Provo • The first meeting of BYU’s 11-2 season wasn’t led by a player or a coach. It wasn’t even about football. Instead, the much-anticipated gathering was about money.

Early last January, the new leader of the Royal Blue Collective — the officially endorsed Name, Image and Likeness arm of BYU athletics — stood in front of the team ready to set a new tone, one that would linger in the back of some player’s minds for the rest of the year.

“I’m not here to pay your rent or bills. I’m not here for any of that,” Min Kim said, according to BYU defensive end Isaiah Bagnah. “You guys are entitled, greedy, asking me for money.”

Fellow defensive starter Crew Wakley confirmed the message and tone of the meeting.

Kim then announced there would be changes. Because BYU went 5-7 the year before, missing a bowl game for the first time since 2017, the collective was cutting everyone’s pay, Bagnah said, and starters would be slashed by more than 50%. Most walk-ons would get nothing. Contracts would be signed in the coming days, and if players wanted cash, they should agree to the new terms.

“I’m here to win. And you guys didn’t win last year,” Bagnah recalled Kim saying.

Kim, a BYU grad and the CEO of Nutricost, also lashed out at star wide receiver Chase Roberts for entering an individual NIL deal with Deseret First Credit Union, a competitor of Royal Blue donor Mountain America Credit Union, Wakley recalled.

“I’ve never been in a meeting like that,” he said.

Before there was magic in BYU’s 2024 season, there was malcontent. Some players were confused and angry, wondering what to do without the money they thought they were promised. It was a feeling that never fully dissipated for some players.

Collective leaders disputed some of the players' characterizations, but acknowledged changes to the pay structure were made after 2023.

“That was a time for the collective to sit down and reevaluate,” Royal Blue leader Lon Henderson said. “... But I will say that there was never anything [intended] to be malicious.”

Either way, 2024 started with some players scrambling and frustrated.

“You have to completely adjust your budget that you are promised,” Bagnah said. “He clearly stated he didn’t care about the players. He cared about winning.”

Collective changes

The month before that meeting, December of 2023, players began having problems with payments.

In a typical pay cycle, players would receive checks around the 15th of each month. But when the team dispersed from Provo at the end of the 2023 season, the payments didn’t hit their accounts, Bagnah said.

At first, some thought it was a simple clerical error. But as the calendar turned to late December, worry crept in. Rent payments were due. Leases were up. Many players went home for the holiday break and had to buy plane tickets back to Utah in time for winter conditioning.

They called collective leaders about the checks.

“It was not more money, it’s the money that you owed us. But it’s just been delayed so long,” Bagnah said. “He said, ‘I’m not buying your Christmas gifts.’ Guys were getting collection [debts] after that for buying plane tickets.”

The collective made the December payments only after the transfer portal window closed at the end of the month, Bagnah said. Some players speculated the delay was purposeful, to incentivize players to stay on the roster rather than leave and miss part of their NIL compensation.

It left a sour taste even before Kim showed up for the team’s first meeting of 2024.

Kim did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

After that January meeting, every player had individual meetings with the collective to discuss their renegotiated salary.

Previously, the team was broken into tiers. Top-tier players made $5,000 a month. The second tier was $2,000 a month. And the third was $500-to-$1,000 a month. A few players made over the $5,000 a month range, but not many.

“Over 80% of the defensive starters were cut,” Bagnah said. “There were starters down to $1,000. Shoot, some of them were on $800.”

The defensive end, who was in tier two, had his payment cut by about $700 a month.

Royal Blue Collective leaders disagreed that 80% of defensive starters saw pay reductions, but did say there were cuts.

“We’re all businessmen, and we have to manage it based on the money that’s coming in and the decisions you make and how you’re going to get better,” Henderson said.

Collective leaders said they were worried about what they called “salary creep” from 2023 to 2024. They said even if BYU had made a bowl game in 2023, the pay structure would have changed.

“Regardless of record, it was a learning process where, ‘Hey, there’s a few things that we need to tweak, so we can make sure that this can be something that’s sustainable,” Mark Comer, another Royal Blue leader, said.

Henderson believed some players came into 2024 with unrealistic expectations.

“If you’ve got 100-plus individuals that you’re navigating to meet their expectations” it is difficult, he said.

At the same time, Kim introduced a non-compete clause in the contract. So even if players wanted to make up for the lost money, there were limitations.

For Wakley, who wasn’t on scholarship, that hurt. Scholarship players also get a stipend each month, helping to alleviate some of the lost revenue. Wakley didn’t receive it because he was a walk-on.

“It’s kind of like you’re doing an ultimatum, you’re either with us or against us,” Wakley said. “I didn’t want to lose what I was getting from Royal Blue. But I couldn’t build my personal brand the way I wanted to [make more money] because it’s got to align with [Royal Blue]. It was frustrating. You had to be on your toes.”

