NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — When you experience the pageantry and tradition of a college football Saturday or see the madness of the NCAA Tournament in March, college athletics seem as healthy as ever.
The games are phenomenal, the crowds are electric and the tv ratings keep going up.
“The game has never been better,” said Shannon Terry, the founder and CEO of On3 Sports Media. “The game has never been more watched. It has never been more exciting.”
But behind the scenes the entire model is under attack.
Over the last two-plus decades the ideal of amateurism in college sports has slowly eroded. As pressure mounted from critics and within courtrooms across the country athletes began to receive academic stipends, freedom of movement through the transfer portal and, eventually, the ability to profit financially off their talents.
“The system was perceived as working very well,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said at the league’s media days in Dallas in July. “Young people came in, they had opportunities. Things changed. The money changed, expectations changed and adaptation was slow.”
Too slow for many around higher education. The NCAA held tight to its commitment to amateurism in college athletics through dozens of challenges in court. With each loss the organization lost more and more control over the future of what college sports should look like.
Belmont University President Dr. Gregory L. Jones believes the NCAA lost its north star towards its mission of educating and bettering student-athletes for a future outside of their various sports.
“The NCAA hasn’t known how to lead,” Jones said. “There had been mistakes the NCAA made over a period of time and the pendulum just kind of swung wildly the other direction. The whole environment is chaotic and way too transactional for my taste in an area of our university that really is about the development of character.”
It came much slower than critics believe, but change has arrived in college athletics with athletes holding more of the power than ever before. Some have already cashed in on lucrative name, image and likeness deals worth six- and seven-figures per year. Beginning in 2025 players will be able to make even more as they become eligible to receive direct payments from their schools in the form of revenue sharing from major media rights deals.
It’s a180-degree turn from the days of strict amateurism, and an unsettling change to a system that has largely been unchanged for decades.
“Everybody’s wondering what can be done to create stability moving forward,” Storey Lee said. “Anytime you’re talking about changing the economic model for student-athletes, there are a lot of questions.”
Let’s start with how we got here. The first blow to the NCAA model dates back four decades. In 1984 the Supreme Court sided with the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents in a case joined by the University of Georgia against the NCAA.
The court ruled that the NCAA’s restrictions of televised games, limiting the total number of games that could be shown per week and the number of appearances schools could make on tv, violated anti-trust law.
With schools then able to negotiate their own tv deals, interest and exposure of college athletics grew rapidly. In 1985 division one football and basketball generated approximately 963 million dollars. Just over three decades later, in 2016, the television rights deal paid by CBS and Turner to televise the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament was worth $1.1 Billion alone.
“The law tends to move people towards more freedom,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said. “And more freedom means you can choose the path that gets the most money. If they want to sell their media rights they have the freedom to do that in this country.”
Games soon were distributed to multiple networks that televised multiple games per week. By the early 2000’s conferences saw how lucrative their media rights were.
The Big Ten launched its own network in 2007 and immediately increased payouts to its member schools to $18 million per year. That number is expected to grow to $75 million per year in 2025. The SEC and other major conferences soon followed suit with their own dedicated networks, boosting athletic department across the country with media rights deals accounting for more than 50 percent of most school’s total revenue.
Even as revenue skyrocketed the NCAA maintained that athletes getting paid would violate the very concept of amateurism. But with tv rights money bloating contracts of coaches and administrators and building lavish facilities across the country, student-athletes became determined to get their fair share.
“You can have this great amateur framework and I think it’s the dream, right?” Skrmetti said. “Everybody wants college athletics to be your buddies at college fighting the jerks from the team down the road and bringing glory to your school. And in the old days I think that’s what it was. But then recruiting started and people wanted to get the best players for their teams. And the tv deals started to get more and more lucrative. And now it’s a multi-billion dollar industry where everyone except the kids at the heart of it are making out. And it just doesn’t work.”
A series of court rulings in favor of student-athletes over the past 20 years led to the increase in the value of their scholarships, including those additional academic stipends. It also led to the elimination of all rules limiting a player’s ability to transfer and opened up the door for them to begin profiting off their name, image and likeness.
On July 26th the NCAA formally filed documents to settle the lawsuit brought by former Arizona State swimmer Grant House. In the agreement the organization agrees to pay $2.77 billion in NIL backpay to former student-athletes who were prevented from exploring marketing deals while they were in college. The settlement will cover athletes that played dating back to 2018, predominantly in football and men’s and women’s basketball.
The settlement also paves the way for a revenue sharing model in college sports similar to many professional leagues.
“Everyone would say there’s a clear line of demarcation between amateurism and professional sports,” Storey Lee said. “Well, there are some things about that old definition of amateurism that are changing, and we have to accept that.”
Beginning in the 2025-26 school year NCAA member schools will be able to pay their players directly, up to $23.1 million across all their sports. And while most people around college sports understand it’s time for the athletes to get a piece of the pie, they worry that the overall mission of a university and it’s athletic program is getting lost in the changes.
“We need to have a balance and making sure that we just don’t become a kind of mini-farm system,” Middle Tennessee State University President Dr. Sidney McPhee said. “A professional operation that moves away from our main purpose of a higher education institution which is to educate and make sure when students leave they have a degree and a way to support their families.”
With the landscape shifting seemingly by the week, NCAA member schools are once again calling for leadership to navigate through the turmoil. It’s now up to the NCAA to focus on what it wants to be in the future, and how it can get there, and not what it was in the past.
Sankey, considered the nation’s most powerful commissioner, told conference schools at the SEC spring meetings in Destin that college athletics is navigating unchartered waters and that it’s up to conferences like the SEC, Big Ten and other major entities to become a part of the solution for the future and a new way of doing business.
The question now is what exactly will that framework look like and will it be sustainable for all member schools? Middle Tennessee athletic director Chris Massaro says the first step is figuring out what the NCAA wants to be in a new paid to play system and begin to chart its own course as opposed to relying on litigation and court rulings to resolve all the organization’s issues.
“Too much of our argument over the last 10 years has been oh we can’t do that because the whole enterprise will fall apart,” Masaro said. “Well, we’ve proven this is a really strong enterprise. It’s not going to fall apart. So let’s not be afraid of the future. Let’s just figure out how it works and here are our parameters.”
