October 22, 2023

Sunday, October 22, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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First Aid Trucks Move Through Crossing to Gaza

The United Nations said the 20-truck convoy carried “life-saving supplies,” which the World Health Organization warned would “barely begin to address the escalating health needs” in Gaza.

A convoy of 20 trucks carrying aid moved through the Rafah border crossing into Gaza from Egypt on Saturday, according to the United Nations, after days of diplomatic wrangling to get food, water and medicine into the blockaded enclave where supplies were running out and hospitals were nearing collapse.

Aid officials welcomed the breakthrough but warned that the trucks, which the United Nations said were loaded with “lifesaving supplies,” carried barely enoughto start addressing the spiraling humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

“The people of Gaza need a commitment for much, much more — a continuous delivery of aid to Gaza at the scale that is needed,” the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said in a speech in Cairo.

Aid workers had expressed hopes that fuel, which Gaza’s struggling hospitals and water desalination plants need to generate power, would be allowed into the enclave. No fuel was transferred on Saturday, and the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Daniel Hagari, appeared to rule out the prospect, at least for the time being.

Several U.N. and European officials and diplomats familiar with talks on allowing aid into Gaza said Israel has insisted the aid should not strengthen Hamas, whose military wing killed more than 1,400 people and captured about 200 hostages in its Oct. 7 assault into Israel. Fuel is particularly contentious, as Israel worries it could be diverted to Hamas to be used for weapons or for its vehicles.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken urged “all parties” to keep the crossing open to enable the continued movement of aid and warned Hamas against trying to steal the material. “Hamas must not interfere with the provision of this lifesaving assistance,” he said in a statement. (New York Times).

Biden says Hamas attacks aimed to halt Israel-Saudi Arabia agreement [and more].

President Joe Biden said that Hamas’ attacks on Israel were intended in part to scuttle the potential normalization of the U.S. ally’s relations with Saudi Arabia.

“One of the reasons Hamas moved on Israel … they knew that I was about to sit down with the Saudis,” Biden said at a campaign event Friday night, according to pool reports. “Guess what? The Saudis wanted to recognize Israel,” the president added.

Less than a month ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also expressed optimism about the potential detente, telling Biden that a “historic peace” between the two countries seemed attainable.

The normalization push began under former President Donald Trump’s administration and was branded as the Abraham Accords.

But Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel and sustained retaliation from the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza have pushed the possibility of normalization between Israel and neighboring Arab countries farther from reach.

On Saturday, the first 20 trucks carrying about 3,000 tons of aid passed through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt on Saturday, bringing humanitarian assistance to Gazans, who have been rationing food and water and relying on dwindling medical supplies amid the barrage of Israeli airstrikes.

In his speech at a Washington, D.C., fundraiser, Biden emphasized his administration’s commitment to supporting the longevity of the Israeli state.

“I am convinced with every fiber of my being: If there were no Israel, there’s not a Jew safe in the world — not in the entire world ... including the United States,” Biden said.

Likening the conflict to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as he did in his Oval Office speech Thursday night, Biden underscored America’s role in providing aid to both allies, once more invoking former secretary of state Madeleine Albright in calling the U.S. the “essential nation.”

“Ukraine is an example of what tyrants do when no one stands in their way. And so, I was determined we had to respond,” Biden said. “And we did. And now, there is a lot of discussion about whether or not it’s worth it. The reason I was — made the speech I made last night was to make the case that it was essentially: If we don’t, no one else will.” (Politico).

A Detroit Synagogue President Was Fatally Stabbed Outside Her Home. Police Don't Have A Motive.

DETROIT (AP) — A Detroit synagogue president was found stabbed to death outside her home Saturday, police said. The motive wasn’t known.

Emergency medical personnel declared the woman, identified in a statement from Mayor Mike Duggan as Samantha Woll, dead at the scene, Cpl. Dan Donakowski said.

“While at the scene, police officers observed a trail of blood leading officers to the victim’s residence, which is where the crime is believed to have occurred,” Donakowski said.

Woll, 40, had led the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue since 2022 and was a former aide to Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin and campaign staffer for Attorney General Dana Nessel, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Police have not identified a possible motive and are investigating, the Free Press reported.