Some players, including Bagnah, said they were fired from the collective for trying to broker NIL deals on their own. Royal Blue Collective leaders said it broke their non-compete.

Collective leaders described it as a “mutual cancelation clause” but the contract, which The Salt Lake Tribune obtained, calls it a non-compete.

“Either party could cancel the contract at any time,” Henderson said. “If [a player] got someone else that they wanted to get paid by and use their name, image and likeness for, then we were fine with that.”

When players expressed their discomfort, collective leaders promised salaries would be renegotiated after fall camp, Wakley said. The safety said he was told that starters' pay would be bumped up.

But Wakley and Bagnah said that never happened for them.

“You’re hearing promises from this person and that person,” Wakley said. He said he spoke with defensive coordinator Jay Hill and was told, “If you’re in the one- or two-deep, I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

“I was in the one-deep for most of the season and it never changed,” Wakley said.

Royal Blue leaders said they had discussions after both spring and fall camps about increasing certain players’ pay.

“That doesn’t mean that each athlete’s going to be really happy with the amount that we as a board voted on,” Comer said, noting that he felt most of the team was not upset.

‘$40,000 for doing nothing’

Both Bagnah and Wakley said the money wasn’t what bothered them them most.

“I didn’t come to BYU to get paid,” Wakley said.

Bagnah agreed, “It wasn’t about the money, it was about the lying to our faces. Respect.”

Wakley said some players were frustrated with the team’s pay structure because some starters were getting less than young recruits or backups.

“Scout team players were getting more than me,” Wakley said.

Inside the Royal Blue contract, there were individually tailored bonuses that were paid twice a year, Bagnah said, and that was how the collective funneled more money to certain players.

For some, that bonus was $6,000 twice a year. But, Bagnah said, that number could be up to $40,000 for a highly recruited freshman — even if they weren’t playing much.

“$40,000 just for [doing] nothing, and you have starters just scratching,” Bagnah said.

Wakley thought the reasoning made sense on some level. BYU needed to offer $40,000 bonuses to sign prized recruits. He also knew that if BYU didn’t pay them, they could easily enter the transfer portal and go to a different program that would.

But it came at the expense of certain starters.

“It’s all about what’s your availability elsewhere. That’s your bargaining power, that’s how much you’re getting paid,” Wakley said. “Can this kid leave us to get more money elsewhere? Some of those young recruits are in that situation versus the older guys. They’re not as worried about us.”

Henderson said the disparities in pay were inevitable.

“I would have to say, ‘Welcome to the NFL.’ I mean, if you’re going to come in and know that you’re [being] paid, there’s some variability to your pay by performance,” he said. “Performance being your NIL performance, what we see you as a value. You’re starting to come to a market value. I know there were different payments for a range of athletes.”

Bagnah said it was hard for some starters to stomach as BYU climbed the Big 12 standings. He felt BYU’s starters weren’t getting close to their Big 12 counterparts. He said he believed an average Big 12 starter is getting over $100,000.

It’s hard to know exactly how much players are being paid. But there are a number of reports and estimates. For a defensive lineman, like Bagnah, the average salary range nationally is between $250,000 and $600,000, according to a recent CBS Sports report. A safety, like Wakley, could make between $120,000 and $225,000. The lowest-paid position, like a wide receiver, should still make at least $75,000, according to the report.

“We weren’t even scratching the surface,” he said. “There’s other schools where second strings get paid more than our starters. Think about that for a second.”

Bagnah said he would have understood if BYU didn’t have the money to pay starters. But seeing younger players — and other athletes on campus — make more than him left him disillusioned. Henderson and Comer both said the 2024 budget overall was increased from 2023.

“They have money, trust me. Look at the basketball team. You’re telling me you can’t at least lower the budget of some of the freshmen, people who don’t have that big of a role? You can’t take some of that and just disperse it?” Bagnah said.

He pointed to the NFL-style model that many teams have started to follow in college. In the NFL, a starter would never make less than a member of the practice squad.

He said the pay structure, at times, was a point of contention on the team.

“How could it not?” he said. “When people found out how much others were making, it [creeps] in.”

Bagnah’s college football career has come to an end and he is now training for the NFL draft.

Wakley transferred to Purdue this offseason and insisted it wasn’t about the money.

“I can pay my rent to live in Provo,” he said.

Instead, he said, it was about respect. BYU wasn’t willing to put him on scholarship. The collective wasn’t going to invest in him like a Big 12 starter.

“It was like, I’ve earned like this, and if you guys aren’t willing to give it to me, then I just have too much respect for myself. And I know what I’m worth, what I deserve,” he said. “It isn’t even about the money.”

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