In the new era of paid college athletes, schools will need to get creative

A federal judge earlier this month approved a settlement that resolved a few antitrust lawsuits that had been filed against the NCAA and the so-called power conferences.

Under the terms of the settlement, there will be a new revenue-sharing model for the next decade that will allow universities — for the first time — to directly pay their student-athletes.

For the first year, schools will have $20.5 million to distribute; that number is expected to go up over the next 10 years. The settlement also includes nearly $3 billion for Division I athletes who were not allowed to sign Name, Image and Likeness – or NIL – deals.

This represents a big change for college sports. Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and co-director of the Great Game Lab at Arizona State University, spoke more about it with The Show.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Let me first ask about your reaction to this settlement, and the new era of college sports it’s led to.

VICTORIA JACKSON: It’s historic kind of in two ways. It’s historic in that it’s a settlement. We’ve seen many, many antitrust challenges and kind of an increasing number of them in the recent past. And with all of those cases, the decision by the defendants — the NCAA and the conferences — has been to fight. In this case, they chose to settle, so that makes it historic.

And then the other way in which it’s historic is that this is the first time schools have agreed to pay for play. They have increased the benefits and money’s going to athletes in response to these previous antitrust cases, but this one is explicitly pay for play. So that is new and distinctive and historic.

BRODIE: In your mind, does this make college sports more like professional sports?

JACKSON: Yes. Particularly with top-of-pyramid football. So when I say top of pyramid, what I mean is the power conferences. They are required to opt into the settlement, and then any sort of school that is aspirationally trying to make it into that top of pyramid.

So schools can opt in if they aren’t mandated to do so as a member of the power conferences. And we’ve seen some conferences opt in and some schools opt in as well.

BRODIE: So you mentioned top-of-pyramid football, and I wonder how you see this sort of trickling down to other sports. Obviously football and men’s and women’s basketball are sort of 1 and 1A at the top of the food chain for sports in terms of revenue. But how might this impact baseball and softball and track and field and swimming and diving and water polo and all the other sports that colleges offer?

JACKSON: There’s two main parts to the settlement, and that also makes it two main ways that those other sports are affected. So the first is that the settlement sets up revenue sharing. And there’s a cap placed on that revenue share, when any time you cap anything without collective bargaining, you’re kind of vulnerable to antitrust challenges. So now we’re seeing an effort to get Congress to codify the settlement.

But that first part with the revenue share, it’s capped in the first year at $20.5 million per school. That’s across all sports. The damages class, the back pay is broken up in a clear percentage, with the heavy majority going to football — upward of 75% — another 15% to men’s basketball, around 5% to women’s basketball and 5% to all of their sports.

So when we’re talking about track and field, when we’re talking about water polo, when we’re talking about lacrosse, there is, in most cases at most schools, not likely going to be revenue sharing with those sports. But the other main part of the settlement that will affect those Olympic sports is that we have, as part of the settlement, roster limits replacing scholarship caps.

And depending on the university, this might be an expansion of scholarship opportunities. Since I am a Sun Devil Athletics person and an ASU person, I’ll use us as an example. We’ve committed to increasing, actually, the number of scholarships we offer across our sports teams — more than 200 new scholarship opportunities, which under the old NCAA rules before the settlement would have placed us in violation of NCAA rules because we would have been going over those scholarship caps.

For example, baseball. Old rules: 11 1/2 scholarships. Now it’s 34 of a roster limit. So we can scholarship more athletes but have less athletes on the roster now because a lot of Olympic sports had walk-ons. And so the overall number of participation opportunities in those other sports will actually be coming down unless schools get creative around what a participation opportunity constitutes.

Arizona State University

BRODIE: Yeah, I’m curious about that because one of the big holdups in the settlement was the rules around roster limits and scholarships. It sounds like maybe in some ways it’s been alleviated, but in some ways maybe not.

JACKSON: This is what I love about the federal district judge who oversaw the settlement, Claudia Wilken. She made very clear in the final hearing on the settlement, to the NCAA and conference lawyers: You need to resolve this roster limit thing, and maybe you should consider an opportunity to grandfather in athletes who are already at universities, on teams, or who have been recruited to play for those teams who are seniors in high school, that those schools can go above the roster limit and grandfather those athletes in.

And she made that clear. But then the settlement, when it was sent to the lawyer after that final hearing, did not have that included. So she rejected it — which was pretty bold — sent it back and reminded them of what she had made clear to them earlier. And so instead of mandating that those athletes will be grandfathered in, it’s been made optional.

That said, I think schools should get creative around what participation opportunities are. I wrote a piece for my friend Matt Brown’s college sports newsletter, called Extra Points, that schools should bring back junior varsity. And that’s the workaround for roster limits. And if this is scholastic sport — which it is, it’s Olympic development, it’s scholastic sport, it’s big time college sports. It can be all things at once.

Why don’t we lean into that scholastic part of it and bring back JV? And if you have an athlete who’s maybe underperforming or underdeveloped while they’re in high school and they put in the work and they grow and they develop as an athlete on that JV team, they have an opportunity to move up to the varsity. And that I see as a roster limits workaround.

BRODIE: At the end of the day. Do you think this settlement is a win for the student athletes, or at least some of the student athletes?

JACKSON: Dealing in the environment in which we’re in right now, I think it’s a step forward. I don’t think it is creating optimized policy. What we have is many different industries operating under the umbrella of college sports.

I think optimized policy would be an exploration of whether or not that top-of-pyramid football should be spun off. I think optimized policy would be allowing those other sports to have sport-by-sport policy determining what serves those athletes in those sports best. I think we have to come up with new subsidization models for college Olympic sports and also think about how best to serve athletes and broaden robust Olympic development, but also with an eye toward maximizing participation opportunities.

The other thing I think college sports could do a better job of is serving community — not as spectators, but as participants themselves. And if we lean into the mission of higher education to serve community in the intercollegiate athletic space and think of our community members as athletes, too, I think that also opens up new doors to new subsidization models, where we’re not so dependent on football money to support all the other sports offerings we have in our university systems.

So it’s a yes and no. This is better than what we had before. I don’t think it’s optimized policy.