Police found Woll around 6:30 a.m. after someone called to alert them of a person lying on the ground unresponsive, the Free Press reported.

In a statement, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Woll’s death was heartbreaking.

“She was a source of light, a beacon in her community who worked hard to make Michigan a better place,” the governor said.

Michigan State Police were assigned to support the Detroit Police Department in the investigation, Whitmer said.

Nessel issued a statement on X, formerly Twitter, saying she was “shocked, saddened and horrified.”

“Sam was as kind a person as I’ve ever known,” Nessel said. “She was driven by her sincere love of her community, state and country. Sam truly used her faith and activism to create a better place for everyone.”

Slotkin also commented on X, saying she was “heartbroken at this news.”

Duggan issued a statement saying he was “devastated” to learn of Woll’s death.

“Sam’s loss has left a huge hole in the Detroit community,” the mayor said. “This entire city joins with her family and friends in mourning her tragic death.” (HuffPost).

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Hot Topic. Donors, Universities and Power.

Warning of ‘Grave’ Errors, Powerful Donors Push Universities on Hamas.

How much power should large donors at Universities have? That very important question has come to prominence since October 7th.

Ken Griffin of Citadel, a big donor to Harvard, demanded that the school issue a public statement in defense of Israel after Hamas’s attack last week.

Wall Street financiers are pressing elite schools to condemn criticism of Israel. On Sunday, the University of Pennsylvania issued a statement calling Hamas’s attack terrorism.

Kenneth Griffin has donated more than half a billion dollars to Harvard University, committing $300 million this year alone. Last Monday, with his alma mater convulsed after a coalition of student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s attack that had left more than 1,000 people dead, Mr. Griffin, who earned his billions on Wall Street, placed a call to the head of the university’s board.

In a private conversation with Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Mr. Griffin urged the university to come out forcefully in defense of Israel, he said in an interview.

It was a move that would have put Harvard firmly on the opposite side of 30 student groups who had said that “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible” for the mass killing and kidnapping of Israelis that took place, and complicate the university’s policies promoting free speech on campus.

Mr. Griffin said that he and Ms. Pritzker “were in passionate agreement,” during the call, and that he learned that a statement was in the works to address the wide outcry. Ms. Pritzker, through a Harvard representative, confirmed the call but declined to comment on the specifics.

It was not until Tuesday, three days after the student group’s letter was first posted, that Harvard addressed the matter directly. In the second of two statements on the conflict, the university condemned “the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas” as “abhorrent,” and said that the student groups didn’t speak for the institution.

Mr. Griffin wasn’t alone in demanding that an elite university denounce its students for criticizing Israel so soon after the Hamas attack. Though some complaints — like that from Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers — were made in public, the most intense demands have come behind the scenes from Wall Street financiers who make up a powerful block of donors to schools including the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Stanford University and Cornell University.

In conversations with The New York Times, more than a dozen donors said they felt they had a right and an obligation to weigh in. Some of the donors who discussed the matter asked not to be named, because they did not want to speak publicly on a rapidly evolving issue that has elicited death threats on both sides. Some, but not all, of these donors are Jewish, though they hold a range of religious beliefs and not all have a history of being active in pro-Israeli causes.

Years of fund-raising campaigns have led the schools to hew ever closer to this big-moneyed group: Harvard, whose endowment has swelled to nearly $51 billion, named its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after Mr. Griffin.

But the latest eruption of violence in Israel also ripped open a chasm between donors and the students and administrators that their largess helps fund. Mr. Griffin and others said administrators who had in recent years been swift to praise and participate in left-wing causes célèbres had been slow or silent in many instances to defend Israel.

Of course, if schools acquiesce too publicly to their donors, they risk again provoking the ire of their students and professors. Some institutions, like the University of Chicago, make it a point to remain neutral on political and social matters, though in recent years it has become more common for universities to speak out decisively on matters like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd.

The Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain said no school administrator would be made available for an interview. Mr. Swain said the school had been “in conversation with alumni and supporters,” describing them as “a vital part of our community.”

