You're listening to the Back Home Network presented by Home
Field Apparel. Welcome back to Crimson Cast,
Galen Clavier joining you. It is May 30th, Thursday.
As we get ready to wrap this month up.
Kind of hard to believe Beautiful down here though.
In Bloomington about 70° today and looking forward to some fun
times this summer. Great event last night for all.
From all accounts at at Huber's as IU turning one of their big
athletic doning or donating events into a full blown NIL
event, that's smart, especially with what we're going to be
talking about today. That's the way things are going.
So some of you got a chance to go to that.
And I did not. Unfortunately, I was actually at
an award ceremony. I use sports media, was up for
an award for best live event production of the Indiana Purdue
women's basketball game actually from earlier this year.
Didn't win, but honored to be nominated.
And certainly everybody involved, I think, was very
proud of the fact that the work has been recognized.
So anyway, hope that those of you who are at the Huber's event
really had a great time and looking forward to some other
NIL events throughout the course of the year.
Or at least. The course of the summer as we
wrap up for fall. Some great quotes, especially
from Coach Sig. If you haven't had a chance to
go check those out. We we've landed the guy who not
only seems to know how to coach football, but is is really good
with comedic timing. I'm enjoying everything that I'm
seeing out of him so far. So we're going to talk today.
I'm doing a multi part episode where we talk through everything
that's going on with this NCAA settlement, the house
settlement, as there's a ton. To cover, there's a ton of
things and. I've gotten a lot of questions
from those of you out there about like what the heck's going
on? What should we be thinking
about? What does this mean?
Does college athletics ending as we know it?
So I'm going to try to tackle all this.
I'm not going to do it all at once.
I'm going to try to tackle it in bite sized chunks.
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dropping beginning of next week. Plan is to have Ben Portnoy from
Sports Business Journal, IU alum on at some point next week as
well to talk through some of these items.
Ben's right there on the ground. He's actually down at SEC
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All right, let's jump into it. I think what we're going to do,
I want to start off with a little bit of an overview of
what we're talking about with this house settlement.
I think most of you have for the most part kept track of of
what's going on here, but essentially just to give you a
Cliff Notes version and catch you up on things.
What's going to? Happen and this has been voted
on and agreed to by not just the NCAA council, but also the
conferences involved. And that's an important thing.
There's going to be a $2.8 billion settlement back damages
to former athletes as well as a revenue sharing model for
athletes in the future based around name, image and likeness.
And there's a lot of elements to this that are optimistic, I
think would be the best way that I would put it on the part of
college sports leaders. And so I think it's important
that we view the terms of the settlement in terms of moving
forward with some skepticism. And I will try to go over the
course of the next few episodes, dig into exactly why I feel that
way. But just to give you kind of a a
reset on what happened with this entire case.
And in case you're not familiar with how all this got to be.
So back in 2020, there was a former Arizona State swimmer
named Grant House. Who joined together with some
other former players, including Sedona Prince, who played
basketball for Oregon, Dwayne Carter, who played football at
Duke. There were a couple of other
folks, NIA Harrison, who played Sanford soccer at Stanford.
They sued the NCAA and essentially said, you know, the
NCAA suddenly started allowing NIL payments to athletes in
2021. We've talked about that
extensively on this show. And so these athletes were like,
well, wait a minute, we just graduated or we're just getting
ready to graduate. We haven't been allowed to take
advantage of this. And so they essentially sued the
NCAA for back damages, saying, well.
This was a core tenet of your rules.
You claimed that we couldn't earn money off of this and we
would lose eligibility if we did.
Now you're just telling people, yeah, it's fine, go ahead, earn
money off of it, no big deal. That's not fair.
So they sue. And they, they're, they're not
winning per SE, but they're winning in as much as the NCAA
has been so afraid, not just of the $2.8 billion in claimed
damages, but in the reality that they could have, those could
have been trouble damages, which of course, in, in these kinds of
cases is a possibility where you can actually get three times the
amount that you're suing for in, in, in trouble damages.
