fishbane

There will be a lawsuit regardless. There is a fairly widely held belief that the opportunities must balance or at least be proportional to the makeup of the student body to pass title IX muster and that the payments to athletes could be proportional to revenue. I'd be surprised if any power 5 school pays the women's athletic staff as much as the men's. Schools are free to pay based on ability, experience, knowledge, and economic value for these positions why would it require the opposite for players? It seems likely that at least some schools will take this interpretation and run with it. This in turn makes it more likely for others to follow suit since that would put them at a disadvantage recruiting athletes to revenue sports. On the other hand making a flat payment to all athletes regardless of sport/revenue probably gets another antitrust lawsuit. It would seem to deny athletes in revenue sports from making their true worth in the market. Another lawsuit is inevitable regarding this, so I'd imagine administrators will likely choose to take the path that doesn't put them at a competitive disadvantage in the sports that are most important to their institution.

I thought he won U20 not U23.

$50.70 is a pretty good take from them. Just about the best possible. Their terms of service has a liability limitation of $150. What I find especially annoying about Flo is that is your go to their website and attempt to sign up they won't even tell you how much the thing costs until you've made an account. Before you even see how much it will cost you've already given them your information and agreed to their terms of service. Does any other service do this? Seems backwards.

The Big Ten is far and away the dominant conference in NCAA. It's been nearly 20 years since a team from another conference has won NCAAs. I think the changes to the qualifier system has only helped the richer conferences and the changes agreed in the settlement (removal of scholarship limits and ability to pay players) will only make it worse. Adding some inefficiency back into the system could help parity. The problem with using a 0.500 conference record is that you'd expect half the wrestlers to get into the tournament. This would be more than 33 wrestlers per weight. I think it would be interesting is if wrestlers had to qualify for the conference tournament based on their conference dual results. It would make the regular season duals more meaningful and reduce dodging, but it would take away from the team aspect of the conference tournament. Adding inefficiencies is one way to help parity. In profession sports this is often done with reverse draft order, a salary cap/luxury tax/financial fair play rules, roster limits, and revenue sharing. Most of these would be unworkable at the NCAA level. A draft is impossible. You can't send an athlete to a college he doesn't want to goo to because that school is bad at the sport he wants to play. A salary cap is essentially meaningless since NIL collective spending can't be effectively regulated. Roster limits are possibly but adding them at the same time as removing scholarship limits only will be a net negative for parity since the richer teams can add award more than 9.9 scholarship per year. Perhaps the only thing that can really be done to help parity would be to take a page out of the Olympic handbook. Limit the number of qualifiers. The fact that the US and Russia only get one entry at the Olympics and world championship has resulted with wrestlers going elsewhere and raising the level of other teams. Issue the 33 qualifiers to conferences based on the number of teams in the conference. There are 77 schools with D1 wrestling teams. The Big Ten only has 14 of those or 18%, so they only get 18% of the qualifiers. That would be 60 or 6 per weight, which is 1 fewer than expected by the 0.500 record criteria. Parity should be improved, since wrestlers will go to less rich conferences to get a spot at NCAAs. I'm very much in favor of a dual team championship, but I think it won't be as successful financially as the individual tournament. One thing that makes NCAAs a money maker is that it sells out. You have fan interest from 60 teams or so in the event. Fans know where it is ahead of time and are pretty much assured their team will be involved to some degree. With a dual meet title it would be more challenging to sell out. If this is a neutral site it would be extremely difficult. If it's hosted in Tulsa, OK are 16,000 people going to show up and watch PSU wrestle Iowa? This would presumably be the result of some bracket, so maybe a week before PSU and Iowa fans would learn their teams would be involved. Would that many fans make travel plans on a week's notice like that? The FBS bowl schedule has the conference championships 4 weeks before the major bowls. I doubt that would happen in wrestling.

The scholarship limit is 9.9 which was a 20% reduction from the old limit of 11. The settlement removes scholarship limits but imparts roster limits. Not sure what that will be in wrestling.

