NCAA amateurism died Thursday after a long battle with hypocrisy.
It was more than a century old.
It will be remembered by decades of success, but also by the one-sided greed that defined its overdue demise.
Foreshadowed by repeated crushing legal losses and a too-late rush to modernize, the NCAA in an inevitable yet still stunning move now embraces the idea of its wealthiest member institutions paying players directly. This would be in addition to the name, image and likeness offerings players already can earn from third parties. The new revenue-sharing dollars could join the funnel of new money flowing to athletes as early as 2025.
This development was the most significant news of Thursday’s vote by the NCAA board of governors to settle multiple antitrust cases aimed at securing years of backpay for former college athletes who were blocked on benefitting financially from the college sports cash boom.
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The $2.7 billion settlement is about the past. The revenue-sharing model moving forward is about the future. Remember all of that breathless talk about the importance of amateurism? It’s over. Yet the damage done by clinging to it continues.
There still needs to be approval from a judge before the settlement is finalized. There still is a chance athletes and their lawyers could push for more in other lawsuits, as their courtroom winning streak in recent years suggests they should. There still will be much discussion about how the money should be divided among many ex-athletes.
But the more interesting discussion and debate will be related to the forward-looking news.
In short, schools like Mizzou could soon be allowed to set aside big chunks of revenue to wire directly into players’ bank accounts.
Does that make the athletes employees? Will a football player have to make as much as a golfer? What about women’s sports and Title IX?
All great questions. No answers. Welcome to modern college sports, where the cart is always a football field ahead of the horse.
There already has been and will continue to be much caterwauling about the death of college sports as we know it. The assumption that sports-loving and revenue-providing public will sour on the college sports scene lacks evidence, though. I hear a lot complaints about NIL, for example. I also see businesses flooding into the NIL space and great college sports TV ratings.
That talking point — the death of college sports — was always a favorite of the handsomely paid college sports leaders who spent years telling us to fear these trends. If you haven’t stopped adopting their talking points by now, consider it.
They stubbornly set the stage for all of this by refusing to read the room. Greed in the present stopped them from seeing the future.
“The settlement, though undesirable in many respects and promising only temporary stability, is necessary to avoid what would be the bankruptcy of college athletics,†Notre Dame president John Jenkins said in a statement that joined the chorus of those pleading for Congress to swoop in with antitrust protection.
Here’s a thought.
If the people in charge of running a business that has generated mountains of dollars annually can’t avoid bankruptcy because it can start giving a chunk of the revenue to the people most responsible for creating it, perhaps the people in charge should be better at their jobs.
The amateurism fetish encouraged athletes and the lawyers who love to represent them lately — the NCAA is the easiest target in the sports world right now — to get on the attack and stay there. Wins keep arriving.
A Power 5 school will in 2025 be able to use up to $21 million in revenue to share with athletes if Thursday’s settlement moves forward as initially presented. Prepare for skirmishes about if that’s enough, how it should be divided among teams and men and women. It will get ugly. It will be happening in real time, with an astonishing lack of clarity about the rules.
Part of me wishes there was an alternate universe where an NCAA president saw the swelling revenue in recent years and felt guilty about the short end of the stick players received. If athletes who graduated had been included in a fund made possible by staggering TV contracts for men’s basketball and football, would the animosity have reached a point where amateurism had to come crashing down entirely? Maybe. But maybe not. Most learn somewhere along the way that business partners who get greedy almost always have it flipped back in their direction if leverage changes sides. The players were partners all along. The most important ones.
So, why should players and their lawyers stop pushing? They finally have advantage, and little good will toward their opponent. I’m not convinced this settlement will stop anything. Not yet.
The massive commercialization of college sports became a gold mine for those who were allowed to partake. Stupid money was and continues to be spent. Elaborate stadium improvements. Overpaid coaching salaries. Skyrocketing of high-ranking athletics department salaries.
Players getting full-ride scholarships, room and board and all the meals they could eat was viewed favorably enough by the players (and the public) for a very long time.
But eventually the college sports boom reached the point of absurdity where amateurism went from looking right, to outdated, to morally and then legally wrong.
The NCAA missed the pivot point. By a lot. It could have controlled an overdue transition. Instead, this.
When Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 feared too many deaths and injuries would end college football, he created the NCAA to set rules that made the sport safer for players. He did not run or hide from the problem. He made progressive changes before more damage was done.
Unfortunately the more recent leaders in college sports decided to bury their heads in sand instead of getting out in front of a sea change.
Now, payback.
It’s getting easier to imagine a seismic split.
Colleges determined to chase relevance in sports will embrace athletes becoming some of their highest-paid employees, whether they are called employees or not.
Colleges that can’t or won’t play that game could be better off scaling back from the sports realm, or dropping sports entirely.
Maybe it was always destined to go this route, but what we will never be able to know is how things could be different, and a lot more stable, if more college sports leaders had, you know, led.