And so that's why you're seeing this settlement is because the
NCAA, if they had had that situation transpire, might have
just ceased to exist as an organization.
And a lot of people have said, well, why didn't they just put
the NCAA out of its misery? And I think it's, you know, this
is one of the key points I want to start with.
The whole reason that there's a settlement to begin with is
because, A, the NCAA and its member institutions want to try
to maintain some semblance of their current system.
But B, athletes, despite what you might think, don't really
want to destroy the NCAA or destroy college athletics
because that's where the money is coming from.
So, you know, it's, it's kind of like, you know, if someone owes
you a ton of money and then they declare bankruptcy, well, you're
not getting any of that money back.
So you've kind of played yourself at that point.
If you force that business out of business and into bankruptcy
because you're going to get pennies, if at all, on what your
original amount was that you were looking for, that you felt
like you needed. So so you get this lawsuit.
And actually we had a good question from Robbie Malkinson
that I'll start with here. Robbie asked, you know, why was
it that the cut off mark was 2016 for the former players who
deserve payback or payoff of revenue sharing rather than
going further back? And I believe the answer to that
is that, you know, because the lawsuits were filed in 2021 ish
2020 regarding this, what they did was they basically took all
the athletes that were involved in the lawsuit based upon the
timetable where NIL was suddenly allowed.
And they said, well, you know, nobody who was an athlete in
college that completed their eligibility at a point where NIL
was not on the table can really make a claim to being, you know,
aggrieved or having been kept from money.
That might have been something that they were entitled to,
which I think is dubious in and of itself.
But essentially they said, you know, if you started school in
2016 and you were to graduate, your eligibility ran out in 2020
or 2021. You have a, you have a beef
here. You have a complaint that you
were deprived the opportunity to make money.
So they started it there essentially saying if you, if
you, if you were a freshman in 2016 or later, you were deprived
of potentially having an IL as part of your financial
incentivization at the collegiate level.
But before that, it was like essentially too early.
So that's why it's it's really it really has to do with when
the NCAA said this is something that we're allowing and then
they backdated it based upon who might have been eligible for it
in terms of what their current eligibility was at that point in
time. That isn't to say that athletes
prior to 2016 shouldn't, you know, be able, I think to say,
wait, we really should have been given this consideration.
But then essentially there's no cut off.
And so I think that that's why this cut off was was
acknowledged. And I think from a court
perspective, they're probably not comfortable with saying,
well, you know, this wasn't even a possibility if you graduated
in say 2019, but we still should consider you.
I don't think they wanted to go that direction.
So that's why that was set up the way that it was the
settlement. As it's, as it's currently been
laid out, it's a $2.8 billion payment that has to be paid out
over the course of ten years. So, you know, roughly two $280
million a year and what they're going to do, the way that this
payment works out is the NCAA is using a reserve fund, which is,
you know, from the profits the NCAA earns, which the fact that
the NCAA earns profits is an interesting problem in and of
itself, but we could talk about that at another time.
But that's going to pay for 40% of the 2.8 billion.
And so the NCAA is basically taking the extra money that
they've earned off of what is primarily the NCAA men's
basketball tournament television contract money, and they're
applying that to pay 40% of this 2.8 billion.
So, you know, about 1.41 point 5 or 1.3 billion, somewhere in
that range will come from that. I guess it'd be closer to 1.2
billion, whatever. I can't do math.
The other 60% of this payout is actually coming from the
conferences. Now this is I think an
interesting one in terms of how this all sets up and there was
some confusion and some argumentation about this.
The power conference schools which are which right now is the
schools that have belonged in the last few years to the ACCSEC
Big 10, Big 12 and PAC 12 are paying 40% of the remain of of
the remainder of the amount of money which means like for.
A school like Indiana, you're going to probably be paying
somewhere between 1:00 to $2,000,000 per year for the next
decade. That will go specifically to
paying down this settlement. That's also going to impact the
amount of money that the conferences are earning off of
the NCAA March Madness tournament revenues.
So you know the way that that works.
