New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
What would proposed elite subdivision cost for schools
It’s out in the open now: The NCAA needs a reworked model for college sports and knows it.
That’s why, in early December, NCAA President Charlie Baker pitched a new subdivision for schools that spend the most money on their athletic programs. And at the NCAA convention in Phoenix last week, the Division I Council set out to provide recommendations on Baker’s vision, nudging the ball forward a bit. The subdivision would be optional, as Baker proposed it, and require its member schools to pay at least half their eligible student-athletes a minimum of $30,000 annually through a trust fund. That money would be earmarked as “education-related,” though the NCAA doesn’t intend to dictate how the athletes actually spend it.
Some perks for joining? The ability for these schools to make their own rules, such as bigger staffs or rosters, without having the voting process muddled by programs with much less money or willingness to spend.
The questions and potential issues? Well, how much time do you have?
Yes, this is still a proposal, a starting point for discussions that heated up at last week’s convention. But if the NCAA aims to split the haves and havenots with a financial barrier to entry, it’s now possible to gauge what that decision might look like for a given school.
To do that, The Washington Post counted the total number of athletes at each school that will play football in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 or ACC next fall (plus Notre Dame, a football independent, and Oregon State and Washington State, who were recently abandoned by the rest of the Pac-12). From there, the formula for the baseline annual payment is pretty simple: total number of athletes divided by two, then multiplied by $30,000 to estimate the minimum each school would have to spend to join the subdivision as Baker proposed it.
Athletic department sizes vary widely across the major conferences. Ohio State had 950 athletes, the most of all of the schools, while Mississippi State had the fewest at 363. That also means there’s a sizable gap between the highest and lowest estimated costs of entry for the hypothetical subdivision.
The Post determined the size of each athletic department based on the number of athletes on the rosters of NCAA championship sports teams. That means, for the purposes of this exercise, athletes on teams that don’t compete for an NCAA championship - Boston College’s sailing team, for example, or Iowa’s women’s wrestling squad - were not counted, though it’s possible their schools would have to include them in their totals down the line.
College rosters are constantly in flux. Maybe you’ve heard of the transfer portal. Maybe you’ve experienced the whims of a teenager. So these counts, collected this month, represent a snapshot and are an estimate of each athletic department’s size when a subdivision could be formed.
This proposal exists because of the vast differences between most majorand not-so-major-conference athletic departments in Division I. But inequities are rampant throughout the major conferences, too.
Ohio State can afford to pay the highest minimum fee, of course, and even more television money is coming its way in the near future. And because of their massive revenue, Texas and Georgia would be the least burdened by joining the subdivision as proposed. Texas would need to pay a minimum of about $8 million annually into trusts for its athletes, which would have been about just 3.4 percent of its 2022 revenue, the lowest among the public schools in the major conferences. For Georgia, an estimated minimum cost around $7.1 million would have been 3.5 percent.
Some schools have large athletic departments but lack the revenue of their high-spending, highgrossing peers. Rutgers’s estimated entry fee ($10.8 million) would have been 9.8 percent of its 2022 revenue, the highest among the public schools included here. For Cal, a fee of about $11.2 million would have been 9.5 percent.
So the potential choice for Rutgers and Cal — not Texas or Georgia — better reflects what it would take for a non-major-conference school to make a jump like this. Maybe UConn (Big East) or Gonzaga (West Coast Conference) wants to join the subdivision to keep up in basketball. Maybe Boise State (Mountain West) wants to join with hopes of reentering the national conversation in football. But maybe the whole point is to keep out any school that can’t spend and spend on football, clearing the way for rules best suited for programs with massive budgets.
With 355 athletes, Boise State’s athletic department is a hair smaller than Mississippi State’s. But if Boise State wants to join this version of the subdivision, it would have to spend a minimum of $5.3 million, an entry fee that would have accounted for 10.5 percent of its 2022 revenue. That proportion is larger than that of all the major-conference public schools. Connecticut would have an entry fee of $8.6 million (8.7 percent of its 2022 revenue). This is a window into how the gate would be kept.
At the NCAA convention, the Division I Council passed a handful of name, image and likeness (NIL) regulations that will go into effect Aug. 1, including a new voluntary registry for agents and financial advisers, plus disclosure requirements with a goal of gathering and distributing NIL data for athletes and schools. The council also discussed a significant change that would permit schools to help athletes facilitate NIL deals. But as for how and when a new subdivision could be implemented, we’re still a ways off.
“It is a table setter,” Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, told reporters in Phoenix. “I’ve worked in government a long time, and in government you file a bill (and) you don’t expect to get it back the same way you filed it.”
According to Yahoo Sports, the Division I Council is expected to offer final recommendations on Baker’s proposal at its meeting in June. After that, the idea would be to nail down plans for the subdivision at the NCAA convention in January 2025. And, in theory, this would all come after the potential adoption of new rules allowing schools to pay athletes directly through NIL partnerships.
That provides a lot of time to iron out the finer details of a subdivision. A big question is how Title IX would apply to NIL and the proposed minimum $30,000 payments to half of a school’s athletes, especially because the payments would be subject to Title IX gender-equity requirements but wouldn’t have to be equal for each athlete. Or what if one major-conference school refuses to join the subdivision, further widening the gap between, say, Alabama and Vanderbilt in SEC football?
Or what if one school in a non-major-football conference does join, permitting UConn. men’s basketball to offer more scholarships than, say, Seton Hall? Or have a much larger coaching staff? Or do something we can’t even think of at the moment, because this whole differentrules-for-teams-competing-for-the-same-conference-championship thing would have been totally unthinkable until very recently.
What about the possibility of program cuts at a school that wants to join the subdivision but feels its current minimum cost is a tad too steep? Is men’s lacrosse sacrificed to lower the cost of admission? Does a soccer or volleyball program come out in the wash?
And perhaps most importantly, what would the subdivision be called? Send your suggestions to NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis.
METHODOLOGY
When analyzing the size of each school’s athletic department, The Post only considered the largest roster among each school’s cross-country and track and field teams, because cross-country athletes at many schools participate on both teams. If a school had women’s volleyball and beach volleyball teams, athletes who participated in both sports were counted only once.
The Post relied on rosters from each team’s 202324 season, except in a few instances when the previous year’s roster size provided a better estimate, such as when a baseball team had only released a limited fall roster. The roster counts were collected in early January.
The athletic department revenue figures, only available for public schools, are from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database.