Schools Can Pay Their Athletes—and College Sports Will Never Be the Same

Wall Street Journal

2 days ago

College sports are dying, college sports are dead, college sports aren't about college anymore—it's Christmas in June for anyone feeling apocalyptic about the state of college sports, now that a settlement has been approved allowing schools to directly pay their athletes.
This isn't a salary, technically. This is compensation from schools to athletes for use of their 'name, image, likeness,' but it's not a measly NIL like a burly offensive lineman getting all the bratwurst he can eat. This is a real paycheck, directly from the college.
It's really happening—for Division I schools that have opted in. It's set to start July 1.
'A new beginning,' NCAA boss Charlie Baker called it.
Is it going to work? Will it cannonball Olympic and nonrevenue sports? How does it square with Title IX? Will it withstand legal challenges? Will it all fall apart?
I have no idea! Neither does anyone else! Hold on to your helmets, everyone. We're all jumping off the diving board together.
(I will now pause 90 seconds for you to climb the ladder and jump off the diving board with the rest of us.)
The settlement of this class action—House vs. NCAA, in which current and former athletes sought name, image and likeness opportunities and a share of athletic department revenue—had been in the works for a while.
On Friday, a federal judge signed off on the $2.6 billion settlement, which includes back pay to litigants but also creates a revenue-sharing system 'in which each Division I school will be able to distribute roughly $20 million a year to their athletes,' the Journal reported.
That's right. Colleges can chop up $20 million and split it among their jocks.
It will take some getting used to.
Naturally, the revenue sharing is already provoking some to bemoan the demise of 'amateurism' and the college sports landscape.
But schools have to be oblivious to not see who's to blame:
They are! College sports did this to itself.
The NCAA and its member schools set professionalization into motion with decades of arrogance and denial about the bountiful but warped economy they built around the games we love to watch.
When college sports started chasing every dollar as a market-driven business—and frankly, there's a case that college sports has always been a business—paying athletes became inevitable.
The bigger the money got, the harder the system was to defend. When college sports started indulging in the $10 million dollar coach, the billion-dollar television deal, the megabuck locker rooms and the assistant to the assistant strength coach making more than a surgeon, the hypocrisy was easy to see.
Everyone was making a buck, except the talent on the field.
It's why the Supreme Court more or less reacted to the NCAA's claims of amateur status with the following: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Public opinion shifted, too.
A decade ago, I'd write about proposals to pay athletes and I could hear the jeering a mile away. Boooooooo! That's not what college sports are about, man!
Eventually, those big-dollar media deals, private jets and Pop-Tart Bowls caught up with college sports. It was hard to argue there was anything amateurish about it anymore.
Now schools will have to figure it out for themselves. I mean that literally: schools and conferences are navigating a new wilderness in which they are permitted to directly compensate athletes—but without a precedent or a clear road map.
Yikes. We do know a few things:
The bulk of those $20 million allotments are expected to go to high-revenue sports like football and men's basketball—that's where the money's coming from, after all. Other beneficiaries may be growing sports like women's basketball and softball.
The settlement also attempts to inject some calm into the craziness around name, image and likeness. The revenue sharing payments will come from the schools, and third party NIL deals over $600 will be subject to review by 'NIL Go,' an oversight group overseen by Deloitte.
The idea here is to put outside NIL deals under a microscope—find out what player deals are legitimate arrangements, and what are booster largesses masquerading as NIL.
Good luck!
Enforcement will be a headache. So will the invariable league challenges. Defenders of the settlement maintain it shouldn't be entangled with Title IX protections against gender discrimination. Already there are parties who want to argue.
Also unknown is the impact on nonrevenue Olympic sports. Do schools start eliminating or rolling back certain sports because they're not big contributors to the bottom line?
Possible! We'll see.
The new setup isn't free of denial, either. While colleges are now entitled to pay athletes, the system still resists the idea that athletes are employees.
Good luck with that, too.
There will likely be challenges to the revenue sharing system—is the proportion of revenue (22 percent) given to athletes a fair amount, or should it be renegotiated? Is it tantamount to a salary cap?
It's hard to not see this heading in the direction of classifying athletes as employees, and eventually, collective bargaining.
If you're lying down on a couch right now with a bag of ice on your head, I understand. It's a lot. It's confusing.
Imagine being an athletic director in 2025. No job has changed more.
A new day is here. It might not be the apocalypse, but college sports will never be the same.
Write to Jason Gay at [e-mail]