That's a complicated system, but essentially conferences get paid
based upon the number of units that their teams generate in the
tournament. A unit is every round that
you're in. So if you've got five teams in
the first round of the tournament, you get 5 units.
If you've got three teams in the second round of the tournament,
you get three additional units, which is why it's always good to
have your teams advancing in the NCAA tournament.
So money's coming out of that as well then?
The. You know, that money is coming
at least in part by the other schools that are in Division
One. So you're talking about the
Group of Five, which is, you know, like Ball State or
Appalachian State or East Carolina and then non FBS
schools. So basically schools that don't
have football, Xavier, Georgetown, that technically
Georgetown does have football there.
There's other schools like that that don't have football, but
are, you know, like there's a lot of teams in the Big East
that would fall into that category.
So. What you're dealing with is a
little bit of disproportionality in that even though a lot of
this money is going to end up going to football and basketball
players, realistically speaking. A lot of the money in terms of
what's going to the settlement is going to be coming from
conferences that don't make that much money compared to the Power
5. So this is an interesting
aspect. And, you know, there's an
interesting element to this. And this is actually a question
asked by Pitt Hoosier. Pitt Hoosier asks.
The NCAA makes billions from the NCAA basketball tournament.
If the NCAA goes away and conferences capture March
Madness money, does that rebalance the importance of
basketball schools and future realignment?
So let me back up there for a second and and just say this.
There was an interesting article by Dan Wetzel, which I would
recommend everybody check out. And this was from basically
about eight days ago. In fact, I'm going to share it
here on the screen. For those of you who are
watching. On YouTube.
So the the way that this sets up essentially is as follows when
when you're looking at the way in which you know these things
meter out. One of the big questions for a
while has been how and what happens to the NCAA S March
Madness tournament if the NCAA goes away.
There's been a lot of talk about the power conferences saying,
well, gosh, we think we should have that money as opposed to it
being distributed to the entire NCAA membership.
A lot of people have been worried that the power
conferences will just kill off what we know is March Madness
and create something that is just within their own universe
of teams. Wetzel makes an interesting
point which I'm going to, I'm going to zoom into here, which
is essentially the big schools and big conferences have about
2.1 billion reasons to stay put and keep both the NCAA and the
other 27 Division One conferences alive and viable.
Because you know, the NCAA is picking up 1.1 billion of the
tab. And then of the remaining 1.65
billion, the Power 5 conferences have to pay 664,000,000.
The remaining 27 leagues will cover 990,000,000.
And So what you're ending up with is a situation that even
though 85% of the settlement of money goes to football players,
you'll have schools that are essentially not football schools
helping to pay into that. But what that might end up doing
is essentially saying, well, for the next 10 years, the power
conferences have no impetus. To get rid of the NCAA as an
organizing entity, they have no impetus to try to kill off the
smaller leagues or have them drop out of the NCAA because.
As long as they're alive, they're going to be paying
elements of that settlement and that means that's money that's
not coming out of the power conference teams or conferences
and so that. Is essentially, I think it's an
interesting idea because I think ultimately what it means is the
NCAA tournament is probably going to be just fine the way
that it is. It might, however, mean that you
get a few more teams in the NCAA because as that.
Contract gets looked at, and since we're looking at 10 years
from I think next year you're talking about 20342035.
The NCAA, when they renegotiate, may want to add some teams to
the NCAA tournament to generate additional revenue, since more
teams means more games and more games means more inventory.
So this is. How the financial structures of
this are working out now to to Pitt Hoosier's question about
does that rebalance the important of basketball and
basketball schools and future realignment.
It probably doesn't in terms of the individual conferences.
And I think, you know, one of the big things to keep in mind
and we'll get to this as we get into the next aspect of this
settlement. Is ultimately the best
basketball only schools or the best schools where it's, you
know, where there's no football, just don't make nearly enough
revenue to make it worth the while of the conferences that
are comprised of football playing schools to allow them
in. Part of it is the amount of
money you just make off of football straight up, but part
of it is, you know, you need extra inventory for television.
I know you you're all going to probably by the time I get done
with these podcasts hate, but I keep talking about inventory and
all of that. You're like, what about what
about the games? What about the pageantry?