I tend to think these will be okay. The Big Ten is the money conference and the SEC is right behind it. The annual salary cap is set by 22% of the average revenue in the power 5 conferences teams in these conferences should be above or near the average. Id be more concerned with programs in the ACC and Big 12 which have relatively bad TV deals compared the SEC and Big Ten. I wonder if some non-p5 FBS schools will pack it in and go down to FCS. Whilst I think it remains to be seen whether this will be the doom of non-revenue sports it certainly isn't good for competitive balance in FBS football. It kind of sucks this happens a few years before the playoffs were set to expand. Probably makes it just as unlikely for a non-P5 team to get in as it was before expansion.

The NCAA could probably have a rule that coaches must be faculty, but they wouldn't be able to tell universities that they must have a pay scale for faculty nor that they strictly adhere to the schedule for all faculty appointments including coaches. All it would take is a handful of schools to care about winning to pay more for special faculty appointments. If would have happened if there were billions of dollars being collected and not shared with the players. The $2.75 billion settlement has to be paid, but I think that is over something like ten years. And dollars paid to football players have to come from somewhere, but schools aren't required to pay their football players at all in subsequent season. Will all schools opt to even do this? I doubt it. This will probably be common at FBS schools, less common at FCS schools, less common still at D2 schools, and unheard of at D3 schools would be my guess. You can probably add the service academies (Air Force, Army, and Navy) to the survivors. I don't see how this could take out the programs there. I think you can add Franklin and Marshall to the list of unaffected too. They are D3 for all sports except wrestling where the compete in D1. I don't see them blowing their entire budget paying football players. I'd say something similar about the PSAC schools (Bloomsburg, Clarion, Edinboro, Lock Haven), which are D2 except for wrestling, but they have experienced decreased enrollments and there had been talk of closing entire universities in the system a few years ago. The biggest threat is probably to FBS schools outside of the power 5 conferences. Most of these don't have wrestling. I think the only FBS schools outside of service academies not in a power 5 conference are App State, Central Michigan University, Kent State, NIU, Ohio University, UB, and Wyoming. Oregon State will also be out of the power 5 next season with the dissolution of the PAC-12.

7 different team champs was over 50 years not 30. Over the past 30 years only 5 teams have won team titles in wrestling. There are not 3x as many FBS football programs as there are D1 wrestling programs. If you go back 50 years in FBS football I think it is 22 different champs vs 7 in wrestling over the same period.

A team outside the Big Ten has not won in nearly 20 years (OSU 2006). A single title has been won by teams outside of the Big Ten and Big 12 since 1950.

I mean if each university independently decided to set up an internal pay scale for coach/AD/admin positions it would be fine. If they got together and did this on a conference/division/NCAA level this would violate antitrust law no question. Coaches and ADs know what each other make (or at least those as public universities) due to disclosure laws, so all it really takes is for a few to care about winning in a few sports for them to have to adjust the scale to market rate to get the person they want in the position they are trying to fill. One school decides they really want to win and pays up to get a coach, that fact becomes widely known, and any school that want to compete must do the same. Some students get more out of college than others, whether athletes or not, and some colleges take education more seriously than others, but by and large they provide student athletes with an education. Not doing this has always been against the rules and would remain against the rules after this settlement. Where pay-for-play helps is that in the past when a school didn't take their educational mission as seriously as they should the athlete's only compensation was a shitty education, now that the athlete can be financially compensated too. This makes the deal more fair for the player. Paying student-athletes was never illegal. NCAA rules are not laws. There should be a good reason for something to be "illegal" or even just institutional rules against it. We are talking about paying someone for doing something that generates revenue for the university that shouldn't be illegal. But that's what you described. And this has already happened and has been litigated. Back in the 1980s the NCAA used to sell the football TV rights as a package and distribute money to school. Some schools sued the NCAA for the right to sell the rights to their own games believing they could do better. They won the lawsuit with the NCAA found to have violated antitrust law. A group of schools got together and packaged their football TV rights for sale and swiftly found out they were getting less than what it was worth under the NCAA's deal. In my opinion the NCAA's reputation suffered more attempting to prevent paying the athletes than by this settlement. The settlement itself is tacit acknowledgment that the NCAA behaved unlawfully for years depriving NCAA athletes money that was rightfully theirs. The settlement goes to righting those wrongs. If players become employees like coaches transfers could go down. Professional athletes typically sign multi-year contracts. If Colorado is able to pay their players they might be able to sign a top recruit to a multi year deal and keep them around longer. What makes you think this will happen? How many D1 wrestling programs do you reckon will be around in 5 years?

