The State of College Sports
College sports are collectively a big business. Sure, most sports cost universities more than they generate, but overall, the NCAA made over $1 billion in revenue in 2022. Football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball generated the most revenue. And while the NCAA itself is a non-profit organization, there is a lot of profiting going on within college sports. Major athletic powerhouse schools also look very different than the rest. But even at the same institutions, the college athletics experience can vary dramatically from sport to sport.
Over the past few years, some big changes have occurred in college sports. This article will look at three of those major shifts:
1) Conference hopping and football championship structure
3) Name Image and Likeness rules (NIL)
The mission of the NCAA is to “Provide a world-class athletics and academic experience for student-athletes that fosters lifelong well-being.” Is that still valid?
Is student-athlete still a realistic and truthful description for these athletes who have in modern times generated billions of dollars for others and in the past few years started to make money for themselves still a valid descriptor?
Conference hopping and championship structure
The Power 5 conferences were* composed of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC. These are the schools with the biggest and most competitive football programs. Although, a few of these 5 most powerful conferences have shown signs of weakness. The Big 12 is losing its two most storied and successful programs, Texas and Oklahoma, to the SEC, while the Pac-12 is losing 10, yes 10 of their twelve teams. Arizona, Arizona State, Cal, UCLA, Colorado, Oregon, USC, Stanford, Utah and Washington are all leaving, scattering themselves to the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC.
*The remaining “Pac-2” are Oregon State and Washington State. The conference will dissolve after the 2024 spring sports season.
Conferences
With all the money involved in college sports, college football in particular, being in the “right” conference can significantly impact a school’s rankings, post-season opportunities and notoriety. However, what’s “right” for the school or conference, might not be “right” for the student-athlete, staff or fan.
In the 2024 offseason, twelve Power 5 teams moved conferences. Texas and Oklahoma left the Big 12 for the SEC. Stanford and California left the Pac-12 for the ACC. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah left the Pac-12 for the Big 12. USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington left the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. Notice the theme there? Bigger. With the Pac-12 dead, the remaining “Power-4” conferences all have at least 16 teams.
Some of these moves make sense and others boggle the mind, but one thing is clear, in the remaining 4 major conferences, the schools are much farther apart than they used to be. How far? I’m glad you asked.
I did the math on the existing and proposed distances between all schools in the Power-5 conferences to quantify the impacts to the schools, teams, athletes, fans and the environment. Some of the results are wild.
The total distance between schools in the four power conferences doubled. Here’s a chart that shows just how far the schools are from each other:
The conference with the most shocking and severe impacts is the Big Ten, adding four schools on the West Coast (USC, UCLA, Oregon, Washington) to a conference that is Midwest focused, but also includes two schools on the Atlantic Coast (Maryland and Rutgers).
The chart below shows the average distance between schools, with a whopping 128% increase in the average distance between Big Ten schools. The Big Ten went from being effectively tied with the SEC for densest conference to the least dense, by a lot.
Big Ten impacts:
The ACC is second in terms of impact, even though they only added two schools (California and Stanford). One hopes that the east coast schools can schedule playing both Cal and Stanford on the same road trip, however for some sports that will not be possible. One also wonders if the Stanford and Cal students will ever be able to attend class in person while conference play is going on, continually bouncing up and down the Atlantic coast.
ACC impacts:
The ACC acquired two west coast schools of their own, increasing their average distance between schools by 24%. However, since ACC schools were all along the Atlantic coast except for Louisville and Pittsburgh, and the do whatever-the-f*#@ they want school, Notre Dame, the impact on student athletes is almost as severe in terms of increased travel time
The Big 12 and SEC impacts were relatively minor by comparison, so I did not list them here, but the data can be found in the table below.
Did anyone ask the coaches, athletes, trainers, parents of the other 23 NCAA sports besides football when making these conference moves? Presumably, it was a consideration, but are all the negative academic, environmental, and financial impacts for the other athletes on campus worth the burden of traveling farther to compete?
