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College athletics is now doomed

A couple of years ago California passed a law that allowed college athletes to make money from licensing their name, image, or likeness (NIL). At first the NCAA huffed and puffed and threatened that if California went through with this it might ban them from playing football, but no one took that seriously. Nor was it ever plausible that universities in other states would allow California schools such a huge recruiting edge without demanding the same advantage for themselves.

For months the NCAA pretended that it might be able to square this circle somehow, but last week's Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Alston put paid to that, and today they officially caved in completely:

The NCAA Division I Council — reeling from a Supreme Court ruling last week that further stripped away confidence in the ability of the NCAA rule book to withstand antitrust scrutiny — voted to recommend its board of directors “adopt an interim policy that would suspend amateurism rules related to name, image and likeness,” according to a NCAA statement. The board is scheduled to meet Wednesday and expected to approve this measure.

So that's that. But as much as it seems fair to allow athletes to profit from a system that already profits everyone except them, it's hard to see how big-time college sports (i.e., men's football and basketball) survives this.

The problem is that this is certain to blow up inequality in NCAA sports to unsustainable levels. Take my local powerhouse, USC. They've been planning for this day and are certain to adopt a very athlete-friendly NIL policy. For the top recruits, this can mean hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, and football factories like USC can make an easy case that stars on their team will cash in at far higher levels than run-of-the-mill big-conference teams. The biggest programs will have on-campus offices that help athletes find agents and get the best deals. They'll remind recruits that their teams get cherry TV exposure. USC in particular will argue that there's no better place for NIL riches than Los Angeles. By the time this gold rush plays out, there will be maybe a dozen top teams that are so far ahead of everyone else that they're going to have to create a new conference just for them.

Make no mistake: there's not much difference between colleges competing for recruits on NIL revenue and colleges competing on just plain paying their athletes. And once you do that, only the very richest places can survive. Welcome to capitalism.

I don't really know what the answer is to this. I suspect there isn't one. Continuing the strict amateurism policy just wasn't in the cards. Eventually it would fall. But I always figured that once it did, there was no longer any way to keep college teams on even a notional level playing field. If a dozen universities basically run pro programs that are farm teams for the NFL while the rest are essentially relegated to Division II, that's the end of big-time college athletics.

Maybe I'm off base about how this plays out. You never know what kind of weird stuff can turn up. But this is how I see it.

POSTSCRIPT: I've used football throughout as my example, but I suspect much the same would happen to men's basketball. And since those two sports fund everything else, if their revenue dries up then so does every other sport. The dozen or so big schools will be fine, but everyone else will see their athletic budgets crater.

68 thoughts on “College athletics is now doomed

  1. kahner

    I'm not a college (or any) sports guy, so I am speaking in quite a bit of ignorance here, but I'm not sure why this would basically end D1 college sports as we know it. A few school ALREADY have massive advantages in recruiting. They already are basically farm teams for the pros. They already have better coaches, trainers, facilities, tv contracts and fan bases. They already have more money for scholarships and very frequently ways to slip money and benefits to athletes that are against ncaa rules. So could this exacerbate the effect? Probably. But college football and basketball seem pretty overwhelmingly unfair and tilted toward a few schools for decades, and the NCAA has been just fine.

    1. kahner

      ETA: it seems like the only real change is some small percentage of the vast amounts of money that go to the power conference schools and make them dominant in football and basketball will now go to the athletes.

      1. Jasper_in_Boston

        We could and probably will see bidding wars over start high school recruits, though. Which could mean exploding budgets for college sports. Already many schools (per my understanding) are probably running their athletic programs at a loss ($8 million coaching salaries will tend to do that). This looks likely to exacerbate that situation. I know one retort is: well, no one is forcing these schools to excessively prioritize athletics. Well, maybe not. But even if unforced, at the margins it probably hurts the country, by diverting money from education into sports entertainment.

        1. kahner

          I thought, at least for now, schools still wouldn't be paying athletes. This ruling just allows them to profit from third party deals with video games, clothing lines etc.

        2. ScentOfViolets

          Actually -- as I understand it -- the athletic department is a big money-maker for the larger institutions. That's the nub of the problem, actually.

