NCAA Sends Out A New Groundbreaking Purposal
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was born more than 100 years ago in response to criticism that college sports were out of control in ways that put athletes at risk. The new landscape of NIL (name, image, and likeness), collectibles, and uneven state-by-state by-laws have put collegiate athletics more at risk than ever.
The NCAA Proposal
On Tuesday, Dec 5th, new NCAA President Charlie Baker (the former Massachusetts Governor) sent out a longstanding forward-thinking letter of proposal most thought the NCAA would never do. For over 100 years, schools paying athletes has been forbidden by their rules; only now is there what could be a groundbreaking proposal to college universities.
The plan Baker laid out after months of study would allow all Division I institutions to directly compensate athletes for using their name, image, and likeness. It would also create a new subdivision for the wealthiest and most influential programs that would give them significantly more power over how they spend their money, as long as they agree to "invest at least $30,000 per year into an enhanced educational trust fund for at least half of their athletes within the framework of Title IX", the federal law that requires gender equity in educational programs, including athletics.
The new subdivision will remain under the umbrella of the NCAA, and its members will continue to compete for NCAA championships with others in Division I. Under the proposal, Baker writes in the letter that the NCAA maintains oversight of the existing national championship model across all Division I sports, except FBS football, which continues to operate under the College Football Playoff.
Schools in the new subdivision would also gain control of decision-making around scholarship limits and countable coaches, the NCAA's way of handing major conference programs the freedom to increase the limits or do away with them altogether.
What This Means For The NCAA
The model "gives the educational institutions with the most visibility, the most financial resources, and the biggest brands an opportunity to choose to operate with a different set of rules that more accurately reflect their scale and their operating model," he writes.
The proposal is not meant as a final product ready for legislative approval but is more of a conversation starter to an end product that could look vastly different. The proposal is expected to be a leading topic at a gathering of athletic administrators in Las Vegas this week and at the NCAA convention in mid-January.
"The growing financial gap between the highest-resourced colleges and universities and other schools in Division I has created a new series of challenges," Baker writes. "The challenges are competitive as well as financial and are complicated further by the intersection of name, image, and likeness opportunities for student-athletes and the arrival of the Transfer Portal."
The new subdivision provides schools a pathway to an alternative to compensation from the current NIL structure, which is built around third-party booster-led collectives distributing millions to athletes through endorsements and commercial deals. While the NCAA will still deem "pay-for-play" impermissible, the proposal gives programs more control, lifting restrictions on a school's involvement with NIL and allowing them to bring NIL within their jurisdiction.
For example, most SEC schools have around 525 student-athletes across all of their sports; to opt in, they would have to pay a minimum of $30,000 for at least 263 athletes. This would be nearly $7.9 million in the trust to be split between male and female athletes equally through Title IX as they wish. Again, there is no maximum, so it's easy to see how this would make an elite new subdivision of the most influential universities. It is a brave new world.
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