While Universities made moves to help their revenue-generating sports (football and basketball) make more money, the rest of the non-revenue generating stand to lose more on longer trips. The burden on the “student-athlete” is very real. The non-revenue generating sports also don’t have the resources available to the football and basketball teams. Being an athlete was tough enough before these moves. Can you imagine what it will be like to be on the Stanford and Cal Volleyball teams, having to travel across the entire country to play their ACC opponents for every away conference game? You hope they can coordinate some of that travel together to defray part of the cost, but who knows.
The economic impacts of these conference moves, while severe are not the only societal ones. There is also the environmental cost of more plane trips and farther flights. The chart below shows the increase in travel costs and the increased CO2 emissions.
With a new football championship system that allows 12-teams to compete for a spot in the championship, the four remaining power conferences have lost some of their significance. It used to be mean something winning a conference championship. Conceivably, in the current 2024 season state, a 5th-ranked Big Ten school and 7th-ranked SEC school could make the playoffs (to go along with teams 1-4 in SEC and 1-6 in Big Ten). While unlikely, in that scenario, the conference championship of both the Big Ten and SEC would be meaningless.
Why not get rid of conferences for college football altogether? Leave the conferences intact for the rest of the sports where it makes more sense, but our current system is nuts.
Chip Kelly has some similar thoughts on eliminating conferences for football (90 sec video below). "132 teams and we all share the same TV contract" - that alone solves most of the conference issues. The ironic part about Kelly though? Just wait for his quote in the NIL section.
And if the NCAA doesn't do something, the scary thing is, if the financial results from these moves are fortuitous for those schools who moved, look out. Instead of 12 major schools moving per year, we could have way more.
If college football conferences must exist, I've got another idea for you.
Big Money Conference
Why not create a brand-new conference called BIG MONEY? The Big Money Conference doesn’t care about geography, academic qualifications, school rivalries or anything else. Any school who wants to maximize their earning potential above all else can apply. There are no academic requirements of any sort, so there will be no academic Big Money Conference team. The Big Money All-NIL team will be composed of the athletes with the largest NIL deals in the conference at each position. Athletes will train at their Big Money schools year-round, be offered complementary performance-enhancing drugs, and receive signing and per-game performance bonuses. Big Money athletes need to get big for big-time pay days after all.
The NCAA will initially balk at permitting Big Money athletes to skirt NCAA rules, but, what the hell, they make the most money, do they really need to be academically and physically eligible? Those transfer restrictions? Forget about them. Drug tests? What are tests? Big-money athletes don’t do tests of any sort.
Billboards will pop up around college towns across America, is your school Big Money? Debates will rage in sports bars and team dives all over, but, if we’re being honest, the most contentious conflicts will be in the Midwest and the South.
It will become a personal conflict of the sports fan vs the alumni and parent and pretty much anyone else with a stake in a university being a place of research, teaching and learning. In the middle, awkwardly stretched between the two camps are the athletes, who wanted to play their sport after secondary school and get an education too. If they were good enough in their field, they could have gone straight to the pros in most sports, but they didn’t. And now they have to decide whether they are Big Money.
That slippery slope to professionalism is happening, but ironically student-athletes getting paid isn’t the problem, it is the schools and athletic departments themselves trying to maximize their profits.
Calculating the impact
If you are not interested in spreadsheet modeling, skip this section to the championships one, but if you are, buckle up. I'm happy to share the sheet, if you're interested drop in a comment or message. Also, shout out to the academic institutions where I learned this stuff, The Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas and the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Who are we kidding though, the Universities of Google and YouTube reminded me what to do or explained new Excel features that didn’t exist when I was in school.
