Q&A: Understanding what's happening with college sports

NCAA, NIL, transfer portals — and possible solutions.

If you’ve been following what’s happening with U.S. college sports, then you know it’s a “Wild West” right now (as the news likes to say). The U.S. college sports system, run by the NCAA, is arguably the premier U23 sports structure in the world — and, because the U.S. doesn’t have a government sports agency or publicly-fund our Olympic athletes, the NCAA has also long served as our development pipeline.

But with the amount of money being made in college football and, to a degree, college basketball, the business around those sports has become disconnected from a traditional student-athlete model.

“If you’re a computer engineering major and you develop an amazing app and you sell it to a company, or if Intel wants to pay for your tuition because they want to hire you after graduation, the university would probably be putting that out in its PR channels,” said Victoria Jackson, a sports historian at ASU, former DI runner, and considered one of the leading experts on the college sports landscape.

But not in sports.

A decade ago, Ed O’Bannon saw his image being used in EA’s college basketball video games — years after he’d played and having never received any compensation for it — and sued. He won. And what has followed is a spate of lawsuits from student-athletes arguing that schools and businesses can’t make these escalating amounts of money off of them. This has brought us to where we are now — with new suits and rulings virtually every week. And the system is now undergoing a massive overhaul in front of our eyes.

What does it look like when the dust settles?

Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) - Allows student-athletes to sign endorsements and sponsorship deals with third-parties and still maintain their “amateur” NCAA status — with still a lot of regulations and compliance rules

Transfer Portal - In 2018, the NCAA also launched a “transfer portal” to allow students to transfer and change schools — with regulations and compliance rules — and not lose their eligibility

Collectives - One outcome has been that groups (or “collectives”) of boosters have formed to “sponsor” athletes to transfer or come to their schools

None of this is inherently good or bad. But it is the outcome of the tensions inherent in our U.S. system. And it’s clear that system is not going to be able to hold those tensions much longer without fundamental change.

What happens from here? Does the U.S. need a federal sports office, like other countries? Do we need to spinoff the huge business of college football and basketball from an academic setting? How do Olympic sports adapt and adjust in this landscape?

We talked with Victoria Jackson, an expert who has testified in front of Congress on this topic and a former pro runner who ran in college with big names like Shalane Flanagan and Des Linden, about these questions and how we got here.

Victoria Jackson, ASU

First off, what is a sports historian?

It was not a thing when I was an undergrad. Yeah, there might be sports in some of the classes I took in history and good people doing good work, but there were not classes being offered on sports history.

I had the good fortune to trip and stumble my way into finding it. I was getting a PhD in history and running seriously as a PhD student and then professionally—which gave me time racing and traveling and stepping outside of the U.S. system. And I realized I could be talking about all the thing I want to talk about in a history classroom through the lens of sports. It opens so many more doors to understanding a concept when you take a sports approach: systems of privilege and power and inequality and the human experience, all of these things.

My primary research field is college sports, and I also do a lot on global women’s sports, which inevitably intersects with American college sports and athlete activism. 

Do you ever look back on your time running in college and think of differently now?

It’s interesting, because I was talking with Jeremy Bloom about this. He was a football player at Colorado in the early 2000s and was also an Olympic skier. And because he had to take endorsement money to fund his travel and training as a downhill skier, it ruled him ineligible to play football at Colorado. At the time there was no legal recourse — like these are the rules and that’s that. 

He went on to play in the NFL, he was a very good football player. But the way he subsidized being able to stay in Olympic sport was through those endorsement deals.

And talking to him, you know, competing in the early 2000s there were still these markings of efforts to try to keep college sports “scholastic.” But obviously they were growing the business so dramatically at the same time that there’s all these conflicting messages that were happening. I remember it seemed really strange when students would fly across country to compete at Standard, at this one big meet to hit times. Like, why’s NC State here? No hate, my sister ran at NC State — but they were racing at 2 or 3 a.m. their time, Eastern Time, and then flying back, just so they could hit these times. How is that scholastic?

And how are we paying for all of this? It was the growth of football money.

