The way college athletics worked, for decades, was, schools made big money, coaches and administrators made big money, but the only compensation for the kids was the value of their tuition and room and board, for which they had to practice, travel and play while making progress toward their degrees, and they were only guaranteed their tuition, room and board in one-year increments for their efforts.
It’s not that things are now in balance with the Ed O’Bannon suit allowing student-athletes to bank endorsement money – they’re still not sharing in the billions generated from TV, from ticket sales, from merch; and even considering that, NIL is still just a few pennies on the dollar.
The in-the-works House settlement will, finally, have schools actually sharing the money they bring in with the kids, but, still, it will be a few more pennies on the dollar – not close to the 44-51 percent that the pros in the NBA, NFL and MLB get as a share of their sports’ revenues.
At the University of Virginia, for example, where the athletics department generated $140.9 million in revenue in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, looking at the 44 percent level at the bottom end of what we see at the next level, having that going out in compensation to the kids would translate to $62 million.
Accounting for the $24 million in athletic student aid funded by the Virginia Athletics Foundation, that would still leave a $38 million hole between what the student-athletes at UVA should be getting in compensation, based on revenue-sharing in the NBA, NFL and MLB.
The House settlement is setting the upper limit of the starting point for what schools can pay out at $20 million, which, if UVA Athletics were to go there, would still leave a $18 million gap between what it does to compensate its student-athletes and what the unions at the next level have been able to negotiate from their sports.
This, I submit, as preface to an examination of the issues raised by the now-former UVA Basketball coach, Tony Bennett, as he announced his retirement, which he attributed to the changing NCAA landscape, and the trouble that he had adapting.
It’s not the money
I scanned the comments sections on mainstream news articles about Bennett’s decision to step away from college basketball, and the detractors – the usual band of cynics who don’t like anybody or anything – made it out that Tony Bennett is being hypocritical because he was being paid $4 million a year off the backs of kids playing for the value of a scholarship and coupons for a combo meal at Raising Kane’s.
That isn’t what is going on here, not even close.
“The game and college athletics is not in a healthy spot, it’s not, and there needs to be change,” Bennett told the room full of reporters, his players and assistants, UVA administrators, fellow UVA coaches and one NBA coach, UVA alum Rick Carlisle, who paid his respects hours after coaching his Indiana Pacers in a preseason game.
“It’s going to be closer to a professional model, Coach Carlisle, I think it is,” Bennett said, “where there’s got to be collective bargaining, there has to be a restriction on the salary pool that teams can spend, there has to be transfer regulation restrictions. There has to be some limits on the agent involvement with these young guys. And there are good agents, and there are bad agents, and they’re driving some of this stuff that we’re in.”
Diving in
Seriously, on all of this, Tony Bennett is spot-on, and it would benefit everybody involved if the NCAA would start addressing the issues that he raises here.
The kids would benefit from collective bargaining, the great equalizer that players’ unions, beginning with MLB back in the 1970s, have used to not only raise salaries for players, but also improve their workplace conditions, travel and accommodations, health benefits, protections in the event of injury.
The issue of agents is a big one, too. The players’ unions at the next level regulate agents to make sure that agents can’t take advantage of athletes, for instance, putting limits on commissions, and enforcing conflict-of-interest restrictions.
The salary-cap thing that Bennett mentioned is about trying to level the playing field, but in effect at the college level, it would mean levelling the playing field among peers – i.e., among the Power 4/Power 5, then among the Group of 5, and then on down.
The JMUs, ODUs and VCUs of the world aren’t going to be able to compete at the same level money-wise as the UVAs, UNCs and Dukes – and the UVAs, UNCs and Dukes aren’t going to agree to limit what they can spend to the level of the JMUs, ODUs and VCUs.
The “transfer regulation restrictions” matter that Bennett referenced isn’t as one-sided as you might think right off.
I alluded, in the lede to this story, to something that most of us overlook in what we call “athletic scholarships,” which aren’t actually four-year guarantees, but rather, one-year renewables, with that discretion left to coaches and administrators.
For all the gnashing of teeth over how the transfer portal is ruining college sports, because student-athletes are, in effect, perpetually free agents, this is the case precisely because the current structure has kids tethered to their schools on what amounts to a one-year contract.
To me, the way this gets resolved is, the NCAA allows schools to offer longer-term deals – a two-year scholarship, three- and four-year scholarships – with the benefits to the kids being, one, stability, and two, they could use a school’s desire to lock them up longer term as leverage to get more money.
Tony Bennett: A future AD?
I’m just using UVA Athletics as the example here because I’ve been writing about UVA Athletics for 29 years, and know it as well as I know anything.
That $140.9 million revenue figure that I cited above ranks in the upper one-third of all college athletics programs nationally, and in the top half of the ACC, the third-most valuable conference in the Power 4/Power 5.
I tell you that to make the point that, UVA Athletics makes a lot of money, even relative to its peers.
It doesn’t make enough money that there’s $20 million laying around to meet the terms of the proposed House settlement, much less another $20 million to reach the revenue-sharing level that we see at the next level.
The TV money is fixed, ticket and merch revenue are pretty much what they’re going to be, the donors, you have to figure, are tapped.
What you’re going to see, as the House settlement starts to play out, is non-revenue sports – which are, pretty much, every sport other than football and men’s basketball – being cut.
“I’m worried about the opportunities that aren’t going to be present for a lot of the Olympic sports,” was how Bennett addressed this at his retirement presser.
This isn’t something that just struck Bennett. He conceded at the retirement event that he has been rethinking his priorities dating back to 2021, which was when the sea change in college sports with NIL and the wide-open transfer portal took root.
People familiar with Bennett’s thinking have been saying for the past couple of years that he had been thinking about his next chapter, and his interest in one day taking on the challenge of heading up an athletics department, where he could play a bigger role in fixing the problems that he sees, and a lot of us see, in college athletics, where he could advocate for changes to benefit the kids, where he could make sure the non-revenue sports are taken care of.
Looking into my crystal ball, he takes the next few months off from basketball, recharges the batteries, and readies himself for a challenge even bigger than winning a national title at a school where the kids actually go to class.
This is where we see Tony Bennett next.
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Chris Graham
