NCAA (finally!) makes NIL proposal

The NCAA has finally made a NIL proposal that might be logical and good, rather than try and starve their most important commodity of their most important commodity – money.

While a letter from the NCAA’s new president Charlie Barker didn’t implicitly say this, he’s obviously fed up with the lines that Mark Emmert had trotted out about the fact that scholarships should be enough for a kid to want to play D-I sports. He’s also noticed that the govermental powers-that-be are not falling over themselves to help the NCAA in their antitrust scheme, either.

In the letter, he put forward a proposal that all D-I schools should be required to invest no less than $30,000 in an educational trust fund at least 50% of its athletes. In other words, kids are getting paid a somewhat logical amount of attend university – $120,000 on a four-year degree, to be split evenly between women and men, per Title IX agreements.

Also, schools can enter into NIL deals directly with athletes, meaning that both sides can ‘cash in’ on the stars (also helps with recruiting via the transfer portal, too!)

The D-I schools would have to enter an agreement with the NCAA on this, therefore creating a new subdivision, with better rules on NIL than previously put out.

Dan Wolken, a writer for USA Today said that it was an attempt by the NCAA to ‘stave off a collective bargaining agreement’. He noted on Twitter: “Florida (just picked a random big school) has roughly 500 athletes. If the minimum requirement is half get the $30k that’s 250 x $30,000 = $7.5 million. It’s an insult to our intelligence to cast this as a game changer. It’s an attempt to stave off collective bargaining”.

Baker also noted that athletic budgets in Division I range from $5 million and $250 million annually, with 59 schools spending over $100 million annually and another 32 spending over $50 million. He said 259 Division I schools, however, spend less than $50 million on their athletic programs”. He also noted that 98% of D-II and D-III schools spend less than $20 million on sports.

OUR TAKE

— Non-Power 5 schools and students who attend them are going to get hammered for this. Because they’ll want to pay the biggest revenue-earner (football), they’ll cut the non-revenue sports, and leave a lot of athletes out in the cold.

—  This is a panicked PR job by the NCAA while it again comes to The Capitol to talk to lawmakers. Note the last line: “It provides an operating model that the NCAA and its member institutions can incorporate into ongoing discussions with Congress about the future of college athletics”.