NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF — After years of litigation and turmoil, college athletics are heading into a new era where players will get paid, and the NCAA must decide what it wants to be.
“It’s an opportunity to do legacy defining work,” Vanderbilt Athletic Director Candice Storey Lee said. “I want to make sure that there are other young men and women that can be student-athletes and can get what I feel like is so beneficial.”
As the NCAA awaits court approval of the settlement it has outlined along with the plaintiff’s attorneys in House V. National Collegiate Athletic Association, talks are underway about how to create a new, dynamic model.
The framework must allow athletes to participate in revenue sharing beginning in the 2025-26 school year, and continue to profit off their name, image and likeness. But many associated with college athletic and higher education say it is important they find a way to keep the core tenets of the collegiate experience in the new model.
“Even with NIL we are not professional sports,” Lee said. “Even with the transfer portal we are not professional sports. Having said that there are some things that I believe wee need to do to ensure that if I tell you we’re an education first enterprise, you don’t start laughing. People need to graduate.”
That’s a concern for educators who believe stressing the student-athlete while players are getting paid will be challenging. Meanwhile, there are others that don’t believe college athletes should be classified as students at all.
In March the Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize after a National Labor Relations Board director ruled they were employees of the school who often exceeded the 20-hour activity limit for their sport.
Dartmouth University has appealed that ruling to the full NLRB and says it has no intention of negotiating with the players.
The Dartmouth administration has support from university presidents across the country who view athletics as a part of their educational offerings that students can choose to participate in, much like theater, dance and other extra-curricular activities.
“I think (employment) is a mistaken model because they actually are getting benefits from attending a university,” Belmont University President Gregory L. Jones said. “They’re not just hired hands. If you’re a student-athlete and you want to go down the employee model, well, in a right to work state you could get fired at any time. If you have a bad game, that’s it, you’re out. I don’t think that’s in the student-athletes’ interest or the university’s interest.”
NCAA officials say the majority of student-athletes have expressed they have no desire to be employees. But there is a growing belief that athletes need a seat at the negotiating table.
If granted, those students or their representatives can help NCAA and conference leaders iron out the details about the organization’s new framework. Losses in court have forced the NCAA to loosen NIL rules, drop all restrictions on the transfer portal and has threatened the organization’s ability to enforce the rules it does have.
Through negotiations the NCAA may be able to get athletes to sign off on who should be paid, how much and the obligations they must fulfill to receive those payments. A collective bargaining agreement could solve many of the current problems when it comes to “pay for play” NIL deals and the transfer portal. It could also provide some guidance as schools begin to map out how they plan to distribute their revenue to athletes.
“I would like to see some sort of collective bargaining, but that’s easy for me to say,” Middle Tennessee Athletic Director Chris Massaro said. “Who are we collective bargaining with? Does Conference USA do its own collective bargaining agreement with students and student-athletes, and who are their representatives? Or do we do a FBS collective bargaining agreement? So the devil’s really in the details.”
The revenue distribution plan is the most urgent decision facing the NCAA and its schools in the wake of the House settlement.
Beginning next year schools can pay up to 22 percent of the average power conference school’s annual revenue directly to their student-athletes. That figure will start at $23.1 million in 2025 and is expected to grow yearly to almost $33 million by 2034.
The prevailing theory is that money will need to be distributed evenly to men and women to comply with Title IX. But with between 90-95 percent of all revenue coming from football and men’s basketball, some believe that the athletes in those sports are deserving of a bigger share.
“There’s a massive disparity between the money brought in via certain programs compared to the money brought in via other programs,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said. “And that disparity can sometimes be attributed to the difference between men’s and women’s sports, sometimes the difference between sports. I don’t know if there’s enough certainty out there to avoid that litigation, so I think it’s just something we’re going to find out.”
Since taking over as NCAA President in the spring of 2023, fixing the system has been the focus of Charlie Baker. The former Massachusetts Governor has testified multiple times in front of Congress about the legal issues facing the organization.
The desire to stay out of court and come up with a framework that works for everyone is why SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey included a call for federal legislation on college sports in his remarks at the conference’s Media Days last month in Dallas.
“My ask again is that Congress continue not only engage in conversation, but help, with us, resolve some of these outstanding issues and restore clear national standards for college athletics,” Sankey said. “And I’m actually the voice of our student-athletes because they have said over and over, ‘we deserve better than to have a patch work of state laws that tell us how to manage our name, image and likeness, and we want to know that when we line up for a kickoff, tipoff in a basketball game, first pitch in a softball or baseball game that the people occupying the other uniforms are governed by the same standards as us.”
Whether the solution comes from Washington D.C. or from the NCAA itself, its member schools have some clear priorities in developing a new model.
Schools want to ensure competitive fairness within their leagues and across the country with clear rules for recruiting and NIL. And they want the NCAA to have to a mechanism to enforce those rules and dole out punishment to those who break them.
They also want the new framework to ensure that all division one institutions continue to have access to the championships that provide the visibility and revenue vital to their operations.
But, perhaps most importantly, they want to protect the educational and athletic opportunities of all its student-athletes, not just the ones that create revenue.
“We should be making statements about this is what we believe, this is what college athletics should be about and this is our future,” Massaro said. “And then sell it.”
There are still more questions than answers about the future in the new paid to play system.
Some believe the potential value of future media rights in football will cause the biggest, most prestigious programs to break away and form their own top tier division to cash in.
But for others the true value in college sports goes way beyond the money to the student-athletes, the games and the experiences that last a lifetime.
That is why they are doing everything they can to preserve the good in college sports, even if amateur athletes are a thing of the past.
“I’m confident that we will be able to weather the storm,” said Middle Tennessee State University President Dr. Sidney McPhee, who is a member of the NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors. “There’s still a lot of issues that are out there, but I do think if you would’ve asked many people three or four years ago if we would get to this point, very few people would’ve said that we would. We have. So there’s hope.”