For the purposes of this analysis, I had to dust off some Excel formulas, including the haversine formula, to calculate the distances between the schools on the sphere we call Earth. I started with publicly available NCAA Conference pages on Wikipedia, then imported the tables on those pages into Excel (Wikipedia tables are great for this and usually formatted well). Then I used a newer neat property in Excel that can convert text into geographic locations. The next step was converting each location (City where the Universities are located) into latitude and longitude, converting degrees to radians, haversine, and then boom, you know the distance between two cities. You could either enumerate every possible combination of distances between all Power 5 schools or use the VLOOKUP function within haversine to output a table showing the distances between that school and every other one in the conference ((took me a dozen times to type it in all correctly though – should have used more named ranges). Here’s an example of what it looks like for the ACC.
The conditional formatting highlights blue as close, and red far away. The historical ACC North Carolina (the state) rivalries confirm that after all that conversion and Excel work, Duke is only 10 miles from UNC, 21 miles from NC State, and 76 miles from Wake Forrest. The slightly higher values seen in Google Maps are to be expected as the haversine distance is a straight line, the way the crow flies, and Google Maps takes the shortest drivable route, unless you’ve procured a special model DeLorean that doesn’t need roads. There is apparently a way to bring a Google Maps API into Excel to automate the process of getting the distances between two places but I decided it would be easier to re-learn something I once knew than something totally new.
Google Maps Chapel Hill to Durhan North Carolina:
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Google Maps Chapel Hill to Winston-Salem North Carolina:
Here’s the Big Ten, the biggest disaster of a conference:
Championships
I’ve written about how at various times in the season, college football can be viewed on any day of the week. It feels absurd, but give the people what they want I suppose. After the regular season ends, the no-rules, rules continue. In 2023 there were a staggering 43 D1 bowl games. That means 86 schools played in a bowl, in what used to be an honor and privilege is now just an expectation for the top 80 football teams in the country. Did you know there are also D2 and D3 bowl games? There were 17 of those, bringing us to 60 total, played from December 16 – January 8. There were so many bowl games, even a team with a losing record, the Minnesota Golden Gophers, made it in with a record of 5 wins and 7 losses because there were not enough 6-win teams to fill up all the bowl slots.
What used to be a rotating series of designated national championship games played at a selected bowl is now a mini-playoff between four teams. However, in the upcoming 2024-2025 season, that will change to include a 12-team bracket, meaning that a team would need to win at least 3 postseason games (teams ranked 1-4 get a first-round bye) and up to 5 postseason games including their conference championship. For the schools, more games equals more TV money, more merch and ticket sales, more exposure for their program and school, and more influence on future fans and recruits. For the TV networks, they get more content to capitalize on. However, for the athletes and conferences, all of these extra games bring up questions and tradeoffs.
The schedule of this inaugural 12-team playoff lasts from December 20, 2024, to January 20, 2025, an entire month, across multiple school semesters. The table below, from a relatively complicated explainer article by the NCAA, shows the schedule and tries to illustrate how this will work.
From the perspective of the remaining power conferences, is having a championship worth more than sending a fresher, less injured team to the college football playoffs? Ross Dellenger of YahooSports asked that question last November in this article. Undefeated Florida State was knocked from the playoffs last year because of a late-season injury to their star quarterback Jordan Travis. If I’m on the conference board, given that there are even more postseason games before the actual championship, let’s eliminate the conference championship. Come up with an exhaustive order of tie-breakers, even if the last one is a coin toss, or mascot dance-off.
Schools are incentivized to have more games, but only if it doesn’t jeopardize their chances of getting to the playoffs. Axios analyzed the breakdown of revenue sources in 2018 in this graphic below, which shows that outside of D1 Power 5, media rights and ticket sales are not a significant source of revenue.
For the players, unlike the schools and conferences, they aren’t getting paid per game and there are no direct performance bonuses. Their name image and likeness stock and contracts were likely set at the start of the season and their performance this year is going to influence future and not current deals. Every additional game they play has a 50% chance of being a below-average performance for them.
This gets us to the next section of this article, what is going on with the transfer rules and NIL?
Transfer Rules
The rules in college sports have also rapidly evolved. NIL and relaxed eligibility and transfer rules have changed the landscape of NCAA athletics, especially for D1 football and basketball. For the big-time football and basketball programs, "student-athletes" are effectively professional athletes who play for a school. The conference and championship changes are exacerbating this athlete–school relationship.
