Latest news with #payforplay
CBC
12-06-2025
- Business
- CBC
U.S. college sports' legalized pay-for-play future threatens to strand Canadian athletes in amateur past
Social Sharing Last Friday, U.S. federal judge Claudia Wilken approved a seismic settlement that will send tremors through commercialized sport across the continent, okaying $2.8 billion US in retroactive pay to former NCAA athletes over the use of their names, images, and likenesses, and granting Division 1 college programs the ability to pay players directly. That second detail matters most for this discussion. Name/Image/Likeness deals, after all, are standard in U.S. college sports now, with teams using them to funnel seven-figure paydays to star players while maintaining that those athletes are still, technically, unpaid students. But legalizing pay-for-play breaks college sports open along its oldest, deepest, most volatile fault line – the precarious distinction between amateurs and professionals in a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Starting next school year, Division 1 teams will have up to $20.5 million in salary to spread among all their varsity athletes, a setup that, belatedly, brings the rules in line with the reality. Few sober-thinking people could watch the 2018 Rose Bowl and conclude, in good faith, that Georgia's Kirby Smart, calling the shots from the sidelines, deserved money, but Nick Chubb and Sony Michel, who combined for 326 rushing yards and five touchdowns, merited only in-kind perks and pats on the back. So in finally acknowledging that the athletes who drive a big-money industry are professionals, Wilken has delivered the shakeup that college sports needed. But here's the thing about real and metaphorical earthquakes: You can feel them far away from the epicentre, and aftershocks from last week's ruling will rattle elite sport in Canada, too. If Canadian stakeholders aren't already plotting countermoves, they need to start today. Keep two points in mind about that $20.5 million annual salary cap. U.S. college athletes one step closer to being paid to play 1 year ago Duration 1:58 A nearly $2.8 billion settlement agreed to by the NCAA and U.S. college athletes has opened the door for athlete back pay and future revenue sharing. There are still several details to be ironed out, and the agreement needs to be approved by a federal judge. First, every NCAA athletic program that can afford it, along with many that can't, will spend to the limit. That figure isn't a commandment, but you'll need to treat it like one if you dream of staying competitive in revenue sports. Second, the bulk of that money will finance player salaries in those aforementioned revenue sports – mainly football, men's basketball, women's basketball to a lesser extent, along with a few moneymaking outlier Olympic sports at specific schools. But the sports you see on TV the most are there because they make the most money, which means they'll consume the largest share of the salary cap. Awesome news if you're a 5-star football or basketball recruit from the U.S., but a big concern for anyone committed to playing or coaching the non-revenue sports that, until now, were a load-bearing pillar in the argument against pay for play. Football and basketball players couldn't earn salaries, the logic went, because the revenue those sports generated paid for all the other varsity sports programs – golf, volleyball, wrestling, track and field, and on and on… But now that a fat payroll is the expectation for revenue sports, what happens to everyone else? I'm not the first person to raise those concerns. And I'm not the smartest to do it. I'm just the one doing it this week, and wondering how it will affect Canada's long-term prospects in sports like track and swimming, where NCAA programs are a vital link between high school potential and world class performance. Vulnerability of non-revenue sports Olympic sports are an easy target for budget conscious decision-makers looking to funnel money to other projects. Four years ago Clemson University in South Carolina announced the elimination of its men's track and field program, which has produced seven Olympians, four of them Canadian. The rationale? It could reallocate track and field money to fund other Olympic sports. Outcry and fundraising saved the program, but the example remains. Non-revenue sports become vulnerable when priorities change, and legalizing pay-for-play is the most profound priority shift in college sports history. It could result in a windfall if you're a hotly-pursued, U.S.-born recruit in a revenue sport. Now you can add a salary to your NIL endorsement income, and if you stick around until you graduate, you can start your adult life with cash in the bank, even if you choose, as those NCAA ads remind us, To Go Pro in Something Other Than Sports. The biggest complication for those athletes? The I.R.S. If they don't already understand the difference between salary and take-home pay, they will when they sign that college football contract and land in the head coach's tax bracket. It'll present a giant headache every April, when filing season lines up with some combination of mid-terms, final exams and spring football. Canadian, international athletes left seeking loopholes But for international student-athletes, and I'm thinking specifically of the 379 Canadian men and women who played Division 1 football and basketball in 2022 according to NCAA stats, getting paid at all will be a puzzle. The student visas that give foreign born students the right to enroll in a U.S. school also place severe restrictions on employment, and they certainly don't cover professional sports. The same obstacles exist for Canadians in the market for NIL contracts, but workarounds exist for the right athlete and sponsor. UConn basketball star Aaliyah Edwards, for example, dodged a U.S. work restriction by signing an endorsement deal with Adidas Canada. But if your employer is a football team, you might not have a loophole to scoot through. In a perfect world, you wouldn't need one. The sensible move is to make varsity athletes university employees, because student visas permit international students to work at the schools they attend. And it's the right thing to do, because when you join a varsity team in a revenue sport, you've signed up for a full-time job promoting your institution. Except this is big-time, big-money sports, where decision-makers might not do what's sensible and right when they can do what's expedient. Maybe it's the University of Kentucky turning its athletic department into an LLC, aiming to raise more money to pay players. Or it might be schools like Boise State inviting private equity firms to invest in their athletic department — even private equity's quick cash comes with a long and harrowing list of pitfalls. So under this setup, maybe Canadian players become the market inefficiency that this new generation of finance-minded sports executives love. An American quarterback who puts up numbers like Oakville, Ont.'s Kurtis Rourke did might command a million-dollar salary at a Big Ten school; the Canadian version might have to settle for a scholarship, freeing his team to spend more money elsewhere.
