We’re in the Home Stretch Toward a Tough New Reality for College Sports

For fans of college sports, these next 11 1/2  months mark the final march from the amateur sports model. Each day the system fans know receives another jolt as everyone tries to interpret what previous and future legal decisions will mean. And where that march will end remains unclear.

The House v. NCAA case that has unleashed revenue sharing and paying back past claims of NIL damages seems to have reached a settlement. But is it actually settled?

Not everyone is so sure—which only adds to the confusion.

College football and college sports went through a phase like this when television rights were deregulated roughly 45 years ago. That decision started a slow, decades-long march toward the current reality.

The accelerant for the current challenges occurred in 2020 during the pandemic. Players were quarantined to play a shortened season of football. They made sacrifices of time with family, time away from the rest of society. They lived in bubbles to play the games.

And why?

Because the schools needed that TV money, and needed them to play games to get that money.

And this generation of players and their parents are more aware of the money, where it comes from and where it goes. Many wondered why players had to make sacrifices for the school for essentially nothing, while head coaches made $17,000 or $20,000 or $23,000 a day.

The players started to question the system. The media started to question the system. And all the while the schools simply said they didn’t have the money to deal the players in.

Outspoken critics like Jay Bilas of ESPN commented on the unlimited staffs that football teams have, and the unlimited salaries schools seem to be paying coaches. At one point Bilas stated that in major college basketball there are more guys in coats and ties on team benches than guys in uniform.

So how will schools come up with $22 million in new annual fixed cost for revenue sharing? And that number comes from a settlement that will likely be challenged in court before the ink even dries. Also keep in mind player unions with collective bargaining are coming to college sports. Demands for health and disability benefits are coming. And why shouldn’t they?

If I’m a potential first-round pick who loses that pro career because I was putting my body on the line for dear old state, shouldn’t I be protected or insured and made whole?

So where will the money come from?

The market for coaches will have to adjust to a new reality. The money being paid to athletic directors and their staffs will need to be evaluated. There will have to be an assessment of the role of every employee. How many third down analysts does a football team really need? How many analytics people does basketball truly need? How many recruiting operations people do you really need?

For the last several years, coaches and athletic directors have been trying to spend their way to winning. The answer is always more money for more staff people, for more facilities, for recruiting and salaries.

Right now, the smart athletic directors are looking at their options. Difficult decisions and adjustments should already be happening.

The revenue sharing bomb, which is best described as new “labor costs,” is about to explode. Schools can’t move their teams to another state or country where labor costs are cheaper.

Surely some will opt for the failed conventional wisdom of cutting sports. But the real money isn’t there; it’s in the labor costs. At one Big Ten school, salaries make up 36% of the athletics budget and roughly $12 of every football ticket sold goes to pay the head coach’s salary. One university is paying a coordinator a salary that is larger than the operating budgets of 11 of their sports teams.

Reaching the new labor costs of $22 million in revenue sharing will have to come by walking back recent salary gains and bloated staff.

But that is only on a school-by-school basis.

Nationally, leaders in college sports should be building an equitable and sustainable college sports model. That model should have one aim: to create a system that can make a level playing field that allows teams to compete on even footing.

A fair system could stop the constant tumult of conference realignment that has Stanford and Cal in the Atlantic Coast Conference and 18 teams in a Big Ten Conference that stretches from the shadows of the Manhattan skyline to the sun and sand of Southern California.

Years ago, a generation of athletic directors and coaches wanted to see college sports thrive in every conference. A level playing field was not seen as a bad thing.

They wanted to have a fair chance to win, and a fair chance to be tested to see how they measured up. They relished the chance to compete. But that is not the mindset right now. The mindset is to amass as much money as you can and outspend everyone else to gain an advantage.

In the short term this may work. But in the years ahead the greater good is not served if the game is dominated by a handful of teams.

Since expanding past 10 teams in 1993, the Big Ten’s heyday was probably the first 10 years from 1993 through 2002. In that run eight (of 11) different teams won Big Ten titles. Three different Big Ten teams went undefeated, which had not happened since 1968 until Penn State (1994) completed the feat, followed by Michigan (1997) and Ohio State (2002) completed the feat.

There are no easy answers to the legal and fiscal challenges ahead of everyone in college sports. But that is why the tough questions seeking difficult answers must be asked now. The time for waiting on the courts or waiting on Congress to act has passed. Solutions and ideas must flow to Washington, not wait for them to come from Washington.

We’re in the home stretch toward a difficult new reality. The leadership of college sports across the country is on the clock. Given what we’ve seen so far that clock may be a ticking time bomb.

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