Mid-major schools have financial concerns after NCAA grants spring athletes extra year of eligibility
LOS ANGELES – The decision was made with fairness in mind, and Andy Fee agreed with its sentiment. It broke his heart to see the final spring seasons of his senior athletes shut down. As athletic director at Long Beach State, where spring sports have a rich tradition, Fee supported most anything that helped student-athletes in the wake of COVID-19.
Yet, when the NCAA Division I Council approved an extra year of eligibility for spring sports athletes this week, Fee was left wondering exactly how much fairness might cost at the midmajor level.
He’s not entirely sure how Long Beach State and other midmajor schools can afford it.
“It’s on our backs and my back as an athletic director to figure out how we do it,” Fee said. “Any time you give student-athletes an opportunity, that’s a good thing. But it’s a challenge. It’s unbudgeted dollars we have to come up with. There are going to be some interesting discussions.”
It will be entirely up to schools to decide how those dollars are spent. That flexibility was the crux of the Council’s decision.
“There were all levels of conversation around how this will
play out very differently on different campuses, and how some institutions might be able to do things that other institutions can’t do,” said Penn athletic director M. Grace Calhoun, the Council’s chair. “But we continued to come back to the fact of making this as permissive as possible.”
Instead of mandating that scholarships be honored for returning seniors, which might have crippled some athletic departments, schools will have full discretion in deciding whether to continue aid, reduce it or eliminate it altogether.
There are nearly 350 universities that compete at the NCAA Division I level, and financially they are not on a level playing field.
Schools from the cream of the crop – who belong to the so-called “Power Five” conferences – pull in millions of dollars per year in payouts from football bowl games and the NCAA basketball tournaments, plus lucrative television contracts. As a result, Pac-12 Conference Commissioner Larry Scott has said some of his conference’s schools “have the strong view they would not reduce aid for a senior that was coming back.”
Schools from conferences such as the Big West and West Coast don’t enjoy the same revenue flow,