Among the donors, views on the appropriate way to respond also vary widely. The outspoken hedge-fund manager William Ackman, a Harvard alumnus and head of Pershing Square Capital Management, has called on executives to refuse to hire students who are members of groups that have signed statements singling out Israeli violence as the cause of the conflict, going further than any other major financier.

In a string of posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Mr. Ackman demanded that the university release a list of members of any student organizations who wrote the letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s attack, to ensure that he and others did not “inadvertently hire any of their members.”

ome high-profile donors said they felt Mr. Ackman wasn’t helping to turn the discourse in favor of Israel by calling for what would essentially be a blacklist of students who disagree with his views.

Mr. Summers, the former Harvard president, in a television interview, said Mr. Ackman was getting “a bit carried away.” “Now is not the time for demonizing students,” he said, describing the idea of a blacklist as “the stuff of Joe McCarthy,” referring to the Wisconsin senator who mounted a hunt for supposed communistsin the 1950s.

Neal Berger, president of investment firm Eagle’s View Capital Management, said he was conflicted about Mr. Ackman’s suggestion. “You have to consider whether the people signing these petitions are 18 years old and very impressionable and don’t know what they are talking about.”

Mr. Griffin was more categorical. He said the students who signed pro-Palestinian letters “would have been considered adults one hundred years ago,” and should be held responsible for their actions now. Asked if his hedge fund Citadel would hire the head of a student group that signed the Harvard letter, his answer was an unequivocal no. “Unforgivable,” he said.

“How do you end up in such a twisted place?” Mr. Griffin asked.

At the universities, students have pointed out that the longstanding blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt, among other factors, has led to a level of desperation in the tightly packed area, roughly the size of Philadelphia. But students’ responses, too, have varied — from expressions of sympathy for citizens on both sides of the divide to the suggestion that the Hamas attack was a justifiable form of resistance.

Some prominent Harvard alumni and donors known for speaking out on geopolitics, like the JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon and the Carlyle Group founder David M. Rubenstein, have declined to weigh in publicly on the university’s actions at all. Both declined to comment.

Several donors who have made multimillion-dollar contributions to Ivy League schools said they worried that speaking out publicly would harm colleges to which they had deep ties, and could crimp donations to university medical centers and other research arms that rely on deep-pocketed donors to conduct apolitical work.

It is notable that criticism has rained in from donors who are not ordinarily politically aligned. Mr. Griffin is a high-profile supporter of Republican causes while other outraged alumni, billionaire financiers Seth Klarman and Lloyd Blankfein, give largely to Democrats.

Mr. Klarman, whose name adorns buildings at Harvard, said he had confronted the school’s administration over the past week.

“Heads of all colleges and universities should step into the shoes of what it’s like to be in Israel right now,” he said.

Said Mr. Blankfein, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs: “Given the use of Harvard’s name by Hamas-supporting student groups, it was a grave mistake not to condemn the hate messages more quickly and absolutely.”

The universities have issued staggered responses to the students. New York University has removed from its website an Oct. 8. campuswide email from its president, Linda Mills, that described Hamas’s violence against Israel as a terrorist attack but did not specifically condemn it. Instead, N.Y.U. now displays an email from Ms. Mills from two days later that expresses the school’s “condemnation of the attack” on Israel by Hamas.

An N.Y.U. spokesman said that only the second missive remained public because it was considered an update — not a sequel — to the prior one.

At the Wharton School, the business institution at the University of Pennsylvania that has minted many a Wall Street billionaire, Marc Rowan, the chair of the school’s board and chief executive of Apollo Global Management, has called for the university’s president, Elizabeth Magill, and board of trustees chair to be fired. Mr. Rowan also asked fellow donors to cut off funds.

Mr. Rowan’s complaint is not limited to the past week. In a public letter several weeks ago, Mr. Rowan criticized Penn for hosting a Palestinian-focused literary festival that included what he called antisemitic speakers, and asked the university to condemn it. Speaking on television on Thursday, Mr. Rowan said that members of the Penn administration suggested he step down from the board.

Some people who have spoken with Mr. Rowan have urged him to tamp down his criticism, worried that Penn could be resistant to reacting directly to demands from wealthy donors.