I understand all of that, but what I what I'm, what I want to
get across to you is you have to look at this stuff in dollars
and cents and what is valuable. And ultimately, football drives
so much in terms of advertising revenue, in terms of ticket
sales, in terms of attention, in terms of, you know, what draws
eyeballs to television. And that is the game right now.
You know, basketball is certainly not unpopular.
And when you get something like March Madness, it does draw, you
know, draws advertisers, it draws ratings.
But, you know, most college basketball games independently
just don't draw that much in terms of ratings.
And you see that across the board.
It's not something limited to college basketball.
I mean, college, you know, women's college basketball has
the same thing. The WNBA has the same thing.
Even NBA games, outside of really important playoff games,
don't really get anywhere close to their football counterparts.
And so I don't think that I think that the the football
schools that play basketball will continue to be important
because they do draw ratings. Indiana is a good example of a
school that falls into that category.
But if you're not playing football and you're not
competitive in football, I'm not sure how much you're going to
matter in terms of the big scheme of.
Things moving forward. So these are some things to keep
in mind as far as all that's concerned.
So let's talk about the rest of this settlement and, and where
it goes. So let me share my screen with
you once again because I think that this is worth checking out
if you look at this article. So that this future revenue
sharing structure, this proposal that's been voted on and agreed
to by the conferences and by the NCAA, creates a spending cap of
roughly no more than $22 million annually for each university,
which is similar to salary caps used by professional leagues.
The 22% figure represents the That's 22% of their 22 million.
22% of that is the average meteorites ticket sales and
sponsorship revenue of each power conference school.
So the average power conference school generates about $100
million in annual revenue stream.
So they basically said, let's take 22% of that, that will be
the cap that a school can pay in terms of of NIL.
And what's going to be interesting with all of this,
obviously, and, and there's a lot more details here.
I'm just kind of skimming over the basics in this episode.
What's going to be interesting in all of that is a.
You know. Will that rise or fall as more
revenue is generated? The answer is probably yes.
The other thing, though, is, you know, that's a cap on what
schools are going to be able to directly pay.
And that's the other big wrinkle here is that up to this point,
the NCAA and its member schools have tried to pursue this
approach, that the only money that can come in for NIL has to
be from outside sources. And the.
Idea was that we want to limit this to independent businesses
communicating and and striking deals with individual athletes.
What's happened in reality is you've had these NIL collectives
pop up all over the country, many of whom are working
directly with the athletic departments.
And so it's essentially like a separate third party, but it's
operating specifically within the interests of coaches and
within the interests of athletic directors, which while you know
by the letter that works with what the NCAA said you could do,
the spirit of it is certainly not what the NCAA intended.
What this settlement is doing is essentially it's removing most
of the hypocrisy and the the lack of consistency within that
arrangement to now schools are going to be able to directly pay
athletes. And I think to some degree the
idea is that they're going to bring their NIL operations in
house, but maybe not. And, and, you know, I think the
idea was, OK, we want to get these NIL collectives under
control has been the argument from a lot of people in the
NCAA. But there's really no way for
the NCAA to police what collectives do down the line.
And what's going to be interesting is this $22 million
figure, A, there's going to be several universities.
They're going to be like, we're not going to pay all of that.
You know, we're only going to pay a proportion of it.
For some of the smaller schools. It's it's probably an
impossibility because, you know, we mentioned that that $100
million figure per school is the average, which means there's at
least, you know, close to 50% of schools are earning under the
average and it's probably more like 60 or 70%.
This is where your statistics things.
Your statistics ideas come in handy if you understand the
difference between mean and median.
Excuse. Me, yeah, that's right.
Mean and median. Took me a second to remember it
as well. You know, high numbers skew from
a revenue perspective. The amount of money Texas, Ohio
State, Michigan bring in is going to skew your average way
high compared to what like a Max school brings in or a Conference
USA school. So you're going to have a lot of
schools within the top level of college sports that aren't going
to. Pay the full 22 million, but
you're going to have a lot of schools.
