NCAA president Charlie Baker sent a letter to Division I schools today outlining a rough proposal for how to resolve…just about everything. There was no mention of Hamas or the national debt, but as far as college sports go, Baker and the NCAA are ready to take a big swing. If successful, the proposal would redefine the organizational structure governing college sports, keeping college sports mostly as we know them while catching up to how popular—and correspondingly profitable—college sports have become. It’s an audacious goal. It’s also probably necessary.
Here’s the letter, courtesy of Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger, and here’s a deep look from Dellenger on the proposal itself and the context surrounding it. We’re going to talk about the proposal at a high level, we’re going to talk about what led to it, and we’re going to talk about what college sports will look like if the proposal—in any similar form to this one—eventually reaches the finish line. We’re also going to share our own opinion on what Baker’s suggesting.
What’s Being Proposed
Baker’s proposal is three parts:
- “First, we should make it possible for all Division I colleges and universities to offer student-athletes any level of enhanced educational benefits they deem appropriate.” It’s a little hazy what this means, but my guess is that “enhanced educational benefits” include room and board, meal stipends, the cost of books, and other non-tuition costs associated with obtaining a college education. My guess is that what Baker is saying here is that the NCAA should give up on trying to parse what level of room and board is permissible and just let colleges do what they want. Would this lead to schools gaming the system? Read on.
- “Second, rules should change for any Division I school, at their choice, to enter into name, image and likeness licensing opportunities with their student-athletes.” Again, this is a little hazy, but at a minimum, Baker is saying schools should be allowed to create NIL offices in-house, rather than keeping them at arm’s length where they currently stand. Could schools just pay athletes to play, then? Again, read on.
- “Third, a subdivision comprised of institutions with the highest resources to invest in their student-athletes should be required to do two things: (1) Within the framework of Title IX, invest at least $30,000 per year into an enhanced educational trust fund for at least half of the institution’s eligible student-athletes. (2) Commit to work with NCAA staff and their peer institutions in this subdivision to create rules that may differ from the rules in place for the rest of Division I. Those rules could include a wide range of policies, such as scholarship commitment and roster size, recruitment, transfer or NIL.”
In short, what Baker’s proposing is something close to formalizing college football’s old Power Five/Group of Five divide, but allowing high-major and mid-major and low-major schools to all continue competing against one another inside Division I. Where Division I is currently bound by the same rules across all non-football sports, and where the FBS and FCS are each currently bound by their own specific rules within football, Baker seems to propose carving out a section of Division I where scholarship numbers can be different, and transfer rules can be different, and NIL rules can be different, but the SEC and the Big Ten don’t need to break away from the rest of the country to make this happen. Michigan can pay its football players six figures a year and still compete in a College Football Playoff against Appalachian State. Kentucky can pay its basketball players seven figures a year and still compete in the NCAA Tournament against Saint Peter’s. On the field, the rules would be the same. Off the field, schools could opt into a special subdivision more exclusive than the FBS in which they could give their high-value athletes more of the value those athletes generate. This is our impression of Baker’s very early-stage proposal.
Questions
What, exactly, is “an enhanced educational trust fund?” Is the idea here that schools can give money to athletes but in a way where it can only be used on education?
One guess would be that Baker’s proposal is trying to split up tax-free benefits, like scholarships, from taxed income, like NIL deals. Schools could administer both under this framework—schools could at long last pay their players—but we no longer have to argue about what a scholarship is worth. Schools can offer an education, and they can also offer cold, hard cash.
What about revenue sharing?
There’s an ongoing class action lawsuit related to revenue sharing, and a fear is that it could bankrupt the NCAA (the NCAA uses its NCAA Tournament revenue to finance nearly everything else it does). Dellenger makes clear in his reporting that this proposal does not include revenue sharing, and that the NCAA remains opposed to that model. Still, it’s not hard to see how the formalization of the power conference subdivision could lead to some sort of revenue sharing agreement. The sticky issues with revenue sharing have been that 1) most TV money works its way to schools through agreements set up by conferences, not through the NCAA, and 2) there is a lot more revenue in power conferences than out in mid-majordom. By giving the biggest-brand schools flexibility to make their own set of rules, this proposal could be seen as opening the door for the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC, and potentially the Big East to set up their own revenue-sharing agreements with athletes in certain sports.
Could non-football schools join the power conference subdivision?