A football player can now play up to 4 games while preserving their redshirt and not using a year of eligibility. Theoretically, someone could graduate from high school early, start at Alabama their second semester of their high senior year, redshirt their freshman year, play 4 games their redshirt sophomore year, but get hurt, medically redshirting that year. Then they transfer to Oregon, not having used any edibility at Alabama, even if they were there for two and a half years. Then at Oregon they play 2 years, that is 2 years of eligibility. Then they transfer to Nebraska for a season because they think they’ll get a chance to improve their draft stock, and play 1 year. Unfortunately, their draft stock tanks, and while at this point the player has been on college campuses for 6 years, maybe gone to class, perhaps did their homework, and maybe got an undergrad degree. But wait, they still somehow have one year of eligibility and transfer to Oklahoma (why is it always Oklahoma?) for more football and maybe a grad degree or just a few more additional undergrad classes.
What are we doing here?
Here's a real example of this playing out, and he's not the only one. JT Daniels was a 6-year, 4-team "student-athlete."
As if the Daniels situation with current rules wasn't enough, a federal judge in West Virginia ordered a further relaxing of the NCAA transfer rules, allowing them to play the spring semester without sitting out.
The NCAA formerly had stricter restrictions on transfers. Players lost a year of eligibility, so they had to really want to do it. The NCAA wrote in 2018, “[r]equiring student-athletes to sit out of competition for a year after transferring encourages them to make decisions motivated by academics as well as athletics. Most student-athletes who are not eligible to compete immediately benefit from a year to adjust to their new school and focus on their classes.” I guess in 2018 the NCAA was still pretending these athletes' focus was school.
Also, a redshirt was formerly burned if the player was on for one play, but that rule was relaxed too. If they are supposed to be “student-athletes” shouldn’t we ensure they are at least at one of those schools for a significant period of time?
The NCAA data on transfers is limited as the modern Transfer Portal was established in 2018 and they have only published a few years of data, but the rate of transfers has been increasing. NCAA research showed 20,911 D1 athletes entered the portal in 2022, interestingly 30% were graduate students. Women athletes listed mental health (61%) and coach/teammate conflict (56%) as their top transfer reasons, while men athletes listed mental health (40%) and playing time (36%) as their main reasons. That mental health was the top reason for athlete’s transfer requests is concerning by itself. This 2023 article from NPR paints a very different picture than the NCAA research, asserting that the top reason for many entering the portal is to better than chance of making the pros. The article, which references the NCAA’s transfer dashboard data also calls out that of the more than 20,000 who entered the portal in 2022, 12,000 successfully transferred to another team. However, 9,000 didn’t, jeopardizing their status at their current team. Many of those student-athletes lost their scholarship, were cut from the team, or dropped out of school entirely.
Impact on coaches
The shifts of the college game, transfer rules, NIL, and increased expectations from players and families have all made the job of a college coach that much more difficult. The old rules reinforced the coach–player relationship and gave them a wide range of power and control over their players once they showed up on campus. The job of a college coach was always difficult, especially at schools without large budgets and enormous coaching, training and support staffs. But now, that power dynamic is shifting from coaches and staff to players, especially talented and marketable ones with large NIL deals.
Coaches have had to adapt to the more flexible rules of the transfer portal. The old transfer rules were like non-competes (which the FTC recently banned generally), preventing the easy flow of players from one team to another. With the new rules, with fewer restrictions, players can migrate to any other team that will have them the next season. Not knowing who will return next season has added to the stress of being a collegiate coach.
Football coaches and basketball coaches of players who aren’t one-and-done level draft prospects now describe having to “re-recruit” their players to stay with their program as opposed to shopping themselves around to a new school and new batch of NIL deals the next season.