On Friday night, Vahan H. Gureghian, a Penn trustee who was appointed by the state’s General Assembly, said he would resign in protest. On Sunday, for the first time, Ms. Magill sent a university message referring to Hamas’s violence as a “terrorist attack.” She added, “While we did communicate, we should have moved faster to share our position strongly and more broadly with the Penn community.”

Jay Clayton, a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman who is also chairman of Apollo’s board, said he was “evaluating his relationship with Penn,” where he teaches at Wharton as an adjunct professor.

Mr. Clayton said he was put off that his alma mater was willing to host speakers who criticize Israel in polemic terms yet was slow as an institution to forthrightly denounce the attack on the nation. “I think most people agree and aren’t saying that.” (New York Times)

How Rich Donors and Loose Rules Are Transforming College Sports.

A shift that allows booster groups to employ student-athletes has upended the economics of college football and other sports while giving many donors a tax break.

The key to recruiting top college football players these days is not just a lavish training facility or a storied coach. It is ensuring the chance for them to hook up with a new type of operation that can pay them eye-popping sums, collected from wealthy boosters who can often write off the donations, for taking on a bit of outside work.

The rapid rise of big-dollar payments to student-athletes from so-called donor collectives has emerged as one of the biggest issues in college sports, transforming how players are recruited and encouraging a form of free agency for those looking to transfer. And because many of the groups are set up as charities or with charitable arms that make donations tax-deductible, they are drawing scrutiny from the Internal Revenue Service.

The shift stems from a decision forced on the N.C.A.A. two years ago to allow payments to student-athletes. The system that has grown out of that change is reshaping college football and other major sports by unexpectedly empowering collectives, little-regulated groups that raise money from alumni and other die-hard fans and channel the proceeds to players, ostensibly for charitable work, social media posts or other small tasks.

While in theory they operate independently of athletic programs, collectives have become deeply embedded in the economics of college sports, offering vast supplements to the scholarships that schools provide.

One player at Michigan State University now makes $750,000 a year, according to the group that pays him. At Ohio State University, some players not only get a paycheck — they get a free car lease to boot, courtesy of a donor collective.

“It’s a sweet car,” Rick Ricart, a car dealer and booster for Ohio State, said as he filmed himself giving a wide receiver a Dodge Challenger. “We’re looking for some sweet plays on the field.”

The upheaval has its roots in a Supreme Court decisionand a handful of state laws that made it illegal in 2021 for the N.C.A.A. to continue its longstanding prohibition on athletes making money from endorsements. In dropping the ban, the N.C.A.A. assumed the result would be a way for star athletes to get endorsement deals, a cut of jersey sales or money for acting as social media influencers — also known as “name, image, likeness” arrangements, or N.I.L.

Instead, a very different model sprang up in parallel, one in which the collectives have effectively hijacked the N.I.L. system to circumvent the N.C.A.A.’s still-in-force ban on paying players to play by finding ways to get more money to more athletes.

The collective system is “a pay-for-play scheme disguised as N.I.L.,” Tony Petitti, the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, said at a Senate hearing this week. “We are concerned that management of college athletics is shifting away from the universities to collectives.”

The New York Times identified more than 120 collectives, including at least one for every school in each of the five major college football conferences. The average starter at a big-time football program now takes in about $103,000 a year, according to Opendorse, a company that processes payments to the players for the collectives. This year, Opendorse said it expects to process over $100 million in payments for athletes, with about 80 percent coming through collectives.

In tandem with the loosening of transfer restrictions, which no longer require athletes to automatically sit out a year if they change schools, the scale of the available payments has become a critical factor as coaches seek to retain their best players and poach talent from rival schools.

“It’s the most important thing in college football,” said Kyle Whittingham, the head coach at the University of Utah. This month, Utah’s Crimson Collective announced that every scholarship football player will be able to drive a new $61,000 Dodge truck at no cost.

“It’s the most important thing in recruiting, which is the most important thing to your program,” Mr. Whittingham said.