I’m curious whether an FCS school playing FCS football could still be part of the special, monied subdivision within Division I. This is most obviously a question for the Big East, where UConn is an FBS independent in football, Villanova plays FCS football, and Butler and Georgetown play a special non-scholarship version of FCS football within the Pioneer League. Presumably, the Big East’s schools would want to pay their basketball players. They want to compete for national championships. They might not be able to do that if they’re required to also compete at the highest level in football. Similar questions exist for bigtime hockey schools, though, and for certain schools excellent in other niche sports, especially as those sports’ popularity seems to grow.
Can schools just pay their athletes to play now?
Under this framework, it would certainly seem to be the case. There’d still be some practicalities to work out—a big question will remain whether an NIL payment has to really include something like an advertising appearance or whether it can just be a pass-through apparatus for a payment to an athlete to play—but it seems that the NCAA is abandoning amateurism.
Does this take the ball out of Congress’s hands?
Not entirely, but if this works, it will drastically reduce what’s left for Congress to handle. The biggest need legally would be some clarification on employment, and most likely a carveout class of employee with rules tailored to being a high-level college football player (or Caitlin Clark, or something else similar). That’s a lot smaller scope than what school presidents and athletic directors have been lobbying Congress to take.
How We Got Here
We’ve called this “Baker’s proposal” a lot, and we want to be clear that this wasn’t Charlie Baker sitting in his office furiously scribbling, like we might picture Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence. This was more like how James Madison wrote the Constitution. There was a committee and there were other committees and there is and was a lot of research and tacit negotiation going on throughout the world of college sports. There’s more of that to come, too. This is a framework. One day, we will learn whether Baker was the architect or the messenger, but it is under his leadership that the NCAA has brought this concept to the public.
Despite only being a framework, this is the latest step in a massive pivot by the NCAA. Charlie Baker has only been in office for eight months. Mark Emmert was in this job for twelve and a half years. During Emmert’s tenure, the NCAA seemed to try to hold the line and force an increasingly farcical vision of college sports upon the industry, relenting only under legal pressure. Baker’s tenure seems, in this proposal, geared towards keeping the NCAA around, and preventing the brief stint of college sports anarchy that would likely follow schools breaking away from the NCAA.
The proposal seems to try to get rid of all the jumping through hoops. Gone would be the pay-to-play structure where schools can’t pay players but donors can, where players must perform some nominal work to receive NIL money but it’s an unenforceable requirement, where Division I has a “level playing field” but Fairleigh Dickinson’s showers are also its film room while LSU’s football facility includes a centrifuge used for plasma therapy. At its surface, the proposal seems to try to split the middle between starting over from scratch and continuing so many self-contradictory charades.
The Future of College Sports
This is where we get into opinion, diverging from trying to stick to analysis.
This seems great. This all seems great. This feels like a breakthrough. There is so much distance left to cover, but for the first time in a very long time, it feels like we might be able to have college sports as we know them without violating the spirit of employment laws and the idea of free and fair markets. Schools will have the leeway to maximize what their athletics teams do. Athletes will be able to receive over-the-table payments for their spectacular talent and work. It’s all still tied to education, and in direct fashion.
There will be problems, and it is always hard to draw a line in the middle of something as gray as the transition from the MAC to the Mountain West to the SEC. But this is hopeful.
My personal favorite part of the proposal—the idea I find most elegant—is that schools wouldn’t have to set up the educational trust fund for all of their athletes. It’s only half. Half is still a lot, especially accounting for Title IX rules—I believe Iowa State offers the equivalent of 250 full athletic scholarships, but setting up trust funds to cover football (85) and men’s basketball (13) alone would require 196 of them across all sports—but this allows schools to avoid having to choose between treating golfers like football players or football players like golfers. To compete at the highest level in football or men’s basketball, schools wouldn’t have to jettison smaller sports. A very real concern surrounding various pay-to-play proposals is that they would have to apply to all Division I athletes equally. The flexibility within this proposal—along with the agency it offers schools, the brands which hold the true power—is brilliant. Again, I know there will be problems, and I know this won’t work perfectly, but this is the most heartening idea for college sports in a long, long time.
What About the NIT?
At least one of our readers is going to be very interested in what this means for the NIT, and the short version is that it probably doesn’t mean anything at all. It is really hard to find a direct impact of this on the NIT. I suppose it’s likely to keep the NCAA Tournament around, which is probably disappointing news for the radicals. I don’t think there was a great path towards the NIT regaining supremacy before this, though, and since the NCAA owns the NIT right now, it’s probably best for the NIT if the NCAA still exists. The NIT is facing headwinds of its own, but the complete dissolution of Division I would seem like a bad development for an overmatched movement trying to reestablish the NIT’s prestige.