They're not. They're going to look at that 22
million is like that's the floor.
Like, of course we're going to pay the full 22 million.
And we're still. Going to use our collective
money from outside to bolster that and this is probably the
the biggest wrinkle that I would anticipate is going to create
problems down the line like this.
I this, the more I look at this settlement, the idea that
schools are going to be satisfied without some kind of
binding top end limit that they cannot exceed, the idea that
schools are going to be satisfied with being like, well,
we got to stop here because the NCAA says we do.
They will find a way around that.
And so that's going to be a really fascinating thing to
watch as as we see this whole thing develop because ultimately
if we've if we figured anything out and I think this the the way
the collectives exploded after the 2021 change.
By the NCAA to allow name, image and likeness.
If that has demonstrated anything to us over time, it's
that. Schools will press every single
advantage they can if they think that it means that they're going
to get an advantage in terms of procuring players.
When that's been the case for decades, you know this is.
Where a lot. Of the foolishness around Should
we pay athletes or not? It's like athletes have been
getting paid for decades, many of them under the table.
Not by every school, but by most competitive schools.
And so the idea that, oh, we're going to put this this limit out
there and nobody's going to exceed it.
It that sounds fanciful to me. I don't think that that's
actually what's going to happen. So we'll have to see what
happens with all of that. But that will be one of the big
trip wires on all of this as we move forward.
I'm going to delve into that a lot more as we get further into
this podcast series. The other two things that I
think are noteworthy out of this settlement, one of them is this
idea that is part of the settlement.
Athletes are still not considered employees.
And according to the settlement, the athletes that are suing are
going to essentially cease fighting the NCAA.
When it comes to lobbying on the idea that, you know, the NCAA
and its member schools want an antitrust exemption, to be able
to say essentially, our business is different, we should not have
to classify athletes as employees.
Henceforth, Congress, please give us an antitrust exemption
so that we can continue to do essentially what we've been
doing. Like, look, hey, we're paying
players now. That should be enough, but we
don't want them classified as employees.
That doesn't seem like it's going to bear a lot of fruit.
I have a real hard time right now, and we've been saying this
for three years now, I have a real hard time seeing Congress
ever giving the NCAA an antitrust exemption because
ultimately there's not really a good argument for it.
Like the the the argument from colleges and universities right
now, from best I can tell is we need an antitrust exemption
because we don't want to call athletes employees.
We're going to be paying athletes directly for name,
image and likeness. We're not paying them to be
athletes. We're just paying them based
upon their name, image and likeness.
And by the way, according to this settlement, the NCAA and
its member schools are going to police name, image and likeness
to make sure it's actually name, image and likeness and not pay
for play. Because they seem to think that
there's a distinction there That if they keep saying, well,
they're not being paid to be like for their own field or on
court performance, they're just getting paid because they're
popular people. That that is somehow a legal
distinction that's going to work to justify essentially having a
labor structure that is unlike anything else in the United
States. That is, that is the
justification right now. That doesn't seem like it's
going to work for a couple of reasons.
First of all, I think that, you know, if you know anything about
Congress, you know, Congress likes to take on high profile
things. They like to have committee
meetings. They let, you know, Congress
people like to parade up there and they like to, you know, say
nasty things into the microphone or they like.
To say things that. Are going to be good sound
bites. So, you know, we've had what
three or four, it feels like different committee hearings
about, you know, saving college sports or we need to do XYZ for
college sports. We haven't even had a vote come
up yet in either House of Congress.
I don't even know if we've had a committee vote.
I don't think we have about an actual antitrust exemption for
college athletics where they wouldn't have to pay their their
students as as employees. And I don't see that changing,
especially in an election year. This is a Congress that can
barely agree what day of the week it is, let alone something
as complex as this where you've got people on either side of the
political equation who don't think an antitrust exemption
makes a lot of sense. And so that whole aspect of
things really doesn't seem likely.
We heard Greg Sankey talk about this from the SEC.
Where? You know, he was like, you know,
I'd, I'd really like to see Congress act.