          1. J. Frank Parnell

            The “Power Conferences” sign lucrative TV contracts which allow all the member schools share in the proceeds. This is where the serious money is.

        3. J. Frank Parnell

          No one is forcing these schools to excessively privatize athletics? You haven’t met a very rich politically well connected rabid football fan(atic).

    2. Loxley

      'A few school ALREADY have massive advantages in recruiting. They already are basically farm teams for the pros. They already have better coaches, trainers, facilities, tv contracts and fan bases. They already have more money for scholarships and very frequently ways to slip money and benefits to athletes that are against ncaa rules.'

      Bingo. And, the highest paid state employee serving as the coach.

      1. kahner

        yeah. maybe i'm missing something, but i really don't get kevin's argument that giving the athletes the opportunity to make some money (from outside private companies, not even directly from the schools) is somehow a catastrophe for college athletics. sounds like an argument directly from the NCAA PR team.

        1. mudwall jackson

          it becomes about media markets and the ability to make more money as an athlete. a school in say los angeles will have a rather substantial advantage in recruiting top athletes over a school in ames, iowa, or norman, oklahoma, etc.

          1. kahner

            sure, but what i'm arguing is it's ALREADY about that. the big media market schools already get the most exposure for the best players, the most money to fund the programs, the best coaches and staff etc. i don't see how players getting a little money for their work would be a massive change or the death knell of college athletics as we know them.

    3. Citizen Lehew

      Agreed. College basketball has already been living in the "one and done" world for a while... the superstars cycle through a handful of dominant teams on their way to the NBA, and everyone else does what they can to compete.

      Between that and the new transfer rules, it's hard to see how college basketball could get much more unstable than it is already.

  2. Tadeusz_Plunko

    I'm going to go ahead and say "good".

    This will shift us toward the European system (and various sports in the US, like tennis) in which if you are a professional-level talent, you go directly into the sport instead of going through the motions of using the university system as a farm league. Students will be free to participate in recreational sports on their campuses if there is enough interest in those leagues, and colleges will be free to offer incentives to those students inasmuch as anyone cares about maintaining a level of competitiveness within those college leagues for purely vain institutional reasons.

    1. kahner

      also a good point. the american obsession with college sports (and high school sports as a pathway to division 1 "glory") seems pretty misguided and probably destructive to be honest.

    2. TheMelancholyDonkey

      The problem comes in the sports, which are predominately women's sports, that do not have significant professional leagues for the athletes to go straight in to. The European system is terrible when it comes to women's team sports.

      1. kahner

        Why can't tuition and/or whatever other income sources colleges have pay for recreational level sports? It might not produce the elite level athletes D1 schools put out now, but....i'm hard pressed to care that much. I don't really think that's a key role for higher education institutions.

    3. realrobmac

      College football traditions go back over a hundred years. Many of the rivalries date back to the 1800s. Basketball traditions are almost as deep. I know that cool and intelligent people don't care at all about traditions if those traditions involve a lot of white Americans, but traditions like this are still important and well worth preserving.

    4. coral

      Agreed. Sports competition at near-professional level is deeply corrupting to the institutions of colleges and universities.

      Get rid of those sports entirely, and focus on education and true amateur and intramural teams for fun.

    5. Atticus

      How many college athletes do you think become professionals? It's probably about 0.001% Even in the top tier DIA football teams, there might be a couple players that go pro each year. Not to mention: the other 100+ DIA football teams that aren't top tier and hardly ever have anyone go pro, all the hundreds of DIAA, DII and DII schools, all the sports that don't have professional leagues.

  3. bbleh

    It's more than good; it's great. While there are minor benefits to providing pathways to a college degree -- it's rarely a college education -- for a small number of student athletes, in the main it's both terribly exploitive of the athletes and horrifically distorting of the structure and the finances of colleges and universities, clear down to the local level.

    The sooner it's all blown up -- except perhaps for a few mega-universities who can continue to support gladiatorial spectacles in the interests of squeezing out some profit net of the gigantic expenses -- the better.

    The whole thing reminds me of the grotesque parody that is Peewee Football: adults abusing children to vicariously feed their own failed fantasies. It's disgusting, not to mention a gigantic detriment to the educational mission of colleges and universities.