After an abysmal offensive performance last season, the Iowa Hawkeyes wanted to lure Cade McNamara, a quarterback who had helped Michigan reach the College Football Playoff in 2021 but had entered the transfer portal after losing the starting job last season. Mr. McNamara, who said money was an explicit part of his search for a new school, got an offer from a collective at the University of Iowa called the Swarm Collective.

“Once it was put into writing, that’s when I knew what I would be getting if I went to Iowa,” Mr. McNamara said.

He said yes.

The Swarm Collective said its charitable arm had, indeed, hired Mr. McNamara, who suffered a season-ending knee injury on Sept. 30, for a job delivering meals to seniors and visiting children in hospitals. It pays about $600 an hour. The group also has a for-profit arm, Swarm Inc., which pays him even more to make ads for the collective’s corporate supporters.

N.C.A.A. rules prohibit collectives from offering compensation as a recruitment tool. Despite Mr. McNamara’s assertion that the collective offered him a job before he transferred, the collective denied doing so.

An N.C.A.A. spokeswoman said that N.I.L. deals that are conditional on enrollment in a particular school would likely violate the organization’s rules, but declined to comment on a specific case.

The rapid rise of big-dollar payments from donor collectives is transforming how players are recruited, although N.C.A.A. rules prohibit the collectives from offering compensation as a recruitment tool.

Pride and a Tax Deduction

Aside from the occasional deal whose specifics become known, there is no public list of which athletes are being compensated and with how much. Most collectives do not disclose individual arrangements, even to their own players, a lack of transparency that makes it hard for athletes to gauge their worth on the open market.

“The world’s greatest game of liar’s poker,” said Chris Schoemann, the head of the Boulevard Collective, a for-profit group at Southern Methodist University. His group goes so far as to instruct its players not to ask each other about compensation.

“I don’t want you discussing or comparing notes with the guy who dresses in the locker next to you,” Mr. Schoemann said. “This could deteriorate a locker room instantly.”

While the collectives have no formal relationship with the schools whose programs they are supporting, the distinction is effectively meaningless to the boosters who fund them.

This summer, Penn State’s collective, called Happy Valley United, held a $2,000-a-ticket fund-raiser at a yacht club on the New Jersey shore. It featured an open bar, dozens of items up for auction and the chance to mingle with both past stars and members of the current team, who had flown in that afternoon from State College, Pa.

One booster bid $20,000 for a dinner for 10 with former Penn State star LaVar Arrington, who was in attendance. Another paid $2,000 for a football autographed by Drew Allar, the team’s sophomore quarterback, who tossed the ball to the winning bidder after he signed it.

As the sun settled over the water, James Franklin, Penn State’s head coach, grabbed a microphone to deliver a message to the hundred or so people there: He needed their help against his main recruiting rivals, Ohio State, Michigan and Notre Dame.

“We’ve got to be able to offer a package similar to those other places so that money does not become a factor,” Mr. Franklin said.

The Penn State collective, which is not a tax-exempt charity, tells donors their gift can still be tax-deductible if they route their money through an affiliated charity called the BPS Foundation. It is one of more than 60 collectives that offer donors tax deductions — either because the collective itself has been approved for charitable status by the I.R.S., or because the collective partners with an outside charity.

“If it’s not a 501(c)(3), I’m not going to give money to it,” said Dick Stewart, who attended the Happy Valley United fund-raiser, referring to the I.R.S. designation for charities. Stewart, an estate planning lawyer, donated $10,000 to Happy Valley United in June from a foundation he runs that was created by a deceased client who was a Penn State graduate.

The N.C.A.A. has criticized collectives for favoring male athletes over female, favoring big schools over small ones, and for backing out of deals with players. But its leaders say they have few tools to crack down on them directly, because the collectives — unlike schools — have not voluntarily put themselves under the N.C.A.A.’s authority.

“We don’t have subpoena power,” said Tim Buckley, a spokesman for Charlie Baker, the president of the N.C.A.A.

Spreading the Wealth, Unequally

Just before several state laws allowing athletes to make money from endorsements were about to go into effect in July 2021, the N.C.A.A. abandoned a series of rules that would have given structure to the new system. It dropped the rules after a Justice Department memo and its emphatic Supreme Court defeat raised antitrust concerns.

