NCAA proposes to eliminate compensation for athletes

An NCAA plan for a series of reforms, including unlimited compensation for athletes, could help address the growing inequality of a system in which sports like football and men’s basketball generate billions in television and other revenue, while schools earn a minuscule amount share directly with the athletes.

In a sharp break with 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 more like professional sports appears 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 that female athletes could reap greater benefits, and he wrote that the overhaul would help the NCAA help gain shelter from antitrust lawsuits.

Far from an edict, Baker’s plan serves as guidance for college presidents and athletics administrators who sit on the NCAA boards that draft rules and submit them to member schools for approval, a process that will take nearly a year to even to approve the rules. most picayune changes.

The National Labor Relations Board is hearing two cases in which athletes are asking to be classified as employees, and several cases are moving through the courts accusing the NCAA of violating antitrust laws. A bill in the California Legislature would mandate revenue sharing with athletes.

Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who became chairman of college sports’ governing body in March, proposed that schools set aside educational trust funds of at least $30,000 a year for at least half of their athletes, but added that they would do so must comply. with Title IX laws, which require equal opportunity for men and women.

“I think it’s historic that, to this day, the NCAA has never advocated unlimited amounts of money for players,” said Ramogi Huma, the president of the College Athletes Players Association, which has fought for the players for more than a decade. rights. “They always said this would ruin college sports. This is a recognition that this is practical.”

In his letter, Baker framed his proposal as a new starting point for a discussion that has confused organizational leaders with agendas as diverse as their budget lines. (Ohio State, for example, reported $252 million in revenue last year, while its neighbor, Ohio University, was competing for the same NCAA championships with just over $29 million in revenue.)

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

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

More recently, the $75 million buyout that Texas A&M is paying its fired football coach Jimbo Fisher has further underscored questions about why some of the money that goes toward exorbitant salaries, bloated staffs and lavish facilities doesn’t end up with the players shared.

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

Baker’s proposal may not be classified as a standard revenue distribution, but since he is not proposing any restrictions on how the athletes can use the money in the trust fund, it may be essentially the same.

“Revenue sharing is semantics,” Huma said. “If a school has complete freedom to pay players as much as they want, who cares? I saw no restrictions on the source of income. It could come from donors or TV revenue.”

Some athletes now earn six figures through endorsement deals. But since the rules came into effect in July 2021, allowing NIL payments in the wake of the Alston case, there have been few rules governing these deals – only that the schools could not be directly involved in purchasing them.

The result is a chaotic, unregulated industry that, combined with the loosening of transmission restrictions, has created an environment in which athletes hop from school to school based largely on where they will get the most endorsement money. (Not coincidentally, the top three candidates for the Heisman Trophy are transfer quarterbacks.)

An unintended consequence is that a large majority of the money has gone to football and men’s basketball players. Baker proposes bringing NIL deals in-house, which would trigger Title IX requirements.

College athletes aren’t the only ones on the move. That includes college athletic programs, with schools hosting conferences lured by the wealth 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, sending their athletes repeatedly across the country to play conference games.

Baker’s proposal seemed to open the door for schools to reconsider their place in the athletic hierarchy. For example, Purdue has 608 athletes. If the school paid at least half of them $30,000, it would have to set aside $9.1 million a year to put into educational trust funds. But there may be little to stop Michigan from paying all its athletes double what Purdue could pay. Michigan generated $95 million more in revenue than its Big Ten neighbor last year.

However, despite resource shortages, administrators from smaller schools expressed reluctance not to be at the highest level. “Subdivision is a trigger word,” Gloria Nevarez, the commissioner of the Mountain West Conference, said at a Sports Business Journal conference on college sports in Las Vegas. “What does it mean?”

Baker wrote that his proposal “kicks off a long-awaited conversation among members that focuses on the disparities that exist between schools, conferences and divisions and how to create more permissive and flexible rules within the NCAA”