    1. TheMelancholyDonkey

      As I've replied to others, don't confuse the small number of athletes in top football and basketball programs with the entirety of student athletes. There are many of them who do take the education part very seriously. I am very close to the University of Minnesota women's hockey team, and you'd be surprised at the level of academic achievement among those who have no chance of a professional career. Teamwide, they consistently produce a GPA around 3.5, with a broad selection of majors. More business degrees than anything else (and, while I'm very skeptical of business school educations in general, it is a difficult major to get accepted in to), with a smattering of math and engineering degrees. There are some who aren't in quality degrees, but probably less so than the overall university in general.

      There are major problem in college athletic departments, primarily having to do with the expenses. But, when you look at the operations as a whole, the specific concerns that draw all of the attention are really only a small part of the picture.

      1. Goosedat

        Young adults who want continuing education should be the focus of public universities, and the students scholarship should be the reason for providing subsidies to enroll rather than the students athletic ability.

        1. mudwall jackson

          and they are. can't tell you the undergraduate enrollment of my alma mater but it is at least 30,000 (throw in satellite campuses and the number doubles), the overwhelming number of which are non-athletes. and even among the athletes, the overwhelming number are those who participate in so-called olympic sports — those without professional opportunities post graduation. if you're on the men's fencing team or women's field hockey team, you're there to get an education.

  4. Jasper_in_Boston

    My take is different: I think it's long been unfair that, say, a hotshot math whiz at Caltech or MIT can make big bucks doing quant work for Wall Street on the side, but a hotshot college athlete can't sell his or her image to Nike. I'd rather see us rectify this inequity than see colleges entangle their own finances with this stuff.

    The status quo may be rife with hypocrisy, but at least there's a limit to how much the finances of colleges are directly impacted by the commercialization of college sports. But if schools start to get into actual bidding wars over top prospects, the situation could quickly spiral out of control and college sports could become a financial albatross. The last thing the USA needs in today's incredibly competitive global economy is for one its most important aces in the whole -- its unmatched university system -- to be weakened and undermined by exploding budgets for sports.

    If reducing hypocrisy and allowing students athletes to get a cut of the pie is something we ought to consider -- and I agree we ought to (the current system is grossly unfair to these young people), far better for Madison Avenue to pick up the tab than the schools themselves.

    So, "no" to direct payment of salaries by colleges. But "yes" to allowing them to earn outside income. It's none of the school's or the NCAA's business if a third party want to do an endorsement deal.

    1. Loxley

      The difference is, that one is getting an actual education, and the other is not. It would be more honest and financially beneficial to the athlete to let them go straight to pro sports at 19.

      1. Special Newb

        Exactly, which is why baseball does it that way. Most baseball players get drafted out of college but it's more about physical development due to age than anything else.

  5. Mitch Guthman

    Who knows? Maybe it will turn out that alums will enjoy watching teams of actual students (coached by people who are paid like professors) play teams consisting of other actual students (coached by people who are paid like professors) play teams. They could call it college football.

    1. mudwall jackson

      any system employed will devolve into one about money regardless of how "pure" it starts out. you underestimate the sizable investment schools have made into sports facilities, and the economic impact sports programs have on the surrounding communities. pick a college town — ann arbor, norman, ok, state college, gainesville, fla., and try to book a room on a football saturday. see if you can get a room and see how much you'll have to pay for it compared with any other weekend of the year save graduation. all that money flows through local economies. in the end, it's about money. always has been,

      1. Mitch Guthman

        The issue isn’t simply money. There’s lots of college towns where football and basketball are big draws but where the athletes are more students than semiprofessionals who are only notationally related to the college. The Ivy leaguers or even Berkeley and Stanford are examples.

  6. golack

    For colleges, D1, power divisions:
    football = lots of money, and students basically need to go to college to get into the NFL
    baseball = afterthought. Pro players are called up from farm teams, which really don't pay well.
    basketball = money and not nearly as expensive as football for colleges. Most students go thru college, but not as essential as football--and going into draft "early" more common (one and done rule, and it gets complicated...)

