Last week, the NCAA and the major athletic conferences reached a settlement in a class action suit filed by former players. The “amateur” era is officially over for the revenue sports but the future is all but clear.
NPR (“What we know and what we don’t about a historic settlement to pay college athletes“):
A sea change is coming to college athletics.
On Thursday, the NCAA and the so-called “power five” athletic conferences reached a groundbreaking agreement that seeks to end the century-old tradition of amateurism in college sports by allowing athletes to receive pay directly from the colleges and universities they play for.
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The proposed settlement has two parts. First, it would distribute some $2.75 billion to athletes who competed before July 2021, when the NCAA first allowed athletes to earn money from their name, image and likeness rights. Second, it would create a future revenue-sharing model in which schools could each distribute around $20 million per year directly to athletes.
But far from closing the door on the years of debates and litigation over the question of payments to student athletes, the proposed settlement raises a slate of even more questions: Which athletes will be compensated? How much will they make? Will women be paid equally to men? Will schools that are unable to pay athletes be able to keep up with bigger, richer schools?
ESPN’s Pete Thamel (“NCAA settlement a historic day for paying college athletes. What comes next?“):
The more than $2.7 billion of back damages and a new revenue-sharing model that come with the settlement of House v. NCAA and two related antitrust cases mark a distinct pivot for college sports. Amateurism, long a fragile and fleeting notion in the billion-dollar college sports industry, is officially dead. College sports, long a fractured group of fiefdoms, came together in an attempt to save themselves, with the jarring sight of five power leagues and the NCAA together on a press release.
This is a necessary and important week for the business of college athletics, yet not a celebratory one for its leaders. It’s a promising day for future athletes who are being compensated with revenue sharing expected to be more than $20 million per school.
And it’s also a confusing week for the coaches and leaders on campus, who have no idea what the specific rules of engagement are moving forward.
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The peace that NCAA and conference leaders hope they are purchasing with their billions in settlement money is seemingly tentative. While the settlement will make it harder for plaintiff attorneys to wield the threat of billion-dollar damages in the future, athletes will have options to keep challenging any restriction or cap on how they are paid. As the final yes votes were being collected this week, a separate federal case in Colorado — Fontenot v. NCAA — continued to march forward on its own track, leaving open the possibility that NCAA lawyers won’t have time to catch their breath before fighting the next battle on capping athlete compensation.
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We’ve outlined the lingering questions that will need to be hammered out. Most of the decisions to this point have been guided by the NCAA, lawyers and commissioners, and there will be a point when the actual participants in the weeds of the sports — the athletic directors and coaches — have a voice in the process. Or at least they hope to.
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Without help from Congress, it will remain a bumpy road for the NCAA to enforce the kinds of rules it thinks are necessary to restore stability to college sports.
How does Title IX factor into the financial calculus? That looms as the biggest campus worry. How will rosters be constructed? Football coaches who have 130 players on their team — 85 scholarships and 45 walk-ons — are wondering if they need to cut a third of the roster with the expected inclusion of roster caps.
Pete Nakos, On3 (“‘New baseline compensation:’ Why revenue sharing makes NIL collectives, sponsorships imperative for competitive advantage“):
The top-funded collectives are spending between $13 to $20 million annually on football rosters at the moment. In basketball, the highest spending programs are pushing $5 million. Despite the NCAA trying to minimize the role of collectives in college sports, multiple sources and stakeholders tell On3 that the revenue-sharing cap will only necessitate organizations to strike side NIL deals to provide a competitive advantage.
“That cap is a very important piece because as we know the competitive nature of the collegiate athletics landscape, particularly in the Power Four, it’s going to necessitate additional dollars in order to recruit and retain the best athletes,” said Andrew Donovan, the President of Altius Sports Partners, which advises double-digit power conference athletic departments.
“If we’ve learned anything over the past three years, it is that schools are incredibly competitive. They’re going to do everything they can and their supporters are going to do everything they can to try to gain an advantage. And so, I think to expect that collectives are going to go away entirely would be a bit of a fool’s errand.”
Recent courtroom losses have rendered the NCAA’s transfer portal and NIL policies useless. As part of the settlement agreement, the NCAA is hoping to establish a new enforcement entity with court backing to limit the role of collectives. Even if a settlement lays out that framework for the next enforcement arm of college sports, Congress will need to step in. State laws will continue to supersede the settlement without lawmakers’ help.
