At times heated, the money debate was “the elephant in the room,” says ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, who is also a member of the NCAA’s constitution and transformation committees.
There are many elephants in the room: scholarship regulations, automatic qualifiers for NCAA championships and revenue-sharing models.
For many programs, the NCAA designates scholarships to each team to parcel over a certain amount of roster spots. While football gets 85 full scholarships, baseball receives 11.7 to spread across a roster size of 27. In swimming, men’s teams get 9.9 scholarships over an average roster size of 30—a 3-to-1 tuition-to-scholarship ratio that is normal among Olympic sports.
At an NCAA convention in 1976, smaller programs wanted to implement need-based athletic aid, eliminating scholarships for athletes whose families were financially stable enough to afford college. The upper tier of programs argued against the movement. After lengthy debate, the proposal was defeated by a slim margin, 120–112. Now, the two groups are again at odds, as some of the sport’s most powerful people are fighting to expand scholarships.
Greg Sankey, who is presiding over the NCAA’s most powerful league (the SEC) and co-chairing the NCAA transformation committee, has publicly expressed the Power 5 should have more autonomy to create scholarship legislation that benefits athletes more. Last year, NCAA governance committees refused to adopt at least two pieces of SEC-sponsored legislation involving an expansion of aid, eliciting frustration from the conference and its leaders.
“There is a need to look at that,” Sankey says. “At Division I, we have some important questions to ask and answer, which likely produces some difficult conversations. The question about finances goes right back to how do you support young people first, and I think that has to be inherent.”
In the SEC, many administrators believe the conference can afford and should provide every athlete with a full scholarship, eliminating the partial scholarships that exist in many Olympic sports. Not all schools or leagues—even those in the Power 5—can afford to offer full aid to their more than 300 athletes. The SEC distributed an extra $23 million to its members last year after borrowing the money against a new television deal the conference signed with ESPN, rumored to be worth nearly a half-billion dollars.
But scholarship aid isn’t the only item some Power 5 conference officials want to change. The NCAA transformation process is expected to produce a streamlined rulebook and deregulation of dozens of policies. The rulebook over the years has grown with reactionary legislation, and the NCAA has faced several lawsuits partly because rules implemented to govern competitive equity made it difficult to modernize, says Morehead.
Sankey says campuses and conferences will have “more responsibility” as it relates to rulemaking. Nonessential policies may go away completely or be left up to leagues. Those include rules over countable staff members, for instance, and arbitrary recruiting bylaws policing phone calls and messages to prospects.
“If Alabama makes an extra $5 million and they can afford to bring on three more sports psychologists, they should be able to,” says Kendall Spencer, an NCAA athlete turned attorney who sits on the transformation committee. “Division I has gotten very big. It’s only a problem if you have a one-size-fits-all model.”
Another issue is what’s not in the rewritten constitution: There is no guarantee of automatic qualifiers for NCAA championships and no revenue-sharing model, two of the most significant items for the lower subsections of Division I.
“It’s not as if those things are going away, but they are on the table to be discussed,” Horizon League commissioner Julie Roe Lach says. “Those are pretty darn important to everyone in the division.”
Each Division I conference champion, or tournament champion, earns an automatic bid into NCAA-sanctioned championship events, most notably the D-I men’s basketball tournament, the NCAA’s only true moneymaker (roughly $900 million in annual revenue). Conferences earn distribution units largely based around their qualifying teams (1) advancing in the tournament, (2) sponsoring the most sports and (3) offering the maximum number of scholarships. Leagues then distribute the units to their members.
If the revenue distribution from automatic qualifying bids and distribution units stops or slows, the benefits that schools provide athletes are at stake, says Downer, the athletic director at FCS Saint Francis (PA), a school with an athletic budget of about $16 million. St. Francis earns about $600,000 in NCAA distribution each year, or roughly 4% of its budget. This past year, the school received a bonus of sorts: $52,000 in grant money from the CFP. It helped with book scholarships for football players. “There is a misconception that this money is going to salaries and facilities,” Downer says. “The reality is, on this level, it’s designed to benefit the student-athlete.”
Eliminating automatic qualifier (AQ) bids, as well as changing the revenue distribution model, is a recipe for a political backlash. Automatic qualifiers are a way to keep Olympic sports growing, says DeBoer. The impact of their elimination would be “dramatic,” she says, and would result in the discontinuation of some programs. And imagine the reaction from local or national lawmakers whose state universities are no longer playing for a chance at the Big Dance, says one administrator. Another asks, what about the historically Black conferences?
Discussions of eliminating AQ bids would produce a “bloody battle” among administrators, says Amy Perko, executive director of the Knight Commission, an independent group that promotes educational reforms in college sports.
“I think the concept of every conference having AQs into every championship, I think it bears scrutiny,” Bowlsby says. “I’m not suggesting it’s going to change in every situation, but there are an awful lot of conferences chasing the holy grail of access and money. If automatic qualification into the basketball tournament is your most important [issue], that’s fine, but you’d have to cede control in other areas.”