    Problems with new rules? Limit number of allowed players per team.
    What about transfers? That will be...interesting.
    Who will get the shoe contracts now?
    Yes, most players will still be exploited

    1. coral

      Football and other sports which are threatening to players' health (concussions, etc.) should not be part of the college experience. Focus on education, not competitive athletics.

  7. TheMelancholyDonkey

    If this post is correct, it's going to destroy women's team athletics, except possibly basketball and soccer. No other sport has any pathway to a financially sustainable system that doesn't involve being subsidized by football and men's basketball. The United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada, dominate international women's team sports because no one else has a viable method for supporting them. For all of its very many faults, the existence of the NCAA and Title IX makes women's sports a real thing.

    1. Nominal

      That's unlikely. Title IX makes it impossible to have a men's football team without having a half-dozen women's sports teams. And if it has a men's basketball team it has to have a women's team. Baseball? Softball. Etc. Any college needs to find room for 100 or so female athletes if it has any sort of men's team presence.

      Title IX wouldn't require anything more for women's sports than what they currently provide except for negligible amounts (giving a computer to every female athlete would be a rounding error for even Cal's athletic program, let alone UCLA's or Oregon's). NIL just allows athletes to profit from non-school activities and has no affect for Title IX. If salaries actually come into play it might, but IMHO that's highly unlikely, especially if it's linked to the income generated by the activity. If the salary rules are the same, it isn't a lack of opportunity if a football player makes $50k in a $20 Million sport while a gymnast makes virtually nothing in a $100,000 sport.

      1. mudwall jackson

        at schools where the football and basketball programs make money, the revenue is used to subsidize other sports, including men's and women's gymnastics, fencing, field hockey, soccer, etc. if nil upends the big two the way kevin believes it will, then yeah, there will be a ripple effect on everything.

      2. TheMelancholyDonkey

        If football and basketball become purely commercial enterprises, then Title IX no longer applies to them.

  8. Loxley

    "College athletics" is an oxymoron to start with. The only formalized policy of requiring that athletes actually be a member of the regularly admitted student body, is the Ivy League Compact. (Which is why Hopkins, who has only 4,500 students and the top swimming and field hockey teams in the country, repeatedly refused to join it).

    Everything else is exploitation of both the athletes and the students who are told that the teams "represent" them. They do not. Any more than a professional sports team that the owner can spirit away in the middle of the night, represents the city their latest publicly funded stadium happens to be located in....

    1. TheMelancholyDonkey

      Not all athletes are regularly admitted in Ivy League schools. Athletic departments are allowed a certain number of admits who would not have gotten in otherwise, which are divvied up among the teams depending upon which ones the administrators want to emphasize.

      And the Ivies rely solely upon "as needed" scholarships, as in, "Do we need a goalie?"

  9. samgamgee

    The whole system needs to be scrapped. College athletics should be limited to club sports and formal athletics moved off campus into a club environment. Academic institutions, especially state funded ones, should not be semi-pro businesses prepping kids for the pros.

    Unfortunately, in an effort to compensate athletes for unfair treatment, advocates have bought into the whole broken system with the pay to play. I enjoy sports, but I'm done with college athletics. If sports is so important, it should be able to sustain itself without depending on schools.

    1. TheMelancholyDonkey

      Of course, only a small minority of scholarship athletes are in programs that are primarily prepping anyone for the pros. The set that are is constituted of the football, men's basketball, and, to a lesser extent, baseball and men's hockey, at a pretty small number of schools.

      Do not confuse the football and basketball factories with the vast majority of college athletics. There are problems throughout the whole system, but they are different ones than you are identifying.

      1. samgamgee

        fair enough, but the rest of the sports should also follow suit. Too often the emphasis is on admitting folks based on athletics and not academics or at least weighted in their favor. That needs to end, for all sports.

  10. RZM

    "College football today is one of the last great strongholds of genuine old-fashioned American hypocrisy" Paul Gallico, 1938
    So the contradictions of big time college sports are not new and they've always begged the question "What is college for ? "
    I think the answer is complicated and therefore the cracks are easily exploited by
    the huge amounts of money (and prestige) that big time sports exerts on our society as a whole.