WKN already pointed out the general issues with amateurism, but there are more specific issues with your suggestions. 1) Placing a cap on AD/coach salaries is an antitrust lawsuit all its own and a losing one for the NCAA. 2) Paying the athletes based on their economic value eliminates the issue with providing them with a potentially low quality education. The education becomes a fringe benefit in addition to their salary. 3) Allowing institutions to pay student athletes their economic worth in the open removes the incentive to pay them under the table. 4) A fair way to assign broadcast rights is to give them to the highest bidder. Giving them away for less than the market rate creates incentive for networks to bribe or wine/dine NCAA and institution officials that get to decide who gets the rights. If there is $100 million in demand for the broadcast rights then thats what they should be sold for. Bro you're the one with the cognitive dissonance problem. The NCAA has been operating a pro league for decades the only thing that was missing was cutting the players in on the revenue. Keeping all the money was simply untenable. This is an asteroid that's been on a collision course with the NCAA for decades. Paying the athletes is not a terrible idea - it is literally the only option available to the NCAA in 2024. The only thing that might possibly save D1 college sports. The alternative is to continue the legal fight and get sued into Bolivian.

That level of parity has never really existed in wrestling. In past 36 years only 5 teams have won team titles. One of those 5, Ohio State, won only a single title. The championship team failed to repeat only 4 times (OSU 1994, Minnesota 2007, Ohio State 2015, and Iowa 2021) during that period. It could have been even fewer if not for probation for things that are no longer against the rules (OSU), eligibility loss due to transfer which is no longer a thing (2007), and COVID (2021). Whilst a certain level of parity is both necessary and desirable, parity can also produce less compelling storylines. The year with perhaps the most parity, when the traditional power house programs were down, was 2015. The title was up for grabs with traditional powers PSU, OSU, and Minnesota outside the top 5 and Edinboro was as much a title contender as Iowa. It was cool, but was it as compelling as 2018 when two all time great teams battled it out for the title?

This isn't news. NCAA athletes have been taken advantage of for decades. Pandoras box was opened 40+ years ago that's when the money got turned on in college sports. The fact that it has recently started being shared with the athletes was a long time coming.

Colleges paying athletes was inevitable. Anyone who thought the old system where colleges could take in upwards of $100-$200 million in revenue from TV deals, ticket sales, and sponsorships without sharing any of it with the players could continue was in denial. The lawsuits that were settled posed an existential threat to college sports both revenue and non-revenue. The settlement came at a fairly cheap price too - 22% of the average power 5 annual revenue is low compared to the near 50% revenue share of pro leagues. Surely the reason the players agreed to only 22% was in part the very real risk of bankrupting the NCAA and though that percentage is schedule to increase under the settlement it won't hit the level of revenue sharing seen in the pros. Athletic departments will be scrambling to figure out how to pay the settlement - cutting staff, cutting salaries, cutting sports, delaying/cancelling investment in facilities/equipment, drumming up donations (not counted in revenue split calculation), increase rental/events at athletic facilities - I'm sure it's all on the table. It's not all negative though - paying the players should also open the door to revenue streams that had been turned off by previous lawsuits. Licensed video games are back on the table. Personalized jersey sales could be back on the table. And whilst colleges will have to share these kinds of revenue with players the share percentage is still quite favorable to the universities with them getting to keep upwards of 70% of it. A logical person could, in light of the alternative, view the settlement as a win even for non-revenue athletes. The blame for the predicament that college athletics found itself in must fall squarely on the greedy institutions that for far too long tried to keep all the money.

You've said this multiple times. Do you have any reason to believe it will actually happen? Students on academic scholarships have been able to be paid for on-campus employment for decades and decades. Their scholarships have never been considered taxable income. Now that the NCAA changed their internal rule about directly paying players you think the IRS will change the tax treatment of their scholarships? Why exactly do you think that will happen? The tuition discounts that universities give as a benefit to their employees and their families is not taxable income. So you're telling me that PSU football coach James Franklin could get a 75% tuition discount on all the PSU classes he takes and all of his offspring can get bachelors degrees at a 75% discount without any of it being taxable income, but some athlete in a non-revenue sport not getting a huge percentage of the $20 million annual salary cap is going to get taxed on his/her scholarship? I doubt that is how it happens.