One league commissioner, granted anonymity, says he has “100% confidence” in the revenue-sharing model changing to incorporate the women’s basketball tournament. Conferences would earn units based on qualifying teams and their success not just in the men’s tournament but the women’s, as well.
Some, like McMillen, believe now is the time to change the AQ structure. Given the large number of D-I conferences, he says stripping AQ bids would allow leagues to consolidate, a move that would save money and create more regional rivalries. Currently, leagues are hesitant to consolidate, for fear of losing their AQ bid.
“Is there some magic to having 32 conferences? No,” McMillen says. “The whole AQ thing breeds inefficiency.”
Each year, at least a dozen automatic qualifiers take spots that could go to major conference programs who are on the bubble and left out, an issue where “the tension is mounting,” says one Power 5 athletic director. “We are letting anyone into Division I from Division II and all the sudden that school gets a shot at the tournament over an eighth-placed SEC team?”
An all–Power 5 NCAA tournament, suggested recently by West Virginia men’s coach Bob Huggins, is an idea that has elicited scowls. The NCAA tournament’s popularity is at least partially built on the propensity to produce upsets—the charm of watching a small conference Cinderella march past a big-name program.
To some, it rings alarms of antitrust—an unsettling word for the NCAA’s beleaguered leadership, villainized recently in the courts and Congress over antitrust matters. An all–Power 5 tournament “reeks of professional league, whether or not the athletes are paid,” says Gabe Feldman, a Tulane sports law professor and expert on NCAA matters.
In professional sports, salary caps bring competitive equity. With each year, college is breaking free of legislation that keeps the moneymakers from growing too big. “I’ve heard commissioners at the highest level saying we are subsidizing others at D-I. They’re not wrong,” says Perko.
The Knight Commission has proposed a revenue-sharing model that would incorporate the women’s basketball tournament in the formula while implementing caps for spending such revenue on salaries and facility upgrades. It also proposed a new model for CFP revenue distribution that would restrict schools and leagues in the way it uses the money, requiring a large chunk to be spent on athlete health and well-being. Inevitable Playoff expansion could double the $460 million the CFP currently generates.
“What I see coming with [Playoff] expansion is student athletes saying, ‘Where’s our share?’” says Maryland AD Damon Evans, who sits on the transformation committee. “The conversations aren’t always going to be the easiest when dealing with money. We [Power 5] want this and they [other subdivisions] want that. Those are the conversations that will be had and hopefully we’ll come up with solutions.”
Currently, each Division I conference champion, or tournament champion, earns an automatic bid into NCAA-sanctioned championship events.
Charlie Nye/USA TODAY NETWORK
Given the Supreme Court’s NCAA v. Alston ruling, NIL-based recruiting inducements and a transfer portal that has evolved into a free agency waiver wire, college athletics seems bound to diverge from NCAA membership. At its end, says McMillen, is an employee-employer relationship between athlete and school, where collective bargaining, revenue-sharing and contracts exist.
College sports can either get in front of this movement or, as with NIL, be at the mercy of state laws, the courts or Congress itself, McMillen suggests. “Right now about 90% of my schools would resist, but you could have a whole division of college sports and run it like a business,” he says.
Several college officials feel similarly. Evans, who sits on the transformation committee, says it’s time for decisive action and wholesale changes, to appease Congress and satisfy the athletes themselves.
“There is a lot of talk about pay for play,” says Evans. “Are we doing right by student-athletes when you see the dollars in our industry continue to grow? This snowball has been coming down the hill and we’ve let the snowball run us over once.”
Huchthausen says there is an inherent tension and conflict that exists in college sports being part of higher education—a hugely commercial enterprise situated in the construct of academia. Administrators are walking a tightrope, she says, and changing rules doesn’t solve that problem.
“I don’t know what really keeps our friends at Alabama and Oklahoma [from] going to CBS and saying, ‘We’re going to do our own thing and you’re going to follow us,’” says Downer, the FCS AD. “This exercise we’re doing right now, we’re laying the table for that.”
Mitchell, the former Olympic swimmer at Texas and athletic director at Division III Caltech, isn’t one who is fearful of that change. D-II and D-III would have to find other avenues to fund their championships, but so be it.
“The main thing coming out of this seems to be the realization that the divisions are quite different and need not be tethered together to serve their unique needs,” she says. “College presidents have allowed this to happen—the salaries, the competitive egos. And don’t get me wrong, I love watching college football. But who’s really going to fix it?”
That’s up to the transformation committee. Here in Indianapolis, the committee’s real work begins after the convention; a spring and summer’s worth of meetings is expected to produce an outcome by August.
The latest installment of the elite’s power grab harkens back to nearly 50 years ago. In attendance at the 1978 convention, Sports Illustrated’s John Underwood wrote, “What the big football schools want is … autonomy.”
Soon, they will have more of it than ever before. Why? Because money is the bigest bargaining chip. And in this poker game, one group holds an unbeatable hand.
“It’s not off the table that the Power 5 will walk,” says one Group of 5 athletic director. “It’s going to get contentious. If the P5 goes into this, and FBS too, thinking they’ve got to win everything and have zero give-and-take, does it get down to, ‘We’re going to take our ball and go home’?”