And even he in his in his comments seem to acknowledge
that that was a long shot. So much of what the NCAA is
doing with this settlement is predicated on this idea that
they're going to be able to maintain their business
structure. And when you break their
business structure down, it is basically these are students,
they're not employees. They should come in and they
should play for us for free, but we're going to let them earn
money is basically a side gig based upon being part of the
team. It it's a very convoluted thing
that when you break it down, it's like a lot of these nil
deals are they're entirely because these are players that
are now on your team. And you know, all of them.
The talk we heard all of these stories and, and things that
have been written over the course of just these last few
months about, you know, players getting a million and a half,
$2,000,000 in nil money. I mean, there's the, the, the
case of the case of Great Azabore, who is the transfer
from, I forget what school he came from, but he's going to
Washington University and he allegedly got a $2.1 million nil
payment. Well, of course he's getting
that payment because he's going to play basketball at
Washington. I mean, that's, there's no other
real factual argument about why he would be getting that much
money. So it's really a flimsy case.
And what's going to be fascinating is not only a, you
know, how much more money we we saw, yes, last week, I think it
was Amanda Kristovich from Front Office Sports had a really
interesting article where she talked about how the NCAA and
its member institutions have spent like $15 million lobbying
Congress for an NIL based antitrust exemption, trying to
keep athletes from being classified as employees.
And it's like so much has been invested in this effort already,
and it's not really bearing any fruit.
How much more time and money is the NCAA and its member
institutions going to invest in trying to get this antitrust
exemption before finally realizing that it's not going to
happen because A, Congress is just not likely to act on it.
B, The National Labor Relations Board is probably going to look
at it and say, this is this. I mean, of course their
employees, you know, and it's like colleges and universities,
like it'd be one thing if you didn't have any employees on
your campus at all, if all students were just volunteers,
but you've got a students working as employees all over
your campuses, all over the country.
Why is this different? You know, so these are the kinds
of things that are going to, I think suss out here.
But it, it, it surprises me that the NCAA and its member
institutions decided that this was a settlement that was going
to lead to some kind of antitrust exemption.
It just doesn't feel like it's going to happen.
So that's going to be something to watch.
And it, it ties into some of the things that I'll be talking
about on the future episodes of this.
Because if, if ever, we've had a moment in this whole saga where
it was clear that the NCAA and its member institutions needed
to kind of take a step back and say, look, we've really got to
rethink how we're doing all of this.
This is the time, because the fact that they've now had to
agree to a $2.8 billion settlement, they're going to be
paying athletes for the next 10 years moving forward minimum
and, and paying athletes going back 5-6 years that they're
still thinking that, you know what, we're going to get a
special exception to maintain our business model is the, I
think I will charitably call it the triumph of hope over
experience at this stage. The other thing, and I'm going
to wrap up with this, 'cause I want to try to keep these
episodes a little bit on the shorter side.
I'm going to take one more question after I talk about
this. The, the, the, the real question
I have is Title 9 and, and how that's going to be equated.
And this was actually a question from Noah Myers.
If I have it correct, it's supposed to be an even split
between male and female athletes due to Title 9.
That seems to be a great deal for female athletes, right?
Or will schools find a way to get around it?
So this is probably the other big aspect that nobody's totally
sure about is how Title 9 will get interpreted.
And, you know, I think it's important to understand what
Title 9 is. Title 9 gets talked about a lot,
and not many people know what it actually is.
And so I, I think that it would be helpful to understand what
Title 9 is. Title 9 is a very simple statute
that was passed in 1972. It's actually authored by Birch,
by former Indiana senator. Here's what it states.
This is the entire text of Title 9.
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be
excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be
subjected to discrimination under any education program or
activity receiving federal financial assistance.
That's it. That's the whole text of Title
9. What does that mean in action?
Up to this point, Title 9 has really been interpreted as a
participation and opportunity aspect of, of higher education.
And we could, we could go, I can do a whole lecture, actually do
a whole lecture on this in the class about Title 9.