Talks of a college football Super League have ramped up in recent months. The Big Ten and SEC recently formed a joint advisory group. Plenty of questions remain about what the sport will look like moving forward.
For example, if every Power Four quarterback receives $500,000 annually through their school’s revenue, many believe collectives will be imperative to offering the extra $200,000 to win a recruitment.
Stewart Mandel, The Athletic (“Paying college athletes will usher in a new era of uncertainty. But here’s what won’t happen“):
Fans will not stop watching college football
It’s the doomsday scenario NCAA attorneys, expert witnesses and certain fans have been threatening for years: The public will lose interest in college sports if the athletes are ever compensated beyond their scholarships.
“If we go down the road of paying players substantial sums, all will be lost,” former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson testified during the 2014 O’Bannon v. NCAA trial. Citing misleading public opinion polls the NCAA invoked during the case, he predicted viewership would fall by 15 to 20 percent.
Well, we have nearly three years of data now that confirms this argument was complete bunk.
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People will keep watching college football because A) there is no greater loyalty in American sports than a person’s favorite college and B) fall Saturdays remain awesome.
The athletes’ academic experience will not be affected
The NCAA for years framed its arguments for preserving amateurism as a noble-minded attempt to protect its “student-athletes.”
“It is incredibly important that we … protect the amateurism of college sports and support rather than detract from the student-athlete’s educational experience,” former NCAA president Mark Emmert said in testimony before the Senate in 2020.
That would be well and good if it had actually been happening. If we completely ignored the decades-old practices of steering athletes to the easiest possible classes; “clustering” high percentages of athletes into easier majors; athletes spending far more than the supposed 20-hour-a-week limit on activities focused on their sport; embarrassing graduation rates; and, in certain cases, outright academic fraud.
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People will not stop complaining about the state of things
College football is the rare phenomenon that is somehow both extremely popular yet extremely frustrating to its consumers on all variety of matters.
While I’ve heard all manner of fans claim that all of this is ruining the game, Mandel is right: if anything, the sport is more popular than ever. While the constant churn of players owing to the combination of multiple transfer windows a year and open bidding for players on other team’s rosters has downsides, it also makes college football a year-round event. There’s always news and excitement.
There is talk of Congress intervening, with Ted Cruz and others indicating that they want to take action. Aside from carving out a Title IX exception for the big revenue sports, which will be vital to saving the so-called Olympic sports, I doubt we’ll see much on that front.
I expect and hope to see some sort of super league for college football. Not only would it make sense financially, but it would also solve many of the other ills in the college sports landscape.
As much focus as we’ve seen on court-ordered player empowerment—their ability to get paid and transfer schools and play immediately—the thing that has been most damaging has been the destruction of historic regional conferences as schools have scrambled to maximize their share of television revenue for football. While that’s fine for big-time football, where teams play five or six road games a year, all in the fall semester, it’s been a disaster for sports with longer schedules, especially those that cross semesters. While Rutgers football can fly from New Jersey to Los Angeles once every few seasons to play USC, it makes no sense for their women’s softball or men’s lacrosse teams to do the same.
In my ideal world, the most successful 32 or 48 football schools would form a new football-only league and we could then restore a more regional look for all the other sports. Even men’s basketball pales in comparison financially to football and the lion’s share of the revenue it does generate in through the NCAA tournament, which thrives on regional conferences. While it will never happen, a European football-style relegation and promotion system would be a lot of fun, giving schools who missed the super league cut hope of getting there one day.
It’s also worth noting that, while talk of “amateurism” and “student-athletes” was quite rightly met with derision long before recent developments with regard to the highest levels of college football and basketball, they remain apt for the overwhelming number of collegiate sports. Even at the Alabamas, USCs, and Ohio States of the world, those who participate in the other sports subsist on partial scholarships, small stipends, and are full and true participants in the student body. And, at schools outside maybe the top 50 or 60 football and basketball programs, it’s true even in those sports. With rare exception, players at Troy and Appalachian State will hang up their uniforms for the last time at graduation.
UPDATE: I also meant to mention that, loathe though the Powers That Be are to do it, the only solution I see to the woes caused by the Transfer Portal and NIL combo is for the players to officially become employees of the universities and/or the aforementioned super league, establish some sort of collective bargaining entity, and have contracts.
