I registered JaMorant.com sitting in the bleachers at Crestwood High School.
It was Ja’s high school senior year. I had gotten to the game late and was sitting by myself when he came down on a fast break. I don’t remember every detail of the play, but I remember exactly what caught my attention. On a fastbreak, Ja drifted right with his dribble just enough to move the defense where he wanted it, opened a passing lane that hadn’t been there and delivered what I thought was a pro-level pass.
It ended up being a turnover. The player he was passing to didn’t make the same read. He didn’t make the cut or the catch Ja was expecting. But I wasn’t watching the turnover. I was watching what 12 had just made the defense do.
I remember thinking, Shit. Phil wasn’t lying.
Phil Morant had been telling me about Ja’s IQ. So right there in the first half, I pulled out my phone and registered JaMorant.com. Later, I texted Ja and Tee and told them I had grabbed it. I didn’t know what Ja was going to become. Nobody did. I just knew I had seen enough to think there might be something there worth protecting.
Today, that moment makes me think about a completely different question: What would that kid be worth in college basketball right now?
Before the world saw it
Phil has always said the thing that separated Ja wasn’t just the athleticism. It was his basketball IQ. He told me he could see it when Ja was young, sometimes before he even saw it completely on the court. They would play NBA 2K and Phil would watch how Ja built his team, where he moved players and how he thought through the game. Ja was processing basketball differently.
Eventually, everybody else started seeing it too. The Chris Paul camp was one of the first times the basketball world really started paying attention. Then came the viral dunk at Murray State. SportsCenter picked it up. Social media took it from there. Then there was another highlight, and another. Pretty soon, people weren’t just watching the dunks anymore. They were watching Ja.
That’s when the story changed.
By the end of his sophomore season, Ja was averaging 24.5 points, 10 assists and 5.7 rebounds. He became the first NCAA player since assists became an official statistic to average at least 20 points and 10 assists in a season. NBA scouts were coming to Murray, Kentucky. National media followed. He put up a triple-double against Marquette in the NCAA Tournament.
Tee called everything happening around Ja a “Category 6.” That’s still probably the best description of it.
Now drop that Ja into 2026
This is where the thought experiment gets interesting. We use “NIL” as a catch-all now, but there are really two different buckets of money around a player like Ja. There is what the college basketball marketplace would be willing to put together to get or retain him. Then there is his actual commercial value to brands because of his name, image, likeness, audience and influence.
Sophomore Ja would have had enormous value in both. If that exact season happened today, every major basketball program with enough resources would know exactly who he was. They wouldn’t be evaluating potential anymore. They would be looking at a 6-foot-3 point guard averaging 24 and 10, generating national attention, producing viral highlights and projecting near the top of the NBA Draft.
So let’s put a number on it. Based on where the top of the college basketball market sits today, I think Ja’s basketball value alone could reasonably have reached $4 million to $6 million for a season.
Then comes the commercial side. Brands wouldn’t just be buying a good basketball player. They would be buying one of the fastest-growing stories in sports. Apparel, gaming, food and beverage, automotive, financial services and technology all would have made sense, along with appearances, social campaigns, local deals and national deals.
I think another $2 million to $4 million in legitimate commercial opportunity is defensible once Ja reached that Category 6 stage. Put it together and sophomore Ja Morant could have been sitting on $6 million to $10 million of annual economic value in today’s college sports market.
That number sounds crazy. Then again, so did what was happening around Ja.
Could Murray State have kept him?
This might be the most interesting part of the whole exercise. Murray State found and developed one of the most valuable players in college basketball. In today’s system, doing that might have made keeping him almost impossible.
Imagine Ja finishing that sophomore season today and entering the marketplace. Major programs could offer millions, national television every week, enormous audiences and commercial opportunities that a mid-major simply couldn’t match dollar for dollar. Would Ja Morant have ever finished his college career at Murray State in today’s economy? I don’t know, but somebody would have made him think about it. Could a Power 5 school made 12 think about staying for another year of college?
That’s one of the strange things about today’s system. The better a smaller program becomes at identifying and developing undervalued talent, the more valuable that talent becomes to everybody with a bigger checkbook. Murray State didn’t just have a great player. They had discovered an appreciating asset.
I wouldn’t have told Ja to take every check
This is the part where knowing Ja personally now and spending more time around athletes and their businesses changes how I look at the hypothetical. If everybody showed up with money, my advice wouldn’t have been to see how many checks we could collect. It would have been to figure out which ones mattered.
Take cash where cash makes sense. Look at royalties when the product has upside. Look at equity when the company makes sense. Own content when you can. Build something directly with the audience. Protect categories that could become exponentially more valuable once Ja reached the NBA. And sometimes, wait.
That’s difficult when somebody is putting a seven-figure check on the table. But Ja’s value wasn’t sitting still. Every SportsCenter appearance, every viral clip, every national television game and every step closer to the NBA was changing the price of the next conversation.
When an asset is appreciating that quickly, today’s biggest offer can become tomorrow’s bad deal.
The number isn’t really the point
We can debate whether Ja would have been worth $6 million, $8 million or $10 million. That’s part of the fun of looking backward through today’s economics. But I keep coming back to Crestwood.
There wasn’t a multimillion-dollar valuation that night. There weren’t national brands calling or millions of people watching clips. There wasn’t a SportsCenter camera in the gym. There was just a kid making a pass that became a turnover, and there was something inside that play that made me pull out my phone and protect one small piece of what might come next.
A few years later, everybody could see it.
That’s the lesson I take from the whole exercise. Recognizing value early and monetizing value early are two completely different things. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do when you see something before everybody else isn’t figure out how quickly you can sell it.
It’s figure out how much of it you can protect until the rest of the market catches up.