It's important to note that the way Title 9's been evaluated
over the course of time and, and you know, when title nine was
passed in 1972, there were very few athletics opportunities for
females there. The NCAA wasn't even really
involved in female athletics. It was a an entirely separate
athletics organization called the AIAW that was founded that
lasted for about 10 years that that specifically administered
athletics. Most universities had separate
athletic departments for women, including Indiana.
So the whole idea for about the 1st 2530 years of title nine
was. We need to.
Force universities to give opportunities to women and
essentially there's there was a three prong test that was
invented for. That.
Purpose The three prong test was as follows to show whether a
school is providing adequate sports participation
opportunities to girls enrolled at the institution.
Prong one is substantial proportionality, which
essentially is the percentage. Based number of scholarships
that you're offering for athletics So what this.
Means is a school like Indiana, which I think is like 54 or 55%
female. 50. 4 to 55% of your scholarships for athletics need
to go to women. That's proportionality.
It's why a school like Purdue, which is like 28% women, or
Georgia Tech which is like 22% women, can have fewer female
sports and fewer female scholarships.
Because proportionality works both ways.
If you've got majority male, you're representing the
interests of the student body proportionally based upon sex by
giving opportunities based upon that.
So that's why that exists the way that it does.
The second prong of the three prong test is a history and
continuing practice of expanding sports participation
opportunities for girls that we're kind of at a point now
where, and I would say we got there about 1015 years ago where
that ceased to be an issue. Like up until the late 90s,
early 2000s, you still had schools that were out of of
compliance with Title 9, but they were slowly adding women's
sports. And that's why, you know, you
saw some sports get added that, you know, maybe were somewhat
surprising, like IU having field hockey or water polo.
Those aren't natural sports to Indiana, but they were added in
part to try to get IUI think fully up into Title 9
compliance. And that that happened all over
the country. That wasn't just an IU thing.
The third prong is full and effective accommodation of the
athletics interests of the girls enrolled at the school, which
meant basically you. Couldn't not offer a sport.
You know, because it was like financially unreasonable if
there was enough of an interest from people who wanted to play
that sport there, that's those are the prongs.
So how does all that tie into what we're looking at here?
That's the big. Question.
You know, there are arguments being made that because it's not
about participation and opportunity, but it's instead
about money being earned based upon estimated name, image and
likeness. Since the most valuable.
From a commercial perspective, athletes at schools tend to be
athletes in the most popular sports.
From a media perspective, again, football, men's.
Basketball and some isolated instances in other places.
That that's how things should break down from an NIL
perspective. And since Title 9 is focused on
participation and opportunity, not on revenue, since again
going back to what we said earlier, the NCAA keeps.
Claiming that athletes aren't employees.
That ties into this as well. There's a, there's a a lot of
people within the legal community that don't think Title
9 will have much of an impact at all or will be applicable to the
settlement or to future revenue sharing.
This idea that you're going to have to split it evenly or
proportionally based upon the number of athletes that are male
versus the number of athletes that are female.
A lot of people don't. Think that that's the case, but
there are some that argue that it does and that it will.
And I don't really know what the answer is on it.
I I get the sense that we will start to see legal arguments
made both ways. They'll be a lot of back and
forth. And you know, I, I.
Tend to side with the argument that because of the way title 9
is like the way that it reads and the way that it's been
tested up to this point, you're not going to be able to just
come back and say, hey, now it applies to revenue streams and
now it applies to what athletes are going to be paid.
The and one of the reasons I say that is if it was truly a matter
of, of absolute equality, I think this would have already
been in the courts and would have been properly adjudged in
favor of females that coach because, you know, certainly
there are some high paid female coaches.
You know, our own Terry Moran is a pretty highly paid female
basketball coach. Don Staley's pretty highly paid.
That is certainly not the case across the board.
And and I think what you see with, you know, a lot of things
is this huge disproportionality that the amount of money paid to
coaches, both head coaches and assistant coaches, support staff
with football, with men's basketball, with, you know, with
other individual sports. We see it with baseball in some
schools. You know, coaches of male sports
make significantly more money proportionally than coaches of,
of women's sports do. The fact that that's been
allowed to stand for as long as it has tells me that, that, you
know, the argument that somehow there needs to be a quality as
far as the students are concerned with money that
they're gonna be earning off of NILI.
