College sports’ online matchmaking game used to be helping student-athletes and schools find each other directly.

But now, if you’re a hotshot athlete (or a parent of one) looking for a college, one of the first things you’re going to do is analyze the most current list of collectives you can find.

It’s a fairly new term in the sports lexicon. In case you’re not familiar, a collective is a group of supporters of a specific school’s athletic programs. They’ve got lots of money or influence, or both.

The group pools resources to attract the best athletes possible. By “resources,” we mean name, image and likeness opportunities, which translate into money for the players.

Since, by NCAA decree, the schools themselves are not supposed to have anything to do with NIL, it’s pretty much the wild west out there. Free enterprise, supply-and-demand, buyer beware … all that good stuff.

That empowers the — hopefully, well-advised — student-athlete to shop around for the best deal available. But maybe it’s not so good if we’re thinking in terms of structure, and an even playing field.

That’s true at the highest level … and it’s what set off Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher a few days ago. According to 2019 numbers, Texas had 650,216 millionaires (second to California in the U.S.) and Alabama just 94,259 (26th). This is an important consideration when Saban said Fisher’s Texas “A&M (team) bought every player” in its top-ranked 2022 recruiting class.

How will little ol’ ’Bama ever survive this treacherous new world?

(In case you were wondering, Hawaii checked in at 38th with 44,383 millionaires.)

As you might imagine, these lists of collectives include all of the big-name programs … some of them more than once. For example, one list has three separate collectives for Penn State.

Most of the collectives are affiliated with Power Five conference programs. But one list includes seven Group of Five schools (eight, if you count Central Florida, which leaves the American Athletic Conference for the Big 12 next year).

The University of Hawaii isn’t on any of the collective lists I could find online.

If you’re a UH fan, you can look at this in a couple of different ways:

1) Once again, Hawaii is a day late and a buck short in keeping up with the rest of the college sports world. Maybe it will make you feel better to know that no one else from the Big West or Mountain West is listed either, but that’s cold comfort at best.

2) Recently, the NCAA implied it plans to keep a closer eye on collectives by reminding them they still fall under the category of boosters, and to make sure what few NIL rules do exist aren’t being broken. That would include outright bidding wars to attract high school recruits or transfers. So — even though investigation and enforcement appear to be even more problematic than before the genie was let loose — is it better that your favorite school isn’t on a list of collectives?

No. 1 makes more sense to me, as long as the rules are followed. If UH fans love their athletes and teams as much as they claim, more need to step up as leaders and help provide the deserving student-athletes with more incentive to commit to and remain at UH.

There have been a few scattered efforts in the year since the NCAA changed its rules, such as the Bank of Hawaii’s deal with some volleyball and basketball players, correlating with its naming rights deal with SimpliFi Arena at the Stan Sheriff Center.

But what does it say about UH and the state when its most high-profile athlete with an existing NIL deal with a local company transferred to an in-conference rival? Central Pacific Bank might have a branch in San Jose someday, but it doesn’t now.

Whatever happened to that state sports commission from a few years ago? Did it ever do anything and does it even still exist? If I remember correctly, it was Lt. Gov. Shan Tsutsui’s baby.

This would be a perfect job for a sports commission, to serve as UH’s collective. All you guys and gals running for LG, want to separate yourself from the pack? Promise to rebuild that commission … Job One for it would be riding herd on getting Aloha Stadium done, pronto. And Job Two should be convincing whoever needs to be convinced that the national champion volleyball players here on student visas should be eligible for name, image, and likeness benefits, same as their American teammates.

Maybe there is a hui out there, some Hawaii version of the Illuminati enticing stud athletes with lucrative name, image and likeness deals to choose UH. But if so, it’s unnecessarily operating in the shadows, and it’s not doing a very good job.

After nearly a year since the game changed, UH has accomplished next to nil when it comes to NIL.