New York Times
10-06-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Mandel: House settlement clearinghouse won't create CFB's goal for more level playing field
With the House vs. NCAA settlement approved, college athletics is about to begin the latest chapter in its long history of attempting to interfere with the market for athletes' services. Let's see if this version holds up better in court than all the ones before it. As you know by now, the House settlement has given birth to a new system by which schools for the first time can directly pay their athletes up to $20.5 million this coming school year. The schools will insist these are purely NIL deals and do not constitute 'pay-for-play,' but of course, they are entirely contingent on the athlete playing for that university. And that's fine. Nothing wrong with paying someone for their services. Advertisement But where the settlement veers into outright market manipulation is the establishment of a new NIL Go clearinghouse, operated by Deloitte, by which athletes must submit all deals they receive from outside sources that exceed $600. Which, in the major sports, is pretty much all of them. If Deloitte deems, say, a running back's $1 million deal from a school's collective to be above 'fair market value,' he cannot accept it. In every other industry in this country, 'fair market value' is whatever someone is willing to pay you. Just ask the many mediocre football coaches who make $6-8 million a year. Or the athletic directors who make $1.2 million a year to hire those mediocre coaches. No clearinghouse for those folks. Every legal expert I've spoken with about this subject thinks there's little chance this clearinghouse would survive a legal challenge. It sure sounds like yet another instance of competitors (in this case, the Power conferences) conspiring to limit athletes' compensation. Go back and read the Supreme Court decision in Alston v. NCAA to see how the highest court in the land feels about restrictions on athletes' compensation. It's somewhat poetic the House settlement got approved during Game 3 of the WCWS, where $1M pitcher NiJaree Canady nearly led Texas Tech to an improbable national title. Because the purpose of the new Deloitte NIL clearinghouse is to stamp out collectives like Texas Tech's. — Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) June 7, 2025 Nevertheless, the Power conferences — it's them, not the NCAA driving this — are pressing ahead. On Monday, they proudly unveiled their newly created enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission, led by former Major League Baseball executive Bryan Seeley, who is likely being paid seven figures to make sure college athletes stop getting paid seven figures. Presumably, they've consulted with their lawyers, who have told them the thing is ironclad. The next Judge Wilken will be totally fine with it. By now, you may be asking yourself, 'Why are they doing this? Who exactly is being harmed by a transfer quarterback getting $3 million from a school's collective?' Athletes going into the portal at any moment is an understandable source of frustration, but the House settlement does nothing to address that issue. It just wants to curb how much one gets for going into the portal. Advertisement The stated reason, as Nick Saban, for one, has said 1,000 times, is the need for a 'level playing field.' It's not 'fair' that Texas Tech has an oil billionaire willing to spend $10 million-plus on the transfer portal if Alabama doesn't have one. How many times have we heard: This is not what NIL is intended for. It doesn't particularly matter at this point what NIL was intended for. This is what it's become. Collectives became a thing specifically because schools didn't want anything to do with paying athletes. Now that they're forced to, they want to unwind time and reverse things. But what's really rich is the whole 'level playing field' thing. There has never, ever been a level playing field in college recruiting. The schools with the most money have always held an advantage over everyone else. They have the most history, the biggest stadiums, the best-paid coaches and the most lavish facilities. Ohio State was dominating Purdue in recruiting long before there were ever NIL collectives, and the Buckeyes will keep dominating in the revenue-sharing era. You could set the cap at $60.5 million, not $20.5 million, and there's still no scenario where the Boilermakers would be able to outspend the Buckeyes. Meanwhile, people have been so busy the past few years shouting that the sky is falling that they've failed to notice that NIL may be the first development in history that's actually given a larger pool of teams a chance at landing top talent. The top quarterback in the portal this offseason, Tulane's Darian Mensah, did not go to Georgia or Ohio State. He chose Duke, where he's getting a reported $4 million NIL deal. The nation's No. 1 men's basketball recruit, A.J. Dybantsa, is not going to North Carolina or Kansas; he's going to BYU, for a reported $5 million deal. And last year, softball phenom NiJaree Canady turned down that sport's biggest juggernaut, Oklahoma, in favor of Texas Tech, which gave her that sport's first-ever seven-figure deal. Earlier this month, she and her team ended the Sooners' reign — and she signed another deal. Advertisement All of those deals got done before the House settlement was approved. Had they not, theoretically, Deloitte could flag them for being too far above 'market value.' Clearly, booster-driven collectives aren't going away. If Oracle founder Larry Ellison wants to give the next Michigan quarterback recruit $4 million, it seems highly unlikely someone could tell him no. Either the collectives will get more creative in how they structure their deals, or someone is going to sue and succeed in getting an injunction. Neither the schools nor the athletes would be the ones filing that suit because they're bound by the settlement. But boosters aren't bound by it. Companies aren't bound by it. And, most concerning to the conferences, state attorneys general aren't bound by it. They're the folks who succeeded in getting both the NCAA's booster restrictions and transfer restrictions shot down. We know this much: Most schools that plan to offer the maximum $20.5 million in House payments are following a formula by which they'll allocate around $13 million for football and $3 million for men's basketball. Ohio State last year spent $20 million on football alone, and many schools are spending way more than that this year. Kentucky is one of several programs planning to spend more than $10 million on men's basketball. Coaches' and administrators' salaries have only gone up and up and up over time, but the powers that be seem to think they can make athletes' unofficial salaries go down with their magic clearinghouse. That's not generally how markets work.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mr. Soundoff Says: New NCAA $ettlement won't fix problems, just create more
Mr. Soundoff Says – On Friday a monumental decision was made within the will begin directly paying their athletes, thanks to a legal settlement approved in federal in July, each school will be able to spend just over 20 million dollars a year in paying college athletes directly. While this new law is designed to level the playing field, John Sears says it won't do anything except widen the gap and create more problems. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
