Smith was a driver for changes in NCAA
AD served on committee for what became NIL
Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith was a forward thinker in a college athletic world resistant to change.
The NCAA clung to its amateur model for decades, even when schools and television networks were making huge amounts of money while permitting athletes to receive nothing more than scholarships.
As the foundations around that outdated model began to crack, Smith advocated for change, often on NCAA committees. Sometimes he was successful. Sometimes he wasn’t.
One of his successes was his push for cost-of-attendance funding, which allows schools to provide extra money for living expenses not covered by scholarship packages. At Ohio State, that’s about $3,800 per student-athlete.
“It took seven years,” said Smith, who is retiring at the end of June after 19 years at Ohio State. “Had we done some of the things we should have done in the business a long time ago, we might not be where we are.”
As Smith put it, “You do it yourself, or it’s done to you.”
The latter is happening. Smith served on an NCAA committee that dealt with the issue that became known as name, image and likeness. Smith has long been a proponent of players being allowed to benefit from NIL, which was finally made permissible in 2021. But the current system borders on what many call anarchy.
“If the board of directors had supported
the package that we put together and passed (as an NCAA committee), we may not have some of the issues we have today,” Smith said. “But they stripped all the prohibitions and the guardrails around it and just introduced (mostly unfettered) NIL. Now we’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle. But the thing with NIL is that people just don’t see the good it’s doing for a lot of people.”
What might not be commonly known is that football and basketball players are the exception in getting full scholarships. Most student-athletes are on partial scholarships. NIL allows them the chance to defray costs and maybe finish school with money in the bank instead of graduating with major debt.
Among the several major pending lawsuits, the House v. NCAA case might be the biggest, Smith believes. The
class-action case could force the NCAA to pay athletes in revenue sharing.
“That’s a huge $30 billion number to the top 65-70 schools,” Smith said.
At Ohio State and most top athletic departments, revenue from football subsidizes almost all other sports except men’s basketball. OSU’S football surplus was about $55 million in fiscal 2023. If colleges must pay athletes in revenue sharing, that would cut severely into the money allocated for non-revenue sports.
“I don’t know what that’s going to look like,” Smith said.
It’s not as simple as dropping moneylosing sports for OSU, largely because of Title IX gender equality requirements. Ohio State funds 36 varsity sports, with an expectation of competing for championships in all of them. That might not be realistic in the future, Smith believes, and it would come at a major cost.
“The thing people forget is that the collegiate system provides the Olympians for our country,” he said. “Over 82% of Olympians in the last Olympics were from the college environment. What happens to gymnastics? That’s the thing I’m concerned about because I can’t see around the corner about what these lawsuits are going to do from a financial point of view. We’re all kind of waiting.”
Smith believes a different compensation model for student-athletes is coming. What form it will take is anyone’s guess.
Smith used OSU’S men’s tennis program, a perennial national championship contender, as an example.
To build their ranking and ensure that it will host early-round NCAA matches, OSU travels in the nonconference part of the season to Florida, Texas and California to face other top teams. In a new financial environment, Smith believes that might not be possible. He can foresee a time when OSU must eliminate assistant coaches or reduce roster sizes in some sports and simply scale back on competitive expectations.
He said he believes Congress will eventually have to pass national legislation so it will no longer be left on a stateby-state basis.
Smith said the challenges around the ever-changing landscape are not why he’s retiring. A part of him would like to help navigate through the uncertain times. But he’s mostly content to leave it to the next generation.
“I think we all have to adjust,” Smith said. “I’ve always told my teammates that change is inevitable. It’s coming. How do we embrace it and do our best around it?”