Former Arkansas All-SEC QB Clint Stoerner slams Hogs A.D. Hunter Yurachek for NIL, state of Arkansas football program

In the land of "It Just Means More," the Southeastern Conference, it just means more fan angst when things are going awry.

We see you, Florida. 

But this is an Arkansas issue, too.

Whether his intent or not, Razorbacks Athletics Director Hunter Yurachek just doused the barbecue spit with lighter fluid.

Yuracheck spoke Monday at the Little Rock Touchdown Club, where he went in-depth on how collectives throughout college athletics have gerrymandered the spirt of Name, Image and Likeness opportunities into a de facto pay-for-play scheme funded by zealous boosters.

Yet, Yurakchek also urged those in attendance to help the Razorbacks keep pace until the system -- presumably at a time when the House vs. NCAA settlement is formalized and schools begin to distribute approximately $22 million, with a 4% annual increase, to its student-athletes.

The problem? Yuracheck admits the Hogs already lag behind.

A bigger problem? The Hogs have gone 13 years without double-digit wins in a season; Bobby Petrino, scorned son come home now as offensive coordinator, posted 21 combined wins in 2010-11.

Clint Stoerner, a former Hogs All-SEC quarterback beloved by their fan base (and Tennessee's), pointed to Yurachek and head coach Sam Pittman as root problems in Arkansas's NIL space.

"It's absolutely a Yurachek and Pittman problem," Stoerner posted on X, formerly Twitter. "The business decision, in the NIL world, is paying the right players.

"It is what it is. You don't have to like it, but you have to embrace it.

"Gonna be hard to get buy in at any level when you lead with how awful it is."

That was Stoerner's measured take Tuesday afternoon, some 24 hours after the following diatribe from Yurachek at the LR Touchdown Club:

"It has been terrible. It's been awful," Yurachek said of being an college athletics director in this current era. "NIL, the way it was intended, July 1, 2021, that if a student-athlete had a value to their name, image or likeness and there was a business product or service, one of these many businesses up here, that wanted to use a student-athlete to market their business product or service, they could receive compensation -- valid compensation to do that. And that's how this all started.

"And our student-athletes in our first year did an incredible job of going out and knocking on doors and beating the bushes and they generated almost two-and-a-half-million-dollars in what I will call was legitimate NIL agreements that they went out and got on their own."

Yurachek also blasted the collectives that have popped up in both for-profit and non-profit form on the periphery of the sport, in college towns from coast to coast, including the Arkansas Edge Collective that works on behalf of all Razorbacks sports.

"But in college athletics, we are our own worst enemy. And we find the loophole to every single rule in the rule-book, and we found a loophole where we created these things called collectives," Yurachek said.

"And collectives are donors pooling their resources together to pay student-athletes, collectives, under the auspices of doing work, charitable work whether that was Tweeting about a charitable organization or signing autographs or making public appearances. But the amounts of money that were getting paid were simply ridiculous and still are ridiculous and they just continue to be ridiculous.

"Because when businesses are making decisions, you make good business decisions, right? And if you're going to hire a student-athlete to market your business, you're going to pay them market value. Well, collectives aren't paying market value; they're just buying teams. And so that figure has grown to just a ridiculous number, and athletic directors are charged many times with going out and raising those dollars through various means."

Yurachek, signed to a long-term atop Arkansas athletics that pays him almost $2 million annually per various published reports and has been extended through at least 2027, admitted the Hogs are little more than mid-tier in the SEC's NIL space, where multiple sources told FootballScoop that programs such as Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss and Tennessee, among others, were set to spend in the range of $12 million or more on their football rosters this season for "NIL" salaries while a source with direct knowledge said the Hogs had hovered closer to $5-7 million.

"We've finally gotten our footing at the University of Arkansas in the NIL world, but we're not where we need to be. I will tell you, the upper echelon of the SEC in football is probably spending double of what we're spending on our football program right now in the NIL space. That's reality," he said.

"You can blame that on Sam Pittman, but it's not Sam Pittman's problem. It's his problem, but it's a money problem, right? Because if someone is spending double of what we're spending, they're going to have a corner on the market."

Yurachek then took a shot at Lane Kiffin's Ole Miss program by saying they all "hate seeing Ole Miss ranked No. 5" but pointed out that Ole Miss's top collective, per Yurachek, has approximately 5,000 members while Arkansas is operating with approximately 1,000 members.

Yurachek's comments come amidst a busy week in the NIL space just within the SEC footprint.

On Tuesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed an executive order that empowers all public institutions in the state of Georgia to facilitate and compensate student-athletes via NIL opportunities.

Additionally, Tennessee and athletics director Danny White, among the highest-paid ADs in all of collegiate athletics, announced a tiered hike to football ticket prices in 2025 and also an entertainment tax atop those prices that will be revenue directed specifically for athlete compensation.