At a reception attended by several university presidents in Manhattan, Arizona State President Michael Crowe was asked to ponder a not-too-distant future where Sun Devils football and basketball players get a cut from the billions of dollars their sports generate in media rights deals.
“I don’t support that. And so are we preparing for it? The answer is no, we’re not,” Crowe recalled. “That is not an outcome which is conducive, in my view, to the success of the pluralistic, gender-balanced, college-sports framework that we presently have in the United States.”
All the same, the NCAA and major college sports conferences are facing yet another antitrust lawsuit — among other legal and political challenges — that could force decision-makers to reckon with a reality where some athletes are paid employees or at least get money in a revenue-sharing model that looks a lot like professional sports.
House vs. the NCAA is a class-action lawsuit being heard in the Northern District of California by Judge Claudia Wilken, whose previous rulings in NCAA cases paved the way for college athletes to profit from their fame and for schools to direct more money into their hands.
The main challenge is that separating will likely destroy a ton of the value. I don’t think most college sports fans, even diehards like myself, are going to be as passionate if our favorite teams are suddenly a glorified development league for the NFL, NBA, etc. That takes away any financial incentive to split, so sports would need to be kicked out, but for many universities that means academics also lose value and resources, not to mention all the non-revenue sports that won’t survive independently.
Splitting just the revenue sports (basketball and football) is also difficult, as there are outliers with profitable programs in other sports (e.g. NE has the only profitable D1 volleyball program, some SEC schools have profitable baseball programs) but everyone else doesn’t. Which model do these teams fit into in the future?
It’s all a huge mess which the NCAA never did anything to prepare for and has no idea how to handle now that pandora’s box is open.
This is already happening, so I say good.
Good.
how about we be concerned with massive tuition at hikes while faculty quality is severely eroded. over-packed classrooms, under-funded - research programs… forced remotely learning.
that shit should matter to everyone, unlike any sport. so when i see massive amounts of ‘education’ funding that never seem to make it back to the ‘education’ process, its kinda hard to care about ‘college sports programs value’