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Bernadette McGlade leads an Atlantic 10 Conference built around basketball and focused on earning multiple bids to the NCAA men’s tournament far more than anything related to high-level football.
However, his league is among dozens of conferences and dozens of schools that will feel the impact of the NCAA and major college conferences approving a $2.8 billion settlement of federal antitrust lawsuits that calls for paying athletes under a framed plan. in a football-driven college sports landscape.
“We have to move forward, we want to continue to preserve our rich basketball history,” McGlade told The KeynoteUSA. “So we have to get to the strategy table and start doing analysis.”
Schools that rely on basketball in leagues like the A-10, Big East (home of UConn, the two-time reigning men’s national champion) and the West Coast Conference face the prospect of pouring millions into their athletes each year. But they have to find the best way to do it without football money flowing in.
“With the opportunity that football provides, football also comes with a lot of (financial) obligations,” said Gonzaga athletic director Chris Standiford, whose WCC basketball program has grown from a mid-major to a national powerhouse in the last quarter of a century. “So this goes both ways. We don’t have the obligation of operations and the new expenses associated with compensating football players. But we don’t have the benefit of the revenue that comes with it, particularly television revenue.”
The settlement includes the NCAA and conferences paying $2.77 billion over 10 years to more than 14,000 current and former college athletes who say the now-defunct rules prevented them from earning money or endorsement deals dating back to 2016. Under the plan, Each school would be allowed to set aside up to about $21 million to pay athletes, a limit that could change. It could begin as early as the fall 2025 semester.
The lawsuit focused on the so-called Power Five conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Southeastern), as well as Notre Dame. But finding money to pay for the settlement will affect hundreds of other Division I member schools in the form of smaller annual payments from the organization. That revenue comes largely from the NCAA’s lucrative television contract for the men’s basketball tournament and its other championship events.
The NCAA has no role in the college football playoffs or bowl games, and television deals for football are struck at the conference level. However, schools with a smaller football program or even no football program at all will take on a portion of the deal before they even begin paying future athletes. .
“I think the really interesting angle here is: Why does men’s basketball pay for all the overhead costs of college athletics and college football doesn’t contribute?” Standiford asked.
McGlade went a step further, noting that the CFP’s projected per-school payments for the Big Ten and SEC alone (about $22 million) largely cover the estimated annual amount a school can pay athletes. McGlade estimated that, by comparison, his league’s basketball-focused schools approach could generate between $3 million and $5 million in annual payments.
“We knew the deal was being discussed and I think everyone at DI supported it throughout this year,” McGlade said. “We didn’t know the gory details of what the payment model would be. Disproportionality is a real concern, and it wouldn’t have taken much for that proportionality to balance out a little more and everyone be a little more respectful of each other.”
Jay Bilas, a former Duke player and attorney who is also an KeynoteUSA basketball broadcaster, said NCAA member schools put themselves in this position by voting “in unison to stop athletes from making money for all these years.”
“So there is no difference in culpability from the University of Georgia to Marquette,” Bilas said. “They are all equally guilty of violating federal antitrust law. So, to me, it shouldn’t be overlooked in all of this, that they were all of the same opinion in saying that athletes receive nothing more than a scholarship or a stipend or whatever.” to be”.
It will take a lot of work to find the best answer for each school within what amounts to a very different economic model.
At Gonzaga, for example, the men’s basketball program generated about $19.2 million in revenue for the 2022-23 season, according to Department of Education figures. That represented nearly 45% of athletics’ total revenue that year ($42.9 million).
That was similar to the Atlantic 10’s Dayton, which ranked No. 24 in the final KeynoteUSA Top 25 of the season. The Flyers men’s basketball program accounted for 44% of sports revenue ($40.1 million). In the Big East, men’s basketball accounted for more than 48% of total revenue at non-football schools like Marquette ($42.6 million) and Creighton ($35 million).
By comparison, blue blood names like Duke and North Carolina (ACC), Kentucky (SEC), and Kansas (Big 12) from powerful football-driven conferences had men’s basketball programs accounting for no more than 29% of total revenue which exceeded approximately 138 million dollars in each case.
In football-crazy Alabama, a men’s basketball program that was the No. 1 overall seed in the 2023 NCAA Tournament and reached this year’s Final Four accounted for just 10.8% of total revenue (191 .2 million dollars) for the 2022-23 season.
“I think everyone would identify that Villanova’s investment in basketball is important at Villanova, at UConn or whoever, and they’re going to continue to do everything they can to compete at that level,” Standiford said. “And we will do the same. But where does that money come from?
“I don’t think it benefits us,” Standiford added. “But I also think we’re a unique group of schools. I don’t know how you would achieve our status if you didn’t already have it. I think that’s what’s going to change.”
Bilas, however, remained confident that basketball-focused programs will “make it work,” noting that success in athletics can drive school-changing growth and improvements beyond sports.
“These revenue streams are growing and will continue to grow because live sports are so valuable,” Bilas said. “It’s not just valuable in the football aspect, that’s the most valuable. But basketball is really valuable. Women’s basketball, some of these other sports. So we’ll see how it turns out.”
“I see all of these different institutions continuing to compete at a high level, but now they’re going to have to compete for talent on the economic front.”
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Keynote USA
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