After the early 2000s, college football basically became such a large business that it essentially funded other sports. Because you can’t pay the players, you have to spend that money and you have to have these markings of being “scholastic,” so you can’t outright professionalize the football program. So the wealth transfer from football to other sports really starts to increase to the point where five years before the pandemic the coaches of non-revenue sports in Division I, their pay increased by 43% across a 5-year period. And those sports weren’t bringing in 43% more money. Football was bringing in considerably more money because of the college football playoffs and the media right deals that conferences were negotiating.

As far as the infrastructure, across athletic departments, this is the best U23 sports development ecosystem in the world — that’s why we see so many international athletes coming through the NCAA.

What you’re kind of hinting at, though, is that it’s not actually a sports development system. It’s a college educational system. Nominally, you’re there to study.

Football — and basketball is kind of in its own category — these NCAA policies were never designed for those sports and those athletes. We’ve never asked: What is the mission? How are we building this? Who are we serving and how are we serving them?

The athletic department is pursuing football money and winning in football, and then all other sports follow that main desire of making money and winning in football. And when I say making money I mean spending money—because the business model here is to spend. It’s to bring more money in that you can spend to win. It’s this arms race, because there are no caps on anything and no agreed upon limits.

I get the sense that the excessive grown you’re talking about is what kind of led people to: Wait, the players should be paid. And that’s how we got NIL and the transfer portal and some of these different rules.

There’s this public conversation happening now about how athletes wanting to be paid, wanting to be employees or revenue share, is ruining college sports. But it’s really placing the blame with the wrong people, because you can not professionalize a thing and run it like a business and then say, ‘Wait, amateurism, education.’

The world got rid of this amateur ideology in the late-80s. Football is the reason why college sports didn’t follow then what the world was doing.

But if you spend even just a week during the fall with a big-time college football program, that is not an educational program that is serving those students. Part of debunking the lie of amateurism of the past 20 years has been showing all of the academic fraud taking place and the watered down educational experiences of athletes in those sports.

We should, instead, be rethinking or taking a re-look at what education means when you’re a football player in the 21st Century. There are a number of scholars who’ve tried to show all of the learning that happens in football, why don’t we have a football major? Or a reduced course load in the fall and slowed down educational timelines?

And, you can’t ignore the racial dynamics of big-time college sports. It’s no coincidence that the big-time sports programs that bring in the most money and haven’t reformed their compensation arrangements or labor relations, that the rosters of those teams are disproportionately Black.

When the schools and conferences go to Congress to try and get anti-trust exemptions to say athletes can’t be employees or can’t be paid directly — though I think they understand revenue sharing seems to be more and more of a likelihood coming — what’s interesting is I’ve never heard one of these people say we need antitrust protection to place a cap on coaches’ compensation or to reduce the spending that’s gotten out of control or to put guardrails on the distances teams will have to travel in these coast-to-coast mega-conferences. The fact that higher ed leaders aren’t asking Congress for those things really shows a disconnect and a disingenuity.

Where are things at right now?

There were a couple of high-profile cases where the NCAA ruled ineligible athletes, related to the transfer portal and the pandemic — because they’re making up the rules as they go. There was a University of North Carolina player who was trying to get back closer to home for family reasons and was ruled ineligible because the rules had changed. And it wasn’t just higher ed leaders who were outraged, it was politicians and attorneys general, who then sued.

The NCAA tried to get a court to say these rules will stay in place until these cases are completed, but the judge said no. So now there are no rules.

I will say I didn’t realize until last year how crazy things had gotten with the transfer portal and collectives. I think it took some people by surprise.

No, I think you're right. I think those of us who understood this business model to be fundamentally flawed and harmful knew exactly where that was headed. Those who see this is a great way of running a sports industry in the space of higher education were like, ‘oh no!’

Because the interesting and very predictable thing that happened was boosters seeing this as an opportunity to pay top athletes, primarily in football and to a lesser extent in basketball, and some really high-profile athletes in other sports. And this was the thing that wasn’t supposed to happen: boosters meddling with the recruitment of athletes or tampering with current athletes at other schools to try and lure them away. 

