Jason Gay’s conclusion is where I arrived over ten years ago.
The NCAA Wants to Pay College Athletes. It Doesn’t Really Have a Choice.
A new proposal outlines a radical future for college sports—but the courts are likely to get there first
Jason Gay
As soon as schools decided they had to pay head coaches $1 million a season, then $5 million a season, and now $10 million a season—with buyouts hitting $75 million, enough to buy an island or an archipelago—we were destined to land right here.
Ditto those multimillion-dollar sports megaplexes, with their state-of-art training facilities, and lavish locker rooms designed to make players sign on the dotted line.
The crazy money got too crazy to ignore. Everyone—not just the sports economists, who had been howling about it for ages—realized that big-time college football and basketball weren’t quaint amateur competitions, but effectively billion-dollar cartels, stuffed with TV cash.
Reality couldn’t be denied. Colleges and universities had created a full-blown market economy in which only one participant was denied full financial access:
The athlete.
Dec. 5, 2023. Write it down. It’s the day the NCAA stopped denying the obvious, and started calling a duck a duck. Quack!
On Tuesday the new(ish) NCAA boss Charlie Baker sent a letter to Division I member schools proposing a series of reforms to “enhance the financial opportunities available to all Division I athletes.” Under the proposed overhaul, Division I schools would be allowed to enter name, image, likeness (NIL) agreements with their own athletes, and they would have no limit on “any level of enhanced educational benefits they deem appropriate.”
More radically, Baker proposed a breakaway subdivision for schools with the resources to pay—all but paving the way for a conscious uncoupling between the college sports haves and have nots. He outlined an environment in which athletes in this subdivision would be required to be directly compensated at least $30,000 per year, through a trust.
Is the NCAA having a sudden epiphany?
Nah. They’re reading the room. College sports are under historic legal scrutiny. The Supreme Court laughed the NCAA’s amateurism claims out of the room in 2021. Pending decisions about granting athletes employee status (Johnson v. NCAA) and back pay for name, image likeness (House v. NCAA)—not to mention Dartmouth basketball’s ongoing effort to unionize—are likely to reshape the college sports landscape long before any widespread action can be taken on Baker’s initiative.
This isn’t the NCAA getting out in front. This is jumping on a train that’s already going 110 MPH down the track.
Kentucky’s bench celebrates during a game against Marshall. Photo: James Crisp/Associated Press
The NCAA wants protection, of course, in the form of antitrust exemption—this is where the Supreme Court, in particular Justice Brett Kavanaugh, argued that they are extremely vulnerable—but they’re not exactly getting a fast assist from legislators. The current Congress can’t agree on the day of the week. The idea that it will swiftly step in with some kind of comprehensive college sports reform and antitrust Kryptonite is a comical hope.
So where does it leave college sports? In a mess! Of course, it’s already a mess, with the chaos of the transfer portal and fenceless rodeo of name, image, likeness, to say nothing about the still-fuming Seminole football fans in Tallahassee. We now live in a world in which Ohio State’s starting quarterback has decided to jump back into the market, and booster “collectives” have weaponized NIL into a turbocharged bank account to land fresh talent. I wake up every day expecting to hear about a new collective, promising unicorns and invisible helicopters for promising linemen.
The NCAA blew it on NIL, Baker said it himself—“it was a big mistake by the NCAA not to do a framework around NIL when they had the opportunity to,” he said earlier this year. This latest proposal is an effort to get ahead and control the game on athlete compensation, rather than tempt another free-for-all.
And even if there’s buy in, it’s going to be crisis-level hard, trying to figure out how it’s all supposed to work—what to do about the vast majority of school sports that don’t generate revenue, rely on the revenue sports for sustenance, and be inclusive of women’s sports, which are obligated via Title IX to be treated equitably.
Baker’s recommendation for the $30,000 minimum stipends contains an edict that the amount is offered to “at least half” of all athletes playing sports for the school—and also comply with Title IX requirements. Can you imagine how fraught that process will be? Ditto NIL, which the NCAA seems to prefer to have schools manage. Good luck. Have you met a booster?
I haven’t even gotten to the argument that schools may be forced to roll back their exorbitant spending on coaching salaries and facilities to pay for some of this. (At least Jim Harbaugh said he would be cool with a pay cut.) Or the possibility that mammoth TV deals can’t be counted on as a money faucet, as legacy broadcast/cable shrinks and tech companies control the pipes. (I would rather hang on the outside of a rocket bound for Mars than be a DI athletic director right now.)
The most fascinating scenario in Baker’s letter is the new subdivision—a split between schools with the resources to go bonkers on college sports, and schools that want to bow out and have a cup of decaf. It sounds simple, in a way: A series of colleges that go back to being colleges, and then a professional college league of top-tier teams with their own rules. Television would do jumping jacks for such a rarefied (read: no scrubs) product. Maybe the NFL and the NBA, decades into the biggest free ride in the history of sports, could be talked into coming on board.
Of course it won’t be simple. Imagine being the college president telling alumni they are withdrawing from the college sports arms race and don’t want to play in the fancy professional league. Some alumni will be relieved, embracing a calming reset where sports are deprioritized. Other alumni will lose their minds. It’s going to be hard.
But as the NCAA’s failed battle against NIL showed, this is going to be hard isn’t a winning legal strategy, and the courts are almost surely going to get to it first.
It was bound to come to this. College sports set it into motion long ago. And now here we are.
Write to Jason Gay at
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