Thoughts on the House Settlement and the Future of College Athletics (part 3)

Good Luck with That...

It’s not my intent to explain the ins and outs of the settlement, I’m doing a bit of speculating and complaining from my specific perspective as a former NCAA Power 4 Olympic sport staff member. If you’d like a bit of an introduction to the House Settlement, here’s as good an article as any from a trusted news source. Also, I don’t have enough experience with Division II or III athletes and institutions to comment on their situations so my thoughts are about Division I only.

In part two, I talked about power, history, and loyalty. I ended by talking about how those factors are all contributing to short-term business decisions that I think suggest what the future will look like. Now it’s time to dig further into that future and why it worries me so much. You can read part two here:

The House Settlement is causing the NCAA and its members to reap what they have sown for so many years. Why do the college football playoffs make all the money they do? Because of how much was invested in them since the invention of bowl games. Why does men’s March Madness make so much money? Because of how much was invested in it since the explosion of televised sports. While those cash cows are sources of large sums of money to member institutions, that doesn’t make them noble non-profit operations. What if the NCAA had invested more of the profits of those monsters into other post-season events instead of paying out profits to member institutions? Would the women’s Final Four have had to fight so hard to use the same name as the men’s tournament? Would the discrepancy between those tournaments still have become as large as it is? How many more years could the NCAA have squeezed out of the previous model of college sports if they had spread the wealth more amongst the sports and not just the institutions? This would have allowed the wealth to reach more athletes and not just enrich administrators.

This forces me to ask, why do women’s sports lag so far behind men’s sports? History. And power. Men haven’t allowed anyone else to play sports for pretty much the entire history of sports. Men have always held the power in sports and they acted in ways that preserved that power by limiting access. “Non-revenue” sports, then, aren’t cursed to be that way forever because of something intrinsic about them. But they do need the same opportunities and long-term investments that “revenue” sports had in the past. Modern “revenue” sports, to use a sports cliché, were born on third base, thinking they hit a triple.

But I fear “non-revenue” sports will never have the opportunities and investments necessary because of the House Settlement and the current model of athletic department-as-business. Because post-House athletic programs must be solvent in perpetuity, they will be unwilling to invest in sports that don’t present a clear near-term profit opportunity. So investments will continue to be made in sports with a protected legacy of profitability. Breaking from this model will require a fabled “disruptor” and the House Settlement is not that. While the settlement will disrupt college sports as you currently know them, it will not provide the disruption necessary to create equity of opportunity across all college sports. It will on paper, because in theory, any sport could receive massive injections of money. But any such injections are almost certain to go to sport programs that are perceived as safe bets. The post-House Settlement NCAA isn’t Silicon Valley, with its radical innovations and disruptors. It is Hollywood, and it will keep making sequels and reboots to keep the money hoses pointed at the same franchises.

A consequence of this mode of operating is the way it will affect college athletes. Many member institutions that have opted into the House Settlement requirements have said they will make “nondiscriminatory” models of revenue sharing in which sport programs that generate the most revenue will receive the majority of the revenue to be shared. In such a model, any athlete can reap the benefits of the settlement because it’s “nondiscriminatory”. But the majority of athletes will not see much benefit because the model is revenue-based.

In principle, I want student-athletes to get paid but I wish they could all be paid based on what they put in and not by how much rich people cared about their performance. The women’s soccer player who gives their all at every practice and competition is just as dignified and praiseworthy as the football player who also gives their all every day. But each will receive their due in very different forms because one of them benefits from history and power in ways the other does not.

American society is really good at assigning worth a dollar value. The House Settlement will show college athletes what society thinks they are worth. The House Settlement will continue to reinforce ingrained and unquestioned standards and, as a result, sports and athletes that haven’t previously benefited from those standards will fall even further behind with no recourse.

Despite how I juxtapose the many potential financial opportunities for football athletes with the lack of similar opportunities for “non-revenue” athletes, I refuse to condemn them or wish that no one receive shared revenue if that revenue is not shared in equitable fashion. I believe that sharing revenue (and power) with some student-athletes is better than sharing with none of them. But don’t confuse my embrace of revenue sharing as agreement with how it’s being done. It has long been the position of social justice workers that the powerful maintain their power, in part, by creating situations that invite infighting between disempowered groups. That fighting distracts the groups from the reality that they are all still disempowered. They fight over scraps, convinced by those in power that those scraps are significant and hard-won. I believe that those that previously benefited most from college sports will continue to benefit far more than the athletes who, you are told, are poised to make a killing in this new environment. Society will get caught up arguing over if Athlete A deserves what they’re earning in relation to Athlete B instead of considering how their earnings compare to the revenue they generate.

I’m worried about the future of college sports in a post-House world because I believe college sports should not be run like a business. I believe college sports should be treated as a social good, much like the education on offer from the institutions athletes attend while competing. I believe in the non-financial benefits of sport, the same ones the NCAA touts in their commercials in which they remind you that most college athletes will go pro “in something other than sports”. I’m worried because the NCAA, its member institutions, their administrators, and their coaches will continue to pitch those non-financial benefits to young athletes while also exploiting their revenue-generating potential. I worry because college athletes will be increasingly enticed by the new opportunities for financial benefit, which I fear will slowly push out the consideration of non-financial benefits. I’m worried that college sports will become even more driven by winning because winning can increase profitability more than character-building can.

I coach because I want to help others tap into their human potential more than I want to help them maximize their financial potential. I worry that college sports, if it ever was a place that held priorities similar to mine, will never hold such priorities again. I worry that my way of coaching will lose any attraction it may have had. I worry that college sports will never again be a place that supports human dignity and potential the way it says it does (if it ever was such a place). I don’t want to coach in spite of the institutions I’m part of. But I can’t make sense of how to support college athletes in a system that prioritizes monetary value over intrinsic value.

Thank you for reading. I know this is a lot and I don’t expect anyone to be with me on all of it. I don’t assume that the future will be like I imagine it but I can’t get this possible future out of my head. I welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments. What happens in college sports will end up having impacts on how we all coach and I’m curious to hear from you how you think it will impact your work.

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