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≡ THE BIG PICTURE ≡
With the pending approval of the House vs. NCAA settlement that will pay college athletes $2.78 billion for retroactive damage payments dating back to 2016, and a new revenue-sharing model going forward, the pressure on non-revenue sports has coaches scrambling.
Politico.com reported last week that the American Baseball Coaches Association, American Volleyball Coaches Association, College Swimming & Diving Coaches Association of America, Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association, Intercollegiate Tennis Association, National Field Hockey Coaches Association, U.S. Track & Field And Cross Country Coaches Association and National Wrestling Coaches Association retained FGS Global – which has worked with the Big Ten Conference in the past – as a lobby arm to forge a solution through the U.S. Congress.
The NCAA and the other large conferences have been lobbying Congress for months, if not years, on the issue, but the pressure has increased dramatically.
The current push for college athletes to receive shares of the money generated from broadcasting contracts, ticket sales and sponsorships primarily impacts football, and to a lesser extent, men’s basketball. Very few other sports, or even individual teams, make money.
So, almost all of the money to be paid out is going to go to football and basketball players. Other sports will see the number of scholarships rise, but these teams will also face a hard cap, limiting the number of walk-ons who can be included.
Football, quite properly, will get the biggest cut. The average Football Bowl Subdivision team size for the 2022-23 academic year was 128 athletes and the new cap will be 105.
But Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports, who has been following this issue closely, wrote in October:
“In all, the 68 power conference schools are expected to eliminate at least 3,000 roster positions as administrators work to adhere to new roster limitations, reallocate resources from lower-tier to revenue-generating sports, and balance men and women opportunities to comply with the federal Title IX law. …
“The settlement is a groundbreaking and landmark agreement between the defendants (NCAA and power conferences) and the plaintiffs (those suing mostly over athlete-compensation restrictions). The deal features three main parts: (1) nearly $2.8 billion in backpay to former athletes distributed over a 10-year period; (2) a revenue-sharing concept permitting schools to share as much as $23 million annually with their athletes; and (3) the overhauled roster structure.”
Dellenger noted that parent groups are working to put together an objection to the roster limits, but the money being removed from college athletic departments to pay football players, basketball players and a few others is going to mean fewer sports at the NCAA level and others either eliminated or reduced to club status, without funding.
The current NCAA regulations require Football Subdivision Schools to participate in 16 sports to be in Division I, while all others must have 14 sports. With so much money to be paid for football, look for future reductions in these minimums, and a whole new series of lawsuits dealing with Title IX issues as women – who do not play football – will receive a tiny percentage of all of the money paid to college athletes.
The House vs. NCAA settlement is only one element of the disruption to the college sports ecosystem which is being more and more unsettled by the day.
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Is there a solution. We have one. In April, a TSX Lane One column suggested that “an NFL-style, 68-team, U-23 professional football league should pay the 68 universities which would host their teams at least $1.037 billion a year to make them whole for the revenue lost from football “
Check out the numbers; this is all about football, and if “college” football players really want to be professionals, let them be professionals. But of a professional team, not a university.
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