NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — Yes, Nate Oats is worried. No, the Alabama basketball coach isn’t the only one.
The hottest topic at conference meetings and within college athletic departments this month is how schools will handle the most significant element of a settlement in the House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuit: a revenue-sharing agreement that would allow schools to pay out roughly $20-23 million annually to their athletes starting in 2025. Football players are expected to get the biggest piece of the pie in nearly every athletic department, but the men’s basketball team is expected to come in second, and coaches are already wondering what their allocation will look like.
Since it seems like each school decides this for itself, one high-level league might have a clear advantage: the Big East, a conference that does not sponsor football.
“I don’t think any of us have the answer yet, but I think we feel good about our position,” Xavier coach Sean Miller said. The Athletics last week at Nike’s Peach Jam, the biggest basketball recruiting event of the year. The topic came up a lot there and at Big East coaches meetings. “In so many ways, it works to our advantage. The good thing about the Big East is that it’s one sport. I shouldn’t say one sport, but I think the importance of college basketball is paramount and after what’s just happened in the college sports landscape, it puts us in a very unique position.”
What if the SEC and Big Ten continue their football race and the basketball-focused Big East schools decide to donate the bulk of allowable revenue to their premier sport?
“That’s a problem,” Oats said, his eyes widening at the thought. “As long as it’s fair across all the big schools, it’s fine. But if one has $22 million and the other has $5 million, that’s a problem. We can’t compete. They haven’t thought it all through.”
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According to Florida coach Todd Golden, SEC basketball coaches have been excited about this nightmare scenario since last year.
“You have all these great basketball schools that don’t have football that they have to deal with,” Golden said, “so yeah, we’re definitely concerned about that.”
According to documents filed Friday detailing the settlement agreement, schools will be allowed to voluntarily split up to 22 percent of the power-conference school’s average annual revenue per season from media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. The total dollar amount won’t be official until all 2024-25 revenue is accounted for, and the number will likely increase each season as revenue grows, but the initial amount is expected to be between $20 million and $23 million per school in ’25-26. It’s unlikely any school would spend all that on just one sport, and it’s not a given that every school will have the cap to work with — each athletic department will have to find the money. Coaches have a lot of questions about exactly how that will work.
Under the back pay distribution formula unveiled Friday, somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the total compensation paid by the NCAA will go to former football and basketball athletes from the major conferences. The tug-of-war over how to distribute money from the NCAA Tournament (which will fund a large percentage of the organization’s payouts to former athletes) has basketball coaches arguing that they should get a bigger share of the money once schools start determining their future sport-by-sport revenue sharing below the cap.
“The plaintiffs are talking about giving 70 percent (of the back pay) to football, right?” Oats said, before the settlement details were formalized. “(John) Calipari actually made a good point when he talked to him last week: The only moneymaker the NCAA has is the men’s basketball tournament. So all that money that the NCAA pays out, 70 percent of it goes to former football players. So you’re going to take the money from the NCAA, where the only money they make is from the NCAA tournament, and give 70 percent of it to football players? What’s the point of that? And isn’t that just inviting another lawsuit from the basketball players?”
GO DEEPER
House v. NCAA settlement takes next step toward schools paying athletes
The big concern in college athletics is how to suddenly add $20-23 million in expenses and balance the checkbook. At the highest levels, especially in leagues like the SEC and Big Ten, finding the money to get that maximum payout won’t be the problem. But athletic departments will have to make major budget decisions, and in many cases, a large portion of the new pay-for-play budget will have to come through fundraising. One result could be an end to the facilities arms race. As one coach put it The Athletics he recently favored a larger NIL budget over a new arena. What most basketball coaches worry about is how much money they will have in their player acquisition budget.
And there will soon be even more mouths to feed, as the new revenue-sharing model comes with the elimination of scholarship caps and the imposition of roster limits by sport. Football will go from 85 to 105 allowable scholarships. Men’s basketball will go from 13 to 15, baseball from 11.7 to 34. There’s some industry belief that a clearer picture of what this will all look like will emerge by the end of the summer of 2025, but coaches are eager to know what their budgets will look like sooner rather than later, as negotiations with prospects who could impact the 2025-26 season have already begun.
“One of the questions is how are we going to articulate this circumstance to the 2025 recruits?” Golden said. “Are we going to operate strictly from the collective? Are we going to operate from the settlement? Anything that people are promising right now, I think, is a gamble.”
What won’t change: Donors will still foot the bill, and the leagues with the biggest revenues and wealthiest donors will still have an advantage. While some schools can self-manage their collectives, putting fundraising entirely under the control of athletic department staff, others can keep their collectives as separate entities to retain the flexibility to spend above the $20-23 million “cap.” Coordinating outside marketing deals for players, a task that once justified a collective’s above-board role before NCAA rules restricting collective activities were struck down, now falls primarily to a player’s agent.
And while Big East coaches enjoy not having to share their internal NIL pool with football, their media deals and athletic department revenues are far greater than those of the Big Ten or SEC.
“There’s more money to waste in those places,” Creighton coach Greg McDermott said. “But you either find a way to fund it or you die. That’s the reality. I just think there’s a lot of uncertainty. I’d love it if it got to the point where I didn’t have to raise so much NIL money. It would be nice to get back to coaching and get out of the fundraising business.”
When UConn coach Dan Hurley heard that coaches from other leagues were concerned about the Big East’s advantage, he grinned and said they should be more concerned that his league has won four of the last eight national titles — and his Huskies have gone back-to-back. A good reminder that the schools with the biggest budgets don’t always win in basketball.
“I think there’s fear about everything because the one thing we know is that three, six, nine months from now, nothing will be the same,” Hurley said. “But as college coaches, it’s our job to figure it out. That’s what you do in a game: When things start going crazy, figure it out.”
(Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
