On Tuesday night, Florida Atlantic fans left their cozy Boca Raton bedrooms for a little New York Christmas and proudly donned their red sweatshirts and t-shirts to cheer on the Owls at the Jimmy V Classic at Madison Square Garden. FAU earned an invitation to the prestigious event through its Final Four run a year ago, not to mention its potential this year thanks to a largely intact squad from that national semifinal appearance. At the Garden, the 11th-ranked Owls went head-to-head with Illinois before falling 98-89. The loss doesn’t diminish Dusty May’s team or its chances of matching last season’s March run.
Charlie Baker’s plan, on the other hand? That could cut the owls off at the knees. And Florida Atlantic is not alone. The school’s rise to the national rankings is just one of many possible unintended consequences of the NCAA president’s proposal to create a new division in college sports. Baker’s proposal to create a group of schools that will operate under their own rules, but in return will be required to pay at least half of their athletes $30,000 a year into some kind of trust fund, has finally abolished all possessions and have none.
Welcome to Have It All and Everyone Else.
“There are some things where there is a difference between what I would call the top 100 schools in terms of resources and the other 250,” Baker said at the Sports Business Journal Intercollegiate Athletic Forum. “And what happens is the NCAA gets into one of these collisions because there are a third of schools that can do more for student-athletes. They just do it. Once upon a time, striving for competitive fairness was considered okay. “It’s not really that anymore.”
GO DEEPER
Commissioners respond to Charlie Baker’s NCAA proposal on athlete compensation
There’s no denying that Baker is in trouble, and whatever you think of the plan, at least he’s got one. His predecessor Mark Emmert’s hesitant and complete refusal to acknowledge that name, image and likeness would appear landed the NCAA in this predicament and forced the national body to attempt to erect guardrails on the highway. This is Baker’s attempt to wrest some control from a chaotic NIL situation.
Aware that the people at the top of the food chain have far more power and influence than the people in Indianapolis today, Baker tries to find an impossible middle ground in which he embraces the progress necessary to achieve the Have It Keeping everyone happy without completely sacrificing everyone else. And by the way, college athletics has always stood for everything else.
This may be the only middle ground available and the only way to ensure that the Have It Alls don’t take their balls, sticks, epees, pucks and cleats elsewhere. It’s still miles from completion, and college insiders who spoke to The Athletic but asked not to be named as they sorted through the details themselves thought it was as much a salvo for Congress as for the membership . A kind of, “Hey, we’re ready to do something. Can you please help us?” Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, was seen as the man for the job, not least because he understood Washington’s machinations. He does his job, which no one has ever accused Emmert of doing.
His letter, which appears to have been sent coldly and without warning, was intended to be provocative and unconventional because he understands that he needs to get people talking. That is a good thing. But as people begin to consider the proposal, it would be wise to also carefully consider the unintended consequences of such a far-reaching measure.
Because they are very real.
For the sake of argument, let’s take Baker’s proposal as a baseline and imagine a world in which some semblance of his proposal passes and passes through the NCAA’s bureaucratic morass. The schools in the cool kids’ club now have more governmental authority and even the power to make rules, as long as they agree to set up some kind of trust fund of $30,000 a year for half of their athletes. (But psst. Let’s not call this pay-to-play.)
So let’s look at that. It affects everyone, but for the purposes of this exercise, let’s use FAU as an example. The school proudly proclaims on its website: “With 19 NCAA Division I athletic teams, FAU is committed to advancing our nearly 500 student-athletes in their respective sports and in the classroom.” Under Baker’s plan, half of those 500 athletes will receive at least $30,000 . That’s an additional $7.5 million per year, or $30 million over the life cycle of a four-year athlete. Additionally, not everyone graduates on time, so you may end up carrying more than average in a year.
FAU had $39.2 million in revenue compared to $38.1 million in expenses, according to the school’s most recent report to the NCAA. That doesn’t include the long-term loan commitments to finance things like the stadium expansion, which have a lifetime term of $48 million and are payable in installments from now through 2041.
And now FAU would have to pay another $7.5 million per year – at least because even Baker admitted that the $30,000 was fungible. “It’s a permissive standard,” he said. “It is a standard that is intended to set the minimum.”
Where does the extra money come from, or better yet, where does it go? Title IX requires some funding to go to women’s sports, but it will still feel like an episode of “Oprah’s Favorite Things”; only in this case she skips every other viewer. Now you get a car. But not you. Promote this sport but not that one, or this athlete but not that one. The left tackle, not the right one. The goalkeeper, not the striker.
Coaches have complained that NIL would spell the demise of locker room chemistry, and honestly, that mostly sounded ridiculous. Capitalism allows some people to earn more than others. However, it’s one thing for an outside entity – or even a collective – to determine a player’s value; It’s another thing entirely for a school and/or coach to assign a dollar value to each individual athlete or sport. (The school may have to work around this anyway so it doesn’t look like it’s paying the athletes directly, which would turn the athletes into employees.)
Let’s be honest. At the Power Conference level and the Group of 5, which still has a shot at that Wonka-esque golden ticket to the College Football Playoff, the football needs to be fed. When you work in a trust fund, a zero minimum wage simply isn’t enough. If the gymnast gets $30,000, find a few more zeros for the quarterback.
By default, this means there is less money available for other sports. Even basketball included.
Programs like FAU, which serve as the lifeblood of the NCAA Tournament, are growing organically. May spent five years with the Owls, finding under-recruited players (Johnell Davis and Alijah Martin) and pairing them with transfers who needed a fresh start (Vladislav Goldin) before turning the Owls into March magic. If you think about it, this is how Jay Wright built a Hall of Fame career.
This is not to say that such an increase is not possible and will not occur with a new subdivision; it just becomes that much more difficult. The transfer portal already makes roster stability difficult enough, both in basketball and football. Adding the promise of a $120,000 trust fund in one place but not another will make things even more difficult.
But perhaps the greatest loss will come where no one ever looks – at the level of Olympic sports. Until about 2001, the number of Division I sports teams grew fairly regularly, adding about 2 to 4 percent more teams per year. Since then, the number of teams added has remained under 1 percent and has fallen into negative territory over the past two years (-0.93 in 2021, -0.33 in 2022), according to NCAA data. COVID-19 is undoubtedly to blame. According to the Business of College Sports, 35 Division I schools have cut more than 110 programs in the wake of the pandemic. Loss of revenue coupled with the rise of NIL made their existence simply unsustainable.
That won’t help. The easiest way to set up a fund for half of your athletes to get $30,000 is to have fewer athletes, and no one is saving money.
If that sounds apocalyptic, then the apocalypse is here. Remember: Stanford threatened to cut 11 sports and only changed course after public outcry. Stanford has a lot of money. Most schools don’t do this.
Then again, this isn’t about most schools. That is the core of the problem. Baker does what he can to find a solution, but he’s trying to save an incredibly broken system. College athletics remains in limbo for a handful of schools that have already gotten almost everything they wanted — including, remember, some sense of NCAA autonomy. And it always comes at the expense of everyone else. As one admin put it, “If you’re not there, are you somehow less than?” Has your brand taken a hit? Is it diminished?”
The answer is of course: yes.
(Photo of Florida Atlantic’s Alijah Martin at Tuesday’s Jimmy V Classic: Rich Schultz/Getty Images)