What remained was only an N.C.A.A. requirement that payments could not be used as inducements to recruit athletes. For N.I.L. deals, the N.C.A.A. waived a longstanding bylaw that athletes be paid the “going rate” for any employment. The lack of any limits on what athletes could make — even for small amounts of work — created a loophole that boosters quickly exploited.

“I’ll just call my friends, and we’ll get a bunch of money and pay football players,” said Tom Dieters, a Michigan State alumnus living in Florida. He began hiring Spartan athletes — like the football player making $750,000 — to work for a charity he runs. Their job, such as it is, is to promote the charity through their social-media posts (the requirement is one post a month).

Mr. Dieters said his goal is to make sure players are happy. He conceded the posts from the players do not actually do much to help his charity, which is focused on estate planning.

“Who are their followers? Kids their age, right?” Mr. Dieters said. “That’s not exactly our target market.”

Soon, there was a Tom Dieters on every campus, and collectives had gone from a novelty to a necessity. Ryan Day, the Ohio State coach, told his boosters that they would need to raise $13 million a year to assemble a championship team. Kentucky’s football coach, Mark Stoops, told his boosters to step up after his team was thumped by top-ranked Georgia, noting that the Bulldogs “bought some pretty good players.”

This new arms race has been a windfall for players, who had long been denied any piece of college sports’ huge revenue stream.

“N.I.L. is the greatest wealth distribution in the history of the United States, next to Social Security and welfare,” said Jason Belzer, whose company runs collectives at more than 40 schools. “The majority of it is going to young African American males and females from lower socioeconomic strata, and it’s coming from white, wealthy donors.”

Players who receive money from collectives said their paychecks helped relieve financial stresses that scholarships and other N.I.L. work did not. They could pay rent, fly their parents in for games, or send money home.

“I have 10 siblings, and I’m the oldest,” said Tony Bradford Jr., a senior defensive lineman at Texas Tech, where a charity collective called the Matador Club has raised $10 million and pays all football players at least $25,000.

Mr. Bradford said he has helped siblings pay for haircuts, field trips and meals. “I love it, because I’m able to help them out,” he said.

But the wealth has not been spread equally.

Because they are not operated by the schools, collectives ignore Title IX, a federal law that requires colleges to provide equal treatment to male and female athletes. At top schools, the average men’s basketball player with a collective contract is paid $37,000, and the average women’s player $9,000, according to Opendorse.

“You’ve got these collectives that are sitting just outside the door of the athletic department, distributing lots of money,” said Michael LeRoy, a University of Illinois professor who has studied collectives and found that one school paid 89 percent of its money to football and men’s basketball players. “Just inside the door, Title IX applies. But outside the door, it doesn’t apply. It’s a sham.”

The N.C.A.A. has done little to enforce one of the few rules that do apply to collectives: the ban on using payments to induce recruits. The only program that has been punished is the University of Miami women’s basketball program, where a booster posted evidence of his own efforts to woo two transfer students, which were facilitated by the head coach.

Earlier this month, the N.C.A.A. also proposed returning to some of the rules it had considered — and backed off — in 2021. They include a registry for agents and financial advisers and a requirement that students report to their schools any contract over $600. Standardized contracts were also proposed.

If approved, the new measures would go into effect next August.

The N.C.A.A. has lobbied a divided Congress to intervene with federal legislation, so far to no avail.

Belated Regulation

The rise of collectives was also enabled by another hands-off regulator: the I.R.S.

It granted tax-exempt status to more than 40 of them, after the collectives said they would pay players in return for doing charity work, such as promoting a cause on social media, visiting children in hospitals or volunteering at camps.

Many collectives were boasting publicly that their real goal was to pay players, attract recruits and help their teams win. In some cases, I.R.S.-approved charities also seemed intertwined with for-profit collectives, working together to pay the same players.

Charity experts were bewildered. The law requires charities to be independent entities focused on the public good.

“It’s not a piggy bank to bring more athletes to your school,” said Philip Hackney, who studies nonprofit law at the University of Pittsburgh.

