U.S. Olympic future endangered by NCAA’s meltdown

As one prominent college coach told me, “It’s going to be the wild, wild West.”

That is proving to be true. And, as in the wild, wild West, there is likely to be collateral damage. The losers could end up being Olympic sports, the same ones that you spent your summer watching.

The chaos is full-blown. Texas and Oklahoma are joining the SEC. In response, the Pac-12 is collaborating with — though not expanding to — the ACC and Big Ten. Athletes, even some still in high school, are scrambling to figure out how to cash in on the new name, image and likeness rules. Some are hiring agents, or their parents are acting as agents.

The pandemic has accelerated changes that were already in the works. This summer the fallout has been raining down and reshaping the collegiate landscape.

Even far away, in Tokyo, everyone could see the impact. The changes have many in the Olympic movement deeply worried about the arms race in college football, about the financial repercussions of NIL, and about what it will all mean for their own development system.

Because the development system of the U.S. Olympic team is college sports.

“It is a very important ecosystem not only to Team USA but to the Olympic movement globally,” said U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee CEO Sarah Hirshland. “We, in the U.S., train a number of the world’s top athletes at the collegiate level. So that system is an important sports development system and an important human development system.”

A rumbling undercurrent throughout the Tokyo Games was the clear and present danger that developmental system faces.

“I cannot deny threats to the system,” Hirshland said. “There’s a lot of work to do ... but we feel we’re on the right path.”

Hirshland has been in constant communication with the NCAA. She has a senior director for college partnerships. A year ago, the USOPC convened a College Sports Sustainability Think Tank to tackle the problem.

Unlike every other developed nation, the U.S. Olympic movement receives essentially no government funding. It is funded by corporate sponsorships and broadcast rights and relies almost exclusively on the collegiate system to develop its Olympic athletes. Seventy-five percent of the 2021 U.S. Olympic team — which won 113 overall medals and 39 golds, both highs for the Games — were college athletes.

One USOPC study found that in 2018, Division I schools spent $5.6 billion on Olympic sports. In just one year.

But those pathways to Olympic success are under threat. We saw that dramatically at Stanford over the course of the past year, when the university that bills itself as a home of Olympic champions decided to axe 11 varsity sports. Though Stanford eventually reversed course, the reverberations were felt throughout collegiate sports. If wealthy Stanford could do that, why wouldn’t other schools cut sports or push them down to club status?

The solution offered to Stanford by a group of former Cardinal athletes was to self-endow the Olympic sports. That can work in some cases, but such a solution may not be feasible at colleges without quite as deep-pocketed alumni bases. And in the NIL grab for cash, potential “investors” may want to direct their money to more high-profile athletes, like a quarterback or point guard.

Programs like the U.S. women’s water polo team, currently an Olympic powerhouse, having won three straight gold medals, are 100% drawn from college programs.

“It’s something that we’re very aware of,” said coach Adam Krikorian, the Mountain View native who has led the women’s water polo team to such extraordinary success. “The collegiate system for us, if I could compare it to the system in Hungary or Spain, is essentially our professional system. We don’t have anything else.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. The skyrocketing revenues from college football have led to grossly inflated athletic department staffs, palatial buildings, and overthe-top bells and whistles for the revenue sports. But there seems to be no putting this genie back in the bottle.

The chaos has already been unleashed.

And no one can predict what it will mean for the collegiate Olympic sports program.

“Without it,” Krikorian said, “our sport is in jeopardy.”

As is the American Olympic movement.