  11. Vog46

    Many of you know I live in Wilmington NC. We have a University here called UNC-W which is part of the UNC system which includes basketball powerhouse UNC Chapel Hill and football and baseball power house NC State University.
    UNC CH and NC state have radio and TV contracts that bring in MILLIONS of dollars.
    UNCW does not - so - boosters raise funds etc but almost the entire athletic department budget is funded by over $1,000 per student per semester in "fees". Thats right the 99% pay for sports to allow the 1% the ability to play.
    I think that unless you are a Div 1 school in whatever sport then you should abandon sports in their entirety.
    The days of "cheap" sports is over. UNCW belongs to the Colonial Athletic Association. Other teams in this league include Hotstra, Univ of Rhode Island. Towson and more. Their travel budgets alone are in the millions.
    So if you want to make Div 1 schools athlete payable and thereby tip the balance of power in recruitment to them? Eliminate sports in all other schools. Or, at the very least, make them self sustaining w/o using OSM (Other Students Money)
    Go back to making universities about learning

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  13. skeptonomist

    This issue is very often framed in the media as if all the money generated by college quasi-pro athleticism goes to "The NCAA", as if the NCAA were a capitalist organization headed by its own Jeff Bezos. But aside from what goes into the athletic programs themselves, it goes eventually to the colleges. A lot is taken out on the way by executive and coach salaries, etc., but paying some of the athletes more would not reduce those expenses. The money that will go to the star athletes will be taken out of what now goes to other athletes and to the actual academic operations of the colleges.

    More fully professionalizing college sports will not increase the total income. The "fair market" value of the labor of the vast majority of college athletes is actually very small. They would be losers if things really went fully professional.

  14. realrobmac

    Someone name the top NCAA football or basketball athlete, the one who is going to get millions of dollars in endorsements ala Pat Mahomes or Aaron Rogers. I can't think of one and I'm a massive college football fan. Sorry, but I don't think this will end up being a huge deal. Mostly you'll have the top few players on each team getting paid to do a few local commercials.

    1. Nominal

      I don't even have to name anyone. Every starting QB at USC will have a standing offer for $20,000 (at least!) to show up in car dealer ads in Southern California. But let's talk basketball. Juzang would be getting money after that tournament run, for instance. I shudder to think what any Duke player would get. Sure, the backup strong safety probably isn't getting anything, but there's a ton of money out there.

  15. Goosedat

    The answer is to this is the elimination of sports from public colleges and universities. Subsidizing football, basketball, and baseball development leagues for the professional leagues should end now and the public should insist state universities focus solely on educating as many young adults as possible. The college sports model was based on the competition of intramural sports programs between competing institutions when colleges were private enclaves for the children of the ruling class and its technocrats at the end of the 19th century. College sports evolved to become publicly subsidized development leagues for a professional sports industry owned by those same elites, bastardizing the intent of the land grant universities. State universities should prohibit all sports scholarships, terminate their high paid coaches, and focus all that energy and resources into educating as many young adults as possible in the sciences and liberal arts. University athletic directors, if they remain, should only be tasked with ensuring students are adequately conditioned for good health rather than increasing sports revenues.

    1. mudwall jackson

      ok, let's eliminate college sports. do you have any idea how much money they pump into the economies of the surrounding communities? as an exercise, pick a college town with a major university and try to book a room on a football weekend. a) see if you can get one and b) see how much you'll have to pay for it compared with other weekend rates. that money gets cycled through the local economies, even to businesses that don't profit directly from the crowds the games bring in. now, right or wrong, how do you make up for that?

  16. Total

    Kevin's logic breaks down when you consider supply vs. demand. There are 22 starting slots on a football team. That's where the money is going to go -- the third string quarterback is not getting giant endorsements. 12 powerhouse schools have 264 slots for starters. There are a lot more quality players in the country than that, and a lot of them are going to go to other schools, which will sustain the current model to some degree.

    (In fact, the number is much lower than that, because the 'hero' slots are the QB, RB, and WR. Offensive linemen aren't getting big endorsements).

    On another note, we already know what it looks like when big colleges pay their players. Anybody doubt that the big football & basketball schools are paying (or getting paid) their players right now?