Now, think: If only there were a business model that existed in the world to prevent this from happening. And that’s professionalizing college football, right? You’d have contracts and agents; you’d have a players’ association and agreed upon restrictions on actions.

The disintegration of the Pac12 and the conference realignments, was this also an outcome of these NIL deals and athletes being paid?

No, this was conference commissioners and the media people who want to maximize their money in football. And the market expansion is part of that. So the Big 10 wanting the L.A. schools for the L.A. market and showing they’re the premier college sports conference — we could say “league” instead of “conference.” To optimize and maximize their media rights, when the Big 10’s media rights deal was up for renegotiation, they got USC and UCLA.

And the other piece is the expansion of the college football playoff. The money basically doubles annually in expanding the playoff and selling the media rights for that. The big conferences all get an automatic payment every year that comes out of that playoff media rights deal and then you get more money based on how many of your conference schools qualify and how far they advance — but that money goes to the conference and the conference shares it across the schools.

I don’t know if taking out one of the Power 5 conferences was the goal at the end of the day, but they should have predicted the domino effect. 

OK, so college football is this massive business that has funded all these Olympic and women’s sports development pipelines. So then how do you separate those things out? How do you get football players compensated and maintain a system of Olympic development for runners and swimmers? A lot of critiques — whether in good faith or not — have argued that if college football players are designated as employees, then it’ll bankrupt the entire system and other sports will be cut.

I think the first step is to say that no athletes are to blame here. It’s really important to remind athletes that their sports have value and they’ve been neglected historically by these people, who have been so fixated on the business of college football. 

Those athletes have also been used as a kind of shield to defend the enterprise: If we pay football players, women’s sports will die, Olympic sports will die.

And, to me, that’s lazy. It’s super lazy thinking and it almost excuses the people most responsible for designing new approaches. Then they can say: We don’t have to fix it, we can just blame them and then say ‘we told you so’ after schools start cutting sports. 

I realize I am a beneficiary of college sports. I had a world-class academic and athletic experience. The system served me. And I didn’t know that football players, who were disproportionately Black, were being channeled into fake classes at the same time that I was there falling in love with history. So I’ve felt responsible to show this problematic relationship and also to come up with solutions.

We need new revenue streams for Olympic sports. We need a different approach to thinking about what sports are in higher education. We need to expand participation opportunities rather than restrict them.

There’s this massive disruption conversation happening, and the USOPC (U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee) is currently going through a redesign right now as well. Congress created an independent commission on the state of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic sports and they’ve been at work over the last year-and-a-half. [Ed note: You can read their full report and recommendations here.] And they took this as an opportunity to show Congress we really need to rethink the Amateur Sports Act of 1978. That Act gave the USOPC a dual mandate to serve both the top of the pyramid and also that grassroots base — but they never had the resources or power to actually support the grassroots. So who in the world claims a mission of serving the greater public and taking on complex challenges and innovating for the future? It’s higher education.

I’ve been trying to show leaders of higher education you have a responsibility to get in line with what’s happening with the USOPC, to think in a sport-by-sport manner. What can we do as colleges with this best-in-the-world infrastructure to support Olympic and Paralympic development? How do we engage our community as participants rather than just as spectators? How can we have mixed public and private funding of facilities with a shared use approach, which even potentially makes them revenue generating and self-sustaining?

If you could wave your magic wand and come up with a solution?

There’s a lot of different revenue streams, a totally different model that needs to be developed. Football needs to be separate. I think it would be totally cool and probably ideal to spin-off football and make it independent of the university, but they’re paying to use facilities and university logos, they’re still playing in the same stadium. And those athletes have scholarships as part of their compensation packages that they can activate at any moment they want, maybe when they retire at 25. And then you don’t have to worry about things like Title IX, because if higher ed wants to run a professional football program in-house you have to provide equitable opportunities for women or professionalize in a similar way. And then gender equity could be approached in a sport-by-sport way.

Talk to people from other countries, anytime you’ve had a conversation about college sports outside of the U.S., people who are less familiar with the scale and business of our system, it’s jaw-dropping. 

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