Don't know where the argument would be in court that somehow
coaches can be paid disproportionately, but somehow
athletes have to be paid exactly the same.
And now maybe there's some legal experts that disagree with me
who are listening to this or watching this.
And if so, I'd love to hear the argument to the contrary.
And I'm certain we'll start to see some things develop over the
course of the next few months as this gets talked about more in
the public sphere where maybe the argument goes contrary and
maybe it becomes something different.
I, I don't particularly care either way.
I'm just fascinated that this is going to be a talking point
moving forward. So that'll be something to keep
in mind. As we move ahead with things,
but that's, that's the other big element that I think we need to
keep an eye on as we move forward with this is we, nobody
really knows how Title 9 is going to be applied.
Couple of other questions that we had that I wanted to quickly
get to before we wrap up. Actually, I'm going to, you know
what, I'm going to save a couple of these.
But John Kluter asks if if student athletes eventually earn
full employee status, are we headed down the path where the
student part is eliminated or will institutions be able to
water down academic standards to the point enforcement becomes
unnecessary? Well, it's funny you say that
because you know, we, we are now like evolving athletic
department staffing and the idea of what the NCAA does.
A lot of what the NCAA does is about enforcing the NCAA rule
book. But so much of the NCAA rule
book is around improper benefits.
Well, so much of that can now be wrapped up in NIL.
It's like, well, what do you do if you're the NCAA from a
compliance and enforcement perspective?
And the NCAA looks like what they're going to try to do to
maintain relevance is shift their focus to making sure that
these NIL deals are legit and that they're not focused on
performance, that they're focused on NIL like popularity
or market value, which is an impossible thing.
Do a judge and it's hard for me to envision a scenario where the
NCAA is going to be able to effectively police all of that.
Now to the larger question about John, like do we get to a point
where the the student aspect of being an athlete in college
becomes secondary? I'm not tackle that in like Part
4. But I do think that as we think
about all of this, we think about money being paid to
athletes. We think about money being taken
out of television contracts to be given to athletes.
We think about, as I mentioned earlier, the fact that that $22
million does not limit third parties from paying athletes and
that there's no way for the NCAA to police that.
All of this points in the direction of a model that is
totally different from what has been utilized up to this point
by the NCAA and its member institutions.
That is what the NCAA really needs to think about.
And there's going to be a lot of questions, including the one
that John asked about. Well, are we now heading towards
a scenario where perhaps you're not just having people that are
going to your institution performing athletically for your
institution? That's an interesting question.
We'll tackle that in future episodes.
Anyway, if you've got questions on anything that I've talked
about here, feel free to leave a comment.
Feel free to shoot me AADM on on Twitter or whatever.
And just a note, there's things I agree with and disagree with
with all of these things, but I think it's important that we
have an open conversation about what all's going on, whether or
not you like or dislike what's happening.
A lot of this stuff has been a long time coming.
And, you know, many people, myself included, have been
predicting for years that it was always going to end up in court
and it was always going to be a situation where the NCAA was on
the wrong side of whatever got adjudged.
That's where we're at right now. And so I'm really fascinated to
see where that leads us. I think you all should be as
well. And we've got a lot more to talk
about as we hit some future episodes.
But hopefully this gives you a good overview of what we're
looking at with this house case and the settlement and
everything else that goes into it.
I'm going to go ahead and and stop for now.
And. Say thanks to all of you for
listening and watching. Be sure to tune in next time.
We'll have more as this comes up.
We'll also have an Indy 500 recap, Scott, and I'm going to
try to do that on Friday. We'll have some other news as
far as IU stuff is concerned as well for everybody.
At the Back Home Network, I'm Galen Clavio.
Thanks for joining us here on Crimson Cast.
Bring back the Bison, Candy, Stripe the Rock.
We'll catch you folks on the flip side.
Hello, everybody. Bye.