The College basketball coaches who have been dealing with top tier one-and-done players are now in a somewhat better position. With NIL now allowing top-tier players to cash in while in school that could encourage a player who would have entered the draft after his freshman season to play a sophomore or even junior year if they can make a lot of money doing so, and it has the potential to increase their draft status.
The more you look at the NCAA and these teams, the more they look like employers. Transfer rules were like non-competes, and now coaches are required to continually appease their at-will employees, I mean "student-athletes."
I have also known some athlete activists who were campaigning for player's rights, benefits, and pay before all of these changes went into effect. Elisha Guidry from UCLA started campaigning with other PAC-12 players for additional health protections and revenue sharing. Seeing the change Elisha and others have created has been inspiring and their work has paved the way for athletes around the country to receive some compensation and benefits, mostly through NIL.
Name, Image and Likeness (NIL)
If you know NIL is a way college athletes can make money, but are unsure of how it works, don’t worry, we all are. The Athletic has an article explaining NIL and collectives and how they function.
In June 2021, the governance body of NCAA division I, II, and III adopted a policy suspending NCAA name, image and likeness rules, for all incoming and current student-athletes in all sports. In some states, high school athletes can also get NIL deals without compromising their high school or NCAA eligibility.
Having teams, locales and alumni networks with larger NIL collectives and opportunities has become a major draw for players, but also coaches. Chip Kelly left a head coaching job at UCLA to take a coordinator one at Ohio State, and said “NIL beats weather.” I’m not a fan of Midwest winters either, but wow. Nick Saban, arguably the greatest modern college football coach and winner of seven national championships retired from Alabama last year, in part, because of NIL.
At The University of Texas, if you are an offensive lineman, you get $50,000 from the Horns with Heart organization, just for being there.
You can find lists of the top NIL earners from websites like On3.com. The 2024 WNBA #1 draft pick and NCAA women’s basketball superstar Caitlin Clark earned an estimated $3.1 million in NIL deals, from companies like Gatorade, State Farm, Nike, and Xfinity. Based on how Clark has transformed the game and NCAA basketball, one could argue she is vastly underpaid, and not just because her WNBA salary will be an absurdly low $75,000.
No. 1 ranked NCAA women’s tennis player Fiona Crawley of UNC forfeited $81,000 in US Open prize money to preserve her NCAA eligibility. “It seems unreal that there are football and basketball players making millions in NIL deals, and I can’t the money that I worked so hard for.” An NIL Platform is apparently working to get Crawley the amount she should have been able to accept via NIL.
Platforms like Opendorse have emerged as marketplaces for athletes to connect with potential deals, calling themselves “The #1 NIL Solution for Brands, Fans, and Collectives.”
The NCAA has sued Virginia and Tennessee over the way it is enforcing NIL rules. The short of the confusing case is that NIL collectives can discuss business deals, negotiate and enter into NIL contracts with prospective student-athletes, but not engage in recruiting. What? The whole point of the NIL deal from the collective’s perspective is that the athlete will represent that school.
I lack the time or space to get much deeper on NIL, but this much is clear, some athletes are now making a lot of money and it has changed the dynamics of what it means to be a student-athlete.
The modern “student-athlete”
Finding a consistent and concise definition of what it means to be a student-athlete is surprisingly difficult. Law Insider finds over 500 definitions of student athlete.
From Cornell Law School: The term “student athlete” means an individual who engages in, is eligible to engage in, or may be eligible in the future to engage in, any intercollegiate sport.
North Central College says: a full-time or part-time student of a university or college who also participates in an organized and competitive athletic program offered by the school.
Apparently, the NCAA started using the term in the 1950s after a workers comp lawsuit following the death of a player during a game, as told by Taylor Branch in this 2011 article on the civil rights of players. In 2006, Robert and Amy McCormick of Michigan State University authored a law paper titled The Myth of the Student-Athlete: The College Athlete as an Employee.
My assertion of the lie of the “student-athlete” is not a new one, but the recent transfer rule, NIL and other changes of the NCAA athlete experience make it that much more clear.