The NCAA proposes unlimited compensation for athletes

The NCAA’s plan for a series of reforms that include unspecified compensation for athletes could help address growing inequality in a system in which sports like football and men’s basketball generate billions in television and other revenue, yet schools share a tiny amount directly with the government. Athletes.

In a sharp break from his organization’s past, NCAA President Charlie Baker on Tuesday called for a series of changes that would pave the way for the top money-making schools to break away and form a division that more closely resembles professional sports and has the potential to enrich students.

Baker’s proposal, in a letter to the 362 Division I member schools, also called for reform of so-called name, image and licensing payments so female athletes can reap greater benefits, writing that comprehensive reform would help the NCAA seek shelter from antitrust lawsuits.

Baker’s plan, while far from an edict, serves as a directive to college presidents and athletic administrators who make up the NCAA governing boards that write the rules and submit them to member schools for approval, a process that requires nearly a year to approve even the most Picayune changes.

The National Labor Relations Board is hearing two cases in which athletes are asking to be classified as employees, and there are several cases making their way through the courts that accuse the NCAA of violating antitrust laws. A bill in the California Legislature would make revenue sharing with athletes mandatory.

Baker, the former Massachusetts governor who became head of college sports’ governing body in March, proposed that schools allocate educational trust funds of at least $30,000 annually to at least half of their athletes, but added that they would have to comply with Title IX laws, which stipulate that Equal opportunities between men and women.

“I think it’s historic that even today, the NCAA has never advocated paying unlimited amounts of money to players,” said Ramoji Huma, president of the College Athletic Players Association, which has fought for more than a decade for players’ rights. rights. “They’ve always said that doing that would destroy college sports. This is an acknowledgment that doing that is practical.”

In his letter, Baker framed his proposal as a new starting point for a debate that has confounded leaders of an organization with agendas as disparate as its budget lines. (For example, Ohio State reported revenue of $252 million last year, while its neighbor Ohio University competed for the same NCAA championship with revenue of just over $29 million.)

“Now the hard work begins,” University of Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich said.

Over the past decade, the NCAA has been forced to loosen its strict restrictions on amateurism. It removed restrictions on the amount of food that could be fed to athletes after University of Connecticut basketball player Shabazz Napier told reporters at the 2014 Final Four that he sometimes went to bed hungry. It had no choice but to allow education-related payments to athletes after the Supreme Court’s emphatic defeat in the Alston case, which challenged the NCAA’s limits on non-monetary compensation. The defeat also forced the NCAA to recuse itself from challenging state laws challenging its authority to prevent athletes from making money from endorsements. In the past few years since Alston, there have been 10 congressional hearings related to the future of college sports.

More recently, the $75 million buyout that Texas A&M is paying for fired football coach Jimbo Fisher has highlighted questions about why some of the money that goes to exorbitant salaries, bloated staffs and lavish facilities is not shared with players.

“I’ll take less money so the players get a share,” Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, who with incentives could earn nearly $11 million this season, said recently. “I hope other coaches use their voices to express the same.”

Baker’s proposal may not be classified as standard revenue sharing, but since it proposes no restrictions on how athletes can use the money in the trust fund, it may essentially be the same.

“Revenue sharing has implications,” Homa said. “If a school has complete discretion to pay players whatever they want, what does it matter? I haven’t seen any restrictions on where the revenue comes from. It could come from donors or TV revenue.

Some athletes are now earning six figures through endorsement deals. But since the rules came into effect in July 2021, allowing nothing payments in the wake of the Alston case, there have been few rules governing these deals — just that schools cannot be directly involved in purchasing them.

The result has been a chaotic and disorganized industry that, along with loosening transportation restrictions, has created an environment where athletes move from school to school based largely on where they will receive the most endorsement money. (It’s no coincidence that the three leading candidates for the Heisman Trophy are quarterbacks.)

The unintended consequence was that the vast majority of the money went to football and men’s basketball players. Baker proposes bringing NIL deals in-house, which would impose Title IX requirements on them.

College athletes weren’t the only ones on the move. So do college sports programs and schools canceling conferences, attracted by the riches of football television contracts. The Pac-12 Conference will be limited to two schools next year, Oregon State and Washington State, with the remaining West Coast schools joining the Big Ten and Atlantic Coast, leaving their athletes to make frequent cross-country trips to play conference games.

Baker’s proposal appears to open the door for schools to reconsider their place in the athletic hierarchy. Purdue, for example, has 608 athletes. Paying at least half of them $30,000 would require the school to allocate $9.1 million annually to go to education trust funds. But there may not be much to stop Michigan, for example, from paying twice what Purdue would pay all of its athletes. Michigan generated $95 million more in revenue last year than its Big Ten neighbor.

However, despite resource gaps, principals of smaller schools expressed reluctance not to reach the top level. “Subdivision is a go-to word,” Mountain West Conference commissioner Gloria Nevarez said at the Sports Business Journal conference on college sports in Las Vegas. “what does that mean?”

Baker wrote that his proposal “begins a long-overdue conversation among members that focuses on the differences that exist between schools, conferences and divisions and how to create more permissive and flexible rules across the NCAA.”