This post dovetails off of Johnny Ginter’s NIL Has Crunched The Already Insane Time Constraints On College Football Head Coaches (1/20/23), particularly:
As (ostensibly) public institutions, there's an opportunity here to bring in money in a way that isn't just a booster moving his checks from the glovebox to the front seat. But it will require a lot of oversight, and a lot of scrupulous people invested in making something like this work without having to route everything through a head coach.
Though not about schools bringing money in per se, it appears the California state legislature is reintroducing a once-failed plan for revenue-sharing:
The College Athlete Protection Act will begin working its way through committees with optimism among backers that it can find its way to (California governor) Newsom’s desk this fall and be signed. (A similar bill failed last year).
CAPA takes a direct shot at the NCAA’s long-standing amateurism model by requiring schools to share profits from specific programs with its athletes, particularly those who graduate.
The bill requires schools to share up to 50% of revenue with athletes who compete in programs that bring in twice as much in revenue as they spend on athletic scholarships.
At many places this would include only football and men’s basketball, although women’s basketball, gymnastics, ice hockey, volleyball and other sports can reach that threshold at certain schools.
Current student-athletes' pay would be capped at $25,000 per year while they're in school, but colleges would be required to set aside an equally divided 50% of revenue annually to be paid out upon completion of a degree within six years. At major football programs, such as USC, that could equal about $200,000 a year per player — or $800,000 for a four-year career, according to some estimates.
In this article, author Dan Wetzel suggests CAPA would strike another blow to the collegiate amateur athletics model. It seems to me powerful stakeholders are trying to reign in the NIL-madness, by evolving college sports into a new type of co-operative education. Though not the Antioch College model, CAPA emphasizes education (and specifically, graduation) as a component of its revenue-sharing plan. Though the era of collegiate amateur athletics may be over, CAPA may give way to a system which strikes more and better balances, between academic institutions and sports and embodied by a semi-professional, student-athlete.
