’s basketball players aren’t subject to Title IX equity because it’s an outside organization that, unlike the university, does not receive federal funding.
MESA pays players in monthly installments in exchange for their participation in about a half-dozen community service events per year as well as social media posts. Because SDSU is opting in to the House settlement, any NIL compensation beyond school-distributed revenue sharing comes under the scrutiny of a new NIL clearinghouse that will prohibit individual deals above “market value.”
There’s a simple workaround, however. Because SDSU will not come close to distributing the allotted $20.5 million in revenue sharing (think more like $1 million or $2 million), MESA can simply transfer what it collects to the school, which forwards it to the athletes.
For the 2025-26 season, SDSU is not expected to provide revenue sharing with basketball players. All of their money will still come from MESA. And any NIL payments made before the House settlement was finalized aren’t subject to the clearinghouse’s scrutiny.
So why not put everything under one roof?
“At some point in the future, will there be a scenario where funds go to San Diego State’s athlete retention fund, or will they go to MESA and then to the athlete retention fund specific to basketball?” Smith said. “Those are definitely possibilities. But for right now, what we’ve built is working and what we’ve built can’t change.
“Once it’s very, very clear that’s the environment we’re playing in – and we are in regular conversations with the university – we’ll be more than prepared to do it. Because there’s so much unknown, for the time being MESA can’t change and the fan of Aztecs basketball can’t change. We need to continue as we are.”
One fear is losing a unique class of MESA donor that identifies more with the program and its players – “the city’s NBA team,” coach Brian Dutcher likes to say – than the university. Despite pleas from the athletic department to include football in the MESA Foundation, Smith resisted.
“There are people who are not just ers of the university and blindly write a check and hope the money goes to a good cause,” Smith said. “They’re individual sports fans and ers. That’s something that definitely came out through our efforts. We are always very focused on being singular with basketball. We didn’t want to confuse the audience and have multiple sports.
“If those fans who were less inclined to contribute to San Diego State now believe that San Diego State is involved and they potentially reverse course, it’s a terrible thing for the program.”
The other piece of messaging is to dispel more general misconceptions about the House settlement, which means schools merely have the option of paying their athletes up to $20.5 million per year. It also means, at the overwhelming majority of universities, they have to first find that funding.
“The biggest concern I have,” Smith said, “is that the audience doesn’t understand that this new, in-house version of being able to compensate athletes does not mean there is any new money. It’s quite the opposite. Opting into the House agreement takes a budget that is already challenged and makes it even more financially challenging.”
