An Extraordinary Moment in College Sports.
For better or worse, it's history
Thank you for reading The Dope. Please take advantage of our best offer and become a Paid subscriber today! It allows us to do our work.
What went down this week in the universe of college sports felt inevitable. The NCAA had been checkmated years ago by a legal process that was 100 percent going against it. The lawsuits were too strong, the association’s response too lame, the outcome already written. We’ve talked about all this.
But make no mistake: This is a massive moment even if you could see it coming. Moving into a space in which college athletes are paid directly by the schools that recruit them, with athletic department budgets and allowances for precisely that purpose — it’s a different universe. There’s no going back.
There will be more to come, of course. But here, in a nutshell, is what just happened:
The NCAA and its Power 5 conferences — the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC and Pac-12 — agreed to start paying their athletes. Each school in those conferences will spend about $20 million per year to do it.
In addition, the NCAA is offering to settle claims with current and former athletes by paying out a $2.7 billion-with-a-B pool of cash over a 10-year period.
Every athlete in the affected classes, from current-day back to 2016, will receive a base payout that is the same.
Some athletes will then receive extra settlement payments, using formulas created by a sports economist that take into account things like relative renown (recruiting star ratings, etc.), how much they played in college, impact on their respective teams, etc.
This part sounds squishy and subject to a hard-target review. But the idea is that, as we already know, college athletes are not created equal — and these extra payouts could be worth “tens of thousands or over a hundred thousand dollars” to those at the top of the list, according to one attorney involved in the settlement.
These extra payouts take into account the same kinds of factors on which a 2024 athlete might be judged while being plied with NIL money. NIL stands for name, image and likeness, and it was the NCAA’s hasty and ill-considered response to being on the brink of losing these lawsuits a couple of years ago.
Under the NIL system, businesses, some legit and some shadow, have basically shoveled cash in the form of “endorsement money” to star athletes to get them to attend or transfer to one school or another.
We used to call this boosterism, and back then it involved Tommy QB taking a job at the local car dealership, for which he got paid regularly but was never actually asked to show up for work.
Those were the “good old days.”
So yes, amateurism is smack dead. In fairness, it had been bleeding out for some time — decades, really, going back to the 1960s and ‘70s, when football boosters first figured out that it was just easier to tuck envelopes filled with cash into Tommy QB’s jacket pockets during the alumni meet-’n-greet. (Tommy QB has had a pretty good run, obviously.)
Still, the announcement of the NCAA’s settlement on three pending court cases is rather stunning. Directly paying athletes is what the organization said it would never do, as college sports were long proffered as amateur endeavors.
Plenty of gray-hairs through the years have happily taken up that chorus. “Their scholarships are payment enough!” they’d bleat, as if being a star player on a team that drives $100 million in revenue is the same as manning lead tuba in the marching band.
In reality, the premier jocks have been getting paid forever; it was simply under the table. Without question, though, most players didn’t get paid. They got squat. And in that crooked way, college sports were amateur for most people for quite a long time.
It’s maybe too easy now to look over our shoulder at that era and realize how stupid it was. For the most part, though, college fans were content with a system whose corruption was hidden from view.
In that sense, this past week really is a jolt, especially because you can’t put this genie back in the bottle. College athletes will henceforth be paid. That’s simply the way it’s going to be. And since schools are free to divvy up that $20 million annual payout any way they like, there will still be programs that recruit first and foremost on how much of the money they’re willing to give to a single athlete or a couple of five-star studs.
The NCAA’s settlement does not answer the question of whether college athletes are employees, by the way. That’s for another day and another set of court cases. What the settlement does, for those who agree to it, is wipe out most other claims they might make, including antitrust claims. It’s a valuable little 13-page document.
Oh: The NCAA also had to include Notre Dame in the process, since Notre Dame is a massive-money program that (mostly) doesn’t have a conference. In turn, Notre Dame’s president agreed to the settlement, but decided to go the righteous route publicly and pretend his school doesn’t make sure its athletes are, ahem, well cared for.
"The settlement, though undesirable in many respects and promising only temporary stability, is necessary to avoid what would be the bankruptcy of college athletics," Notre Dame president John I. Jenkins intoned. "To save the great American institution of college sports, Congress must pass legislation that will preempt the current patchwork of state laws; establish that our athletes are not employees, but students seeking college degrees; and provide protection from further antitrust lawsuits that will allow colleges to make and enforce rules that will protect our student-athletes and help ensure competitive equity among our teams."
The great American institution of college sports…Athletes are not employees…Students seeking college degrees. Yes, John I. Jenkins was in fact born in 1953.
Still, I can appreciate the shoutout to a lost generation, a time when colleges made massive bank on the backs of their athletes but refused to share any of it. (After all, you’re getting a scholarship, kid. Shut up and play.) It was once called amateurism. This was a big death, this one.
Reggie Bush was ahead of his time.
The ghost of Jim Thorpe shakes his head in disbelief…