There are many reasons that athletics are now so expensive for colleges. Coaching salaries, growing support staffs, and stadium enhancements are all part of the equation. So is the legal settlement that allows athletes to share in the revenues they help generate. However you tally it up, only a small percentage of colleges can truly afford to play the game.
There are about 20-25 schools, the ones receiving the most media attention and revenue, that can afford to do pretty much what they want with their sports programs. Those are the likes of Ohio State, whose athletics budget is over $300 million and may soon top $500 million, and Alabama, whose budget is about $260 million.
Outside that group of two dozen are schools such as Boston College, whose athletics budget is less than $150 million.
And the gap between the haves and have-mores is only about to grow.
Conference-wide revenues are now being distributed disproportionately to the teams that win and advance in playoffs. Plus, now that each school can share up to 22 percent of its athletics revenue with their players, the schools with the most lucrative athletics programs will be best able to recruit the best players.
For an example of how eager some schools are to raise money for their sports teams, consider the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and its head men’s basketball coach, Josh Pastner. In late July, while investors were in town discussing adding an NBA expansion franchise in Las Vegas, he pitched them on effectively “buying” his Running Rebels and paying its players the money they are due from name, image, and likeness deals. Pastner says the right price would be between $10 million and $12 million.
Is this what big-time college sports is coming to? Auctioning off varsity teams to the highest bidder? Ownership?
Ideally, Congress will bring some sanity to the situation. The Protect College Sports Act, which has bipartisan support in the Senate, would give the NCAA more flexibility to bring the spending arms race under control. A vote was recently postponed until mid-September at the earliest.
In the meantime, while we are waiting for something (anything) from Washington, here are three things I think could be done to shore up many schools’ athletic programs and better support the athletes.
The first and biggest of these would be a long overdue adjustment in the NCAA model itself. Its current structure of three divisions (I, II, and III) dates back to the 1980s and no longer adequately captures the true breadth of institutions in this country. There are more than 1,100 NCAA member institutions. With a new structure of at least five divisions, schools could decide where they best fit today — allowing them to compete only with schools that have comparable athletic budgets. Having more divisions also would allow more athletes to celebrate as national champions.
What could that look like? It might further refine Division I into Divisions 1A and 1B. They’d be separated by the schools’ annual spending on athletics, averaged over the most recent five years. To start, you could fill 1A with only the few dozen schools whose athletic budgets are $150 million or higher. Division 1B would be schools with budgets below that figure. (The dividing point would be adjusted over time.) Each division would have its own national championship structure. Division IB could focus a bit more on bringing the athletic experience back into alignment — there could be high-level competition and sports enthusiasm on campus, but not at the expense of the athletes’ academic and personal lives, and without the runaway spending that the GAO highlighted.
(If no one likes the idea of naming these subdivisions A and B, how about National and American, a convention the NFL and Major League Baseball both use?)
Division II, the smallest in the current NCAA model, could remain as it currently stands. Schools need to have only 10 sports to be eligible for Division II.
A bigger distinction could be made in Division III. Here, too, there could be A and B subdivisions, but the distinction would be undergraduate enrollment, averaged over five years. Those with more than 3,000 students would be in Division IIIA, and under 3,000 would be in Division IIIB. Each could have different sports minimums; Division IIIA could have a minimum of 18-20 sports, Division IIIB could have 10-12.
Both would be nonscholarship as Division III is today, emphasizing the holistic student-athlete experience. But athletes could still compete for DIII conference and national championships. And each group could shorten the lengths of its sports seasons, allowing for more multisport athletes.
My next two suggestions involve getting help from outside higher ed.
Our pipeline for American Olympic athletes is overly dependent on the colleges where they get their training. Essentially, the cost of developing Olympians is covered by college tuition, fees, and alumni donations. In nearly every other country in the world, the government directly subsidizes the cost of training Olympians and potential Olympians. Federal funds earmarked for this purpose would benefit not only universities but also the United States Olympic Committee, which historically has chosen to award its own limited development funds to teams that win medals.
And finally, given football’s outsize role in athletic department revenues and budgets, colleges and universities should try to partner with the NFL to subsidize health care for all Division I athletes, not just football players.
Many economists, national academic advocacy groups, and others have long argued that the NFL should contribute to the pay for college football players, whose teams effectively form the equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues. These players are now earning money from their schools’ TV deals and NIL monies, but their health care remains costly for them. Currently, an athlete’s personal or family health care policy covers the bulk of their medical costs, with each athletics department’s insurance picking up the rest. Any risk manager on campus will tell you how expensive and unpredictable this can get, especially since players often want second opinions or to use their own out-of-network health care provider, or are forced to purchase a high-deductible insurance plan just to play.
College football generates the money — but every Division I athlete deserves the payoff: real access to quality health care. A model for collaboration like this is already taking shape with flag football’s entry into the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games. The NFL has supplied millions of dollars to high school and college programs to launch flag football teams and fund championships.
Fixing college sports may not require blowing up the entire model, but schools can’t do it on their own.