  17. Citizen Lehew

    The only way to fix all of this actually has nothing to do with college sports at all... it's pro sports that need to be reformed.

    As soon as the pros are no longer allowed to use college teams as free farm leagues things will improve dramatically for college sports. The elite kids looking for a pay check would go directly to a pro farm league from high school... everyone else would go to college and be thrilled with their free tuition.

  18. espicer05

    12 powerhouse universities have a finite number of scholarships to gove out and positions available.

    Football is 55 players.
    Basketball is 11 players.

    There is more talent than spots available.

    While the very best recruits will go to those schools, how much different is that from what's happening now?

    The very best recruits go to the best schools and Duke is littered with McDonald's All-stars. So I respectfully disagree with you on this one Kevin. I see very minor chamges in this ruling.

  19. TriassicSands

    KD: "But as much as it seems fair to allow athletes to profit from a system that already profits everyone except them..."

    This is a factually incorrect statement. The athletes get a free education, often at a school at which they might never have been accepted otherwise, the extensive perks that athletes receive at schools with major programs, and a stage on which they can showcase their talents for the pros where the real money is for those who are good enough. That doesn't sound like no profit to me.

    Education in this country has been replaced by training for jobs to make more money. Politicians don't talk about education to broaden one's horizons and contribute to a fuller life. It's only about getting the best job and making the most money. This move to pay college athletes is just one more step in the degradation of learning.

    Colleges should simply quit pretending. They should forget about school and classes and just form minor leagues for the pros. No football or basketball player would ever have to attend a single class if he or she didn't want to. And academic standing would be irrelevant to eligibility.

  20. painedumonde

    The real trick here is that the professional leagues have played the universities and colleges for the book worms they are. Those professional leagues need to pony up.

  21. duncancairncross

    Professional level sport in Schools and Colleges is one of the main things WRONG with the US education system
    It leads directly to and amplifies the "Jock" culture

    At Glasgow University we had 10,000 "jocks" (Scotland) - but no "Jocks"
    When the Rugby team played the audience was about 50 friends and relatives

    And the you have "Cheerleaders" - what in hell are you guys thinking!!

    Professional Sport in education eats the souls of everybody involved

    Get rid of it!!

  22. Victor Matheson

    I’m an actual sports economist. I am a co-author on the country’s best-selling college textbook on sports economics. And pretty much no sports economist thinks what Kevin thinks.

    1. There are already only about 10 schools that have a realistic chance of winning a national title each year. Yet roughly 65 teams generate significant revenues every year despite having no chance of winning it all.
    2. There is only so much NIL money in each local market. Even if USC has the best shot at a few top recruits, the 10th best player on USC is going to get way less NIL money than a standout at Miami or OSU or Michigan, so talent is going to get spread out.
    3. 1800 schools nationwide compete in intercolllegiate athletics. 1700 of these schools do so without generating any significant football or basketball revenue. None of these programs will disappear once football money goes to the players,
    4. Finally, even if Kevin were right, it’s still the right thing to do. I mean ending slavery probably didn’t cause hardship for many of the plantations that had to give up free labor. But that still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have five workers the right to make fair wages.

  23. D_Ohrk_E1

    I meant to comment on this a couple of days ago. Oh well.

    You know, the reason why NIL rules have been put forth isn't because of the SCOTUS ruling in NCAA v Alston. The reason is because they were rushing to beat the clock in states where NIL laws were about to go into force, thus creating massive disparities between those states and everyone else.

    As for USC's edge under NIL, it's a bit overstated.

    Every team's gonna have stars. After all, local markets need stars of their own. Does USC have a bigger market? Sure, but, they also can't seem to fill up the Coliseum. And you can only have so many star players on a team before kids start transferring out to find teams where they can shine at. Bubba Bolden transferred to Miami a few years ago and now he's apparently gotten one of the earliest big money NIL deals -- https://bityl.co/7cit

    I'm not yet convinced that NIL will drive a big wedge between the haves and have-nots. NIL is, after all, a system that bypasses schools in terms of the money flow. Josh Allen would be getting a massive NIL in his last year at Wyoming, were the system in place at the time.

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