The BPS Foundation, for instance, takes in tax-deductible donations, and then puts them at the disposal of for-profit collectives at Penn State and 24 other schools.

“You can say, ‘I want to make a $1,000 donation to support the women’s basketball team at U.N.L.V.,’” said Rob Sine, a partner at Blueprint Sports, which operates those collectives. He said the foundation would then turn to the for-profit side of the collective and ask them, “How do you want to use it?” The collective would then choose players to do charity work, and the foundation would pay them, he said.

Asked for more details about the BPS Foundation, Mr. Sine said it was run by others, and he could not speak for them.

The Times later found Nevada state records from June showing that the foundation’s president was Mr. Sine himself. A spokeswoman for him said that Mr. Sine had left that job, but declined to say when.

In some cases, collectives seemed to underplay their ambitions when they applied to the I.R.S. for tax-exempt status. THE Foundation — the Ohio State collective that gave auto leases to players — said in its application that it expected to take in $50,000 or less per year for its first three years.

That qualified the group for a faster, less-stringent approval process, meant for small charities.

But it contrasted with the message from one of the group’s co-leaders, Brian Schottenstein, who said in a radio interview days before the application was filed that “my goal is to have this be the largest N.I.L. charitable fund in the country.” At the time, a collective at the University of Texas was already promising to pay players $50,000 apiece.

“I had somebody else do the application,” Mr. Schottenstein said, when The Times asked about the discrepancy. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

In June, the I.R.S.’s chief counsel issued a memo that agreed — belatedly — with critics of these new groups. “Many organizations that develop paid N.I.L. opportunities for student-athletes are not tax exempt,” the memo said, because their top goal is to help the athletes, not the public.

That led to changes at a few collectives.

At the University of Michigan, a new collective agreed to a major shift to gain I.R.S. approval. Instead of giving 70 percent of its revenue to athletes, as planned, it will now give them 30 percent and use the rest for more direct charitable work.

As a result, the goal of paying each Michigan football player $40,000 for charitable work has been downsized to about half that, said Andy Johnson, a co-founder of the group, Hail! Impact.

At Baylor University, collective payments had been handled by an existing economic-development charity, Startup Waco. Jon Passavant, the organization’s chief executive, said that it had never made sense to try to marry charity work with donors’ demand for high player salaries.

“How is the public benefiting from student athletes making lots of money?” Mr. Passavant said. He said he had often found himself turning down huge donations, because he could not pay players what the donors wanted.

“I said, ‘We can’t do it,’” Mr. Passavant said. “And they would say, ‘This is ridiculous. We’re not getting the people we need’” for the Baylor football team.

After the I.R.S. memo, Mr. Passavant’s group is moving its N.I.L. work into a new for-profit subsidiary, where donations would not be tax-deductible.

But at most other charitable collectives, nothing has changed. Most said they would wait for the I.R.S. to give them specific instructions, a process that could take years.

The I.R.S. declined to comment on any specific collective, citing taxpayer-privacy laws, but said it was “carefully considering how to proceed on this important issue.”

Still, after an initial rush of donations, many collective leaders said they were already worried that donors would stop contributing, especially if they cannot claim tax deductions.

Seeking a long-term solution, some collectives have formed an association to lobby for a share of the revenue that schools receive from TV broadcasts. Some collectives have also turned to selling T-shirts, beers, vodkas, shampoos, even linebacker-themed frozen pizzas.

Last year, a collective at the University of Florida promised a high-school quarterback $13.85 million, then canceled the contract and shut down. This month, another Michigan State University collective called Spartan Dawgs 4 Life said it had “reduced” contracts after running short of funds.

Mr. Dieters, who had gleefully jumped into the collective business in 2021, found himself fielding calls from that other collective’s players. He said he could not pay them all. (The Athlete by David A. Fahrenthold and Billy Witz, a longtime sportswriter. With now covers the business of college sport. Fahrenthold is an investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades, and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.)

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Billie Jean King always keeps us informed.

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One summary comment on the GOP House today. I hope it will stay with you until Monday.

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At New York Botanical Gardens now. 2,466 pounds.

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