OK, so major college athletes are going to basically be pros going forward, finally getting a share of the massive revenue that college sports (primarily football and men’s basketball) have generated for so many years.
What could possibly go wrong?
That depends. If you are an Olympic sport athlete, or you play at a mid-major or low-major school that doesn’t exactly reap those profits, or your sport is one that is suddenly on the chopping block thanks to the legally mandated commitments that were part of last week’s $2.85 billion settlement of the House v. NCAA lawsuit, there is no guarantee the gravy train will be stopping at your dorm.
The $2.85 billion, incidentally, is separate from the profit-sharing component. That’s the amount in damages that will go to past players, primarily football and men’s and women’s basketball players, over the next 10 years.
Current players will share a pool with a $20.5 million limit per university, over and above scholarships, with the amount increasing in future years. The breakdown is generally 75% of that amount to football players, 15% to men’s basketball players, 5% to women’s basketball players and 5% to other athletes. (Title IX challenges, anyone?)
And yes, there will almost certainly be fallout.
The major conferences, defendants in the lawsuit – including the reconstituted Pac-12, with holdovers Oregon State and Washington State joined by six teams in the summer of 2026 – are locked into the profit sharing agreement. Beyond that, individual institutions can either opt in or opt out and stay within the old rules, and you can just imagine where the competitive advantages will fall in that case.
“The schools that are not required to opt in have the benefit of waiting a year and seeing how this plays out, learning from mistakes that are made by those who’ve been required to do it from day one, and then (can) make a decision next year about whether or not they want to opt in,” said Victoria Jackson, an associate professor at Arizona State and sports historian.
So what happens if your program can’t afford to opt in and finds itself looking up at the programs who do?
This process has pretty much completed the de-fanging of the NCAA, which basically will run tournaments and disburse profits from the March Madness TV contract and little else. It has no role in the college football playoff, and what once was a robust enforcement mechanism that zealously pursued (and occasionally caught) entities who were offering under-the-table money now has little to do.
According to The Associated Press, 153 NCAA rules were eliminated to allow schools to provide direct benefits to athletes under the settlement.
The new system is going to be run by something called the College Sports Commission with assistance from Deloitte’s NIL GO clearinghouse, which will inspect individual name/image/likeness (NIL) deals of $600 or more to make sure they’re actually fair market value and not play-for-pay mechanisms.
Supposedly, the CSC has enforcement power; to enforce what, we don’t know. That seems to be the last vestige of the old college athletics mindset that someone, somewhere is getting an unfair advantage – and, indeed, it could lead to influential people attempting to bypass the system. Anyone for the old days of suitcases and FedEx envelopes full of cash?
That, Jackson said, reflects “what a stupid business this all is, and also a refusal to just admit that college football at the top of the pyramid is professional sports. Because they refuse to just outright professionalize college football, they’re dragging all of the (other) sports into this crappier, bad, far from optimized business model.
“… What are you when you’re a professional track and field athlete? You’re funding yourself through prize money and endorsement contracts and appearance fees if you’re among the top tier. And you don’t have to report your third-party NIL deals with USA Track and Field or the (U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee). This idea that everything is going to have to be run (through the clearinghouse) feels wrong, and the continuing of the policing of athletes that’s unnecessary.”
With the amount of change that has already taken place, her vision of spinning off football from college athletic departments makes sense: Keep the tradition and emotion and history remain but with a different business model and, potentially, additional revenue streams.
“Football shouldn’t be supporting those other things,” she said. “Or if football is, let’s make sure it’s the industry that’s doing it, not the football players’ deserved cut of that money.”
Jackson talked of a conversation with then-UCLA quarterback Chase Griffin at a House subcommittee hearing, and of how he said he was proud that his sport helped support, for example, the gymnastics team on campus.
“And I’m like, why are we expecting Chase Griffin to pay for this?” she said.
Another possible trend to come out of this settlement: Attrition, especially among the Olympic sports – a euphemism for what used to be called “non-revenue” sports, but accurate given the college system’s outsized importance to Olympic teams here and elsewhere. Grand Canyon eliminated men’s volleyball a few weeks ago, and other campuses might either eliminate whole teams or trim roster sizes.
Interestingly, Jackson said she was on a panel with NCAA president Charlie Baker a few weeks ago. He told her that after attending the NCAA men’s swimming and diving championships last spring and seeing the success of college athletes last summer in Paris, “We should have been marketing the NCAA national championships as a preview of the Olympic Games.”
Such irony. The NCAA is only decades behind the Olympic movement in scrapping amateurism.
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