To give an idea of the befouled nature of big-time college sports, it is perhaps the only enterprise in America that has sought help from the beleaguered federal government to save the industry from itself. That is like asking to wash your car in the driveway of the neighbor whose home is on fire.
That preposterousness may begin to ease, starting today.
The NCAA and its litigious athletes together open a new chapter July 1. If it mostly works, the charred remains of the federal exchequer might be spared the embarrassing request to rescue people who are massively undeserving. If the plan, known as the House settlement, fails, the unregulated business chaos via private donors over the past four years will seem like sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. Failure would leave an opening to invite in the Trump administration to broker a solution. Begin your cringe now.
This long-awaited attempt to resolve multiple class-action violations of antitrust law by the NCAA and its member schools is considered by some to be the most consequential business development in the history of college sports. Formally abandoning amateurism (which has been unofficially dead for most of a century), many of the nation’s sports-playing universities have agreed to pay athletes directly about $2.8 billion, including back pay to eligible athletes dating from 2016. Like it or hate it, full professionalization of college sports is underway.
For 2025, the parties have agreed to a kind of salary cap of $20.5 million per school, a figure scheduled to increase annually, for the use of athletes’ names, images and likenesses (NIL), mostly from revenue-producing platforms such as TV broadcasts and social media. Private donations will still play a major role, but the money now goes through athletic departments.
Last year, University of Washington athletes unofficially were estimated to have received $9.4 million in NIL payments, said to be 24th in the nation The University of Texas led all schools with $22.3 million. Schools are not required to pay the cap amount, but the big-budget operations almost are compelled to do so, because any bashfulness will be excoriated by a fan base (stoked by ESPN, Fox Sports, the gambling industry and online harassers) for failure to do enough for sports. Another option is a complete opt-out, which is what the Ivy League schools have done. They will earn little TV revenue and pay no athlete. How 1880s of them.
Which players and teams get the money at each school is still a little nebulous, as are the decisions by campus budget-cutters contemplating abandonment of some non-revenue (Olympic) sports as well as staff reductions. One school that has disclosed information is Big Ten Conference powerhouse Michigan.
According to MLIVE.com, the athletics department is planning a 10 percent reduction in staff. In a letter to fans, alumni and supporters last week, AD Warde Manuel explained the cuts that will help reduce a projected $27 million budget deficit for the 2025-26 academic year. Additionally, the Wolverines have only six home football games instead of eight in 2024.
A current working model in the Big Ten and elsewhere uses a 75-15-5-5 ratio for divvying up money. Typically that means 75 percent to football, 15 percent to men’s basketball, five percent to women’s basketball and five percent to the remaining sports.
At UW, the athletics department has vowed to keep all 22 varsity sports and has announced no cutbacks. Joe Knight, hired eight months ago as executive director of the new Dawgs Unleashed, an internal marketing entity that manages some of the NIL operation, told the Seattle Times that UW’s size and proximity to Fortune 500 companies creates an opportunity rare in the cutthroat world of college sports.
“UW and Seattle, there’s nothing like it,” Knight said. “We’re so inextricably married. The corporations and the student body within Husky athletics, there’s such a unique opportunity for us to really do this in an effective way.
“I don’t think anyone is as well positioned as the Huskies in this new era.”
Since optimism is among the few things still free in college sports, it may as well be spilled around.
Another significant development emerging from the settlement is a new agency, the College Sports Commission, which has been deputized to enforce the rules and regulations. In response to a query from The Athletic about the commission, a joint letter from the power conferences offered a lofty aspiration: “The draft legislation represents a very encouraging step toward delivering the national clarity and accountability that college athletics desperately needs.”
Historically, the NCAA’s enforcement of its rules regarding recruiting violations and other misconduct often has been criticized variously as biased, incompetent and invisible. The new commission could be a little like Sheriff Andy of Mayberry actually putting bullets in the gun of a quaking Barney Fife.
A reason for optimism is the commission’s first CEO. Bryan Seeley is a former U.S. attorney who for the past 10 years has been a senior vice president with MLB. He’ll be in charge of enforcing the revenue-share cap, running the clearinghouse on NIL deals, and handing out punishments to rule violators.
Perhaps Seeley’s most noteworthy feat at MLB was leading the sign-stealing investigation in 2017 that put the Houston Astros in baseball’s graybar hotel for awhile. If you’re a Mariners fan who still enjoys booing the crap out of Jose Altuve every time he appears in Seattle, you may enjoy what could happen to the scofflaws, scoundrels, rogues and charlatans that populate big-time college sports. Presuming, of course, that none of them wear purple.
Right now, however, it’s just speculation. We have to wait a while before results manifest. Keep in mind that there was no genuine urge to reform the business model, no development of a conscience, only a desire to stop all the courtroom losses that finally doomed a corrupt system of phony amateurism that existed nowhere else in global sports. The new deal still has many unanswered questions, starting with Title IX, the federal law requiring schools to provide equal athletic opportunities for women. A lawsuit has already been filed.
As sports lawyer Cal Stein put it to The Athletic: “The House settlement started with the goal of the NCAA putting an end to the losses it has taken all over the country. But the great irony is that it’s just going to lead to more lawsuits.”
Maybe the century-long corruption and hypocrisy of the NCAA and its member universities is nearing an end. I’d sooner bet on a brain worm in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. starving to death.
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I don’t know, Art, that worm could well face a food desert in Kennedy’s cranium.
Art, aside from your astute analysis of the situation, I commend you for referencing Barney Fife and RFK Jr. in the same post. As for brainpower, I think I’d have to go with Barney.
So, Praise the Lord, they created equity BETWEEN the schools by creating even more INEQUITY between the sports, and in the process the protections afforded women’s sports via Title IX have been flushed down the toilet.
Just like pro sports, competitive pressures will force schools to spend to the current $20.5mm annual cap. And if (per UW example) they only spent $9mm last year, that extra $11mm will come from somewhere. What “somewhere?” Women’s and non-revenue sports. Just look at what WSU was forced to do to its track and field program.
And while Big10’s 75-15-5-5 working model might seem almost virtuous, with the new settlement and Title IX effectively expunged, that will change. Given men’s fb/bb sacred cow (revenue generating) status competitive pressures will force school’s new revenue split to be more like 85-15-0-0. Unless of course a school signs the next Caitlin Clark, in which case it will be 85-14-1-0. There’s nothing left to stop them.
When I started my career in finance, I used to naively espouse the virtues of capitalism, free enterprise etc. Now it’s just private equity bullshit (buy company, issue debt, take $ out of company, fire people, gut company). And other blatantly exploitive, vulgar forms of what is no longer free enterprise but gangsta “capitalism” if you will.
Unfortunately, colleges are now subject to the same market forces that have corrupted capitalism as the courts have deemed it so. They’ve been forced to participate in the newest form of gangsta capitalism via an unholy alliance with the revenue generating monsters at ESPN and FOX – simply as a matter of survival. Conferences collapsed, schools were abandoned and forced to seek shelter wherever they could – just look at the geographical absurdity of Stanford and Cal’s shotgun marriage with the ACC.
Colleges used to be a refuge offering the freedom for people to gain knowledge and form ideas free from the influence capitalism and the worst forms of behavior it often engenders. They were called “institutions of higher learning” for a reason.
And now they’re holding hands with the gangstas.
God help us.