I'm pretty sure every year someone has made a thread saying the NCAA is dead and XC tf is going to cease to exist
On one hand, you are correct. “The sky is falling!” posts have not been prophetic, per se.
On the other hand, the rate of change is accelerating wildly right now. With NIL, the Transfer Portal, and mega-conferences (literally coast-to-coast conferences) forming, all within the span of a few years, change is coming fast.
It was one thing for Maryland to join the Big Ten. Another thing altogether for the PAC-12 to disappear, with schools in L.A., Oregon and Washington joining the Big Ten. That’s a burst of change that only a few years ago would have seemed absurd beyond belief.
It is hard to see how the Olympic Spots benefit in the proposed models, and that includes men’s soccer, golf, tennis, etc.
If the model is: Compensate the athletes or make them employees + have as few of them as necessary to meet the mission of the university + meet NCAA minimums for total teams (football and basketball plus a few other men’s teams, paired against a minimum number of women’s teams to have substantially proportional roster totals)…
Start with the premise: IF anything close to this proposal transpires, you will have to make a paid and essentially unpaid level of the current Division I.
If you can make the case that those schools could afford to pay their athletes (buy their NIL rights, or however we couch it) at the going rate, then I'd love to hear it. Keep in mind, it isn't just about paying those basketball players. It would be about massive increases to the athletic budget to pay athletes across the board. Suddenly Gonzaga is paying $30k or more to half, or more, of its athletes?
So you agree that March Madness will be dead? If only 40-50 schools can be eligible for the top tier basketball championship, it won't generate the same level of interest and revenue as it does today.
Why do we need to kill the rest of NCAA sports just for the sake of football? Simply reclassifying the football subdivisions within D1 makes more sense.
Football money makes the non-revenue sports possible
I don’t know how many schools in the power conferences would be able to pay their athletes what the NCAA proposed.
What I heard is most likely going to happen is Football and Basketball super conferences will emerge and those sports athletes will be employees with revenue share from TV contacts. When you are an employee Title IX doesn’t have the same bite that it does now.
the rest of the sports are gone if this happens.
Very possible that eventually the universities license their brands and rent their stadiums to what will essentially be a new minor league for FB, BKB, Hockey? Baseball? The players are employees, not students and title 9 doesn't enter into it.
You might have missed the point of the proposal and how it would alter the landscape in Division I.
Do you keep a bunch of sports and athletes when the cost-per-athlete rockets through the roof, or do you keep the minimum number of men's teams (focusing on football and basketball) and then just carry enough women's teams to meet substantial proportionality and that's it?
Olympic sports, and specifically men's cross country and track and field, would be under tremendous threat in this model.
Division III schools use athletics to drive enrollment and tuition revenue. Every athlete can be an overall asset. Under the proposed model, Olympic sports athletes in Division I would all be a liability.
It's not that hard to keep XC around. My coach alleged that our team was profitable in college. Didn't give any scholarships to XC, 1 coach shared between men/women, generally went to meets within bus + hotel distance. IDK exactly what that is for costs, but let's say 200k/year.
If you have a few generous donors, you are set. Some people donate to the overall athletic pool, which means every sport gets some of the money. And at least for my team, we had some successful former XC runners/parents who donated explicitly to the program.
So you agree that March Madness will be dead? If only 40-50 schools can be eligible for the top tier basketball championship, it won't generate the same level of interest and revenue as it does today.
Why do we need to kill the rest of NCAA sports just for the sake of football? Simply reclassifying the football subdivisions within D1 makes more sense.
Football money makes the non-revenue sports possible
Only in southern and/or rural colleges (and a few outliers like UMich and OSU). Harvard can cover track just fine, even if their football program makes no money. Same for D3 schools, etc.
How was it profitable? And your team had to be pathetic with no scholarships. Why would a school want a program that embarrasses the school name? It hurts the overall image.
Those countries are all terrible at track. No depth.
Are they? Most of those countries are the size of a large US state. If you compare the US to the entire EU, which would be a much more reasonable comparison, I don't think the US would come out very favorably.
The reality is given the total resources spent, the NCAA hasn't really been getting it done for the US in International Track and Field for a long time now. Consider some of our most successful sprinters recently like Noah Lyles or Erriyon Knighton, both skipped college track all together. Even the likes of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone or Mondo Duplantis (I know he doesn't compete for the US) had such brief college track careers that it's doubtful their college experience changed their trajectory any. The US only holds 1 individual men's running world record on the track anymore, and that's in the 110 hurdles. It's much worse as you go up in distance, heck it was only 3 years ago a high school boy ran a 1500m faster than the NCAA record, the NCAA has proven to be completely incapable of developing a world class distance runner above 800 meters.
Our best hope for college Track and Field at this point is for many D1 programs to somehow transition their non-revenue sports to a D3 like model or risk loosing the sports all together, at least on the men's side. At the highest level hopefully we can get more support for a club system, to at least try to maintain some competitiveness at the international level.
Nice. Most D1 programs move to the D3 level. Sounds like a big win.
Thanks for calming us all down.
I would imagine that most of the current top-tier D3 programs far outpace the resources that D1 schools saw pre-1990.
I think in the last 20 years we've seen an arms race in facilities, budgets, perks, etc. While I've enjoyed it, and benefitted from it, I don't think a change to this system is a death knell for the top American Jrs.
LOYOLA MARYMOUNT IS JUST THE BEGINNING. YOUR PROGRAM IS NEXT. NEW NCAA RULES HAVE FOREVER CHANGED NCAA SPORTS AT THE DIVISION 1 LEVEL... FOR THE WORST.
I haven't read the whole thread so maybe someone else has said this. All NCAA schools are very protective of the idea that their athletes are students too. And while we laugh about that idea, in most cases it's true. The back up long snapper at Purdue and the garbage time point guard at U Conn are not there preparing for the NFL of NBA and that's true for most of their teammates. Make athletes employees, not students, in the public's perception and you have minor league basketball and football. Minor league sports do not generate nearly the revenue that big time basketball and football do. Paring your sponsored teams to only football and basketball is going to make it really hard to sell the idea that your kids are student athletes.
And at most NCAA schools by far one of the main functions of non revenue sports is attracting applications from kids who did that particular sport in high school and want to keep on with it in college. They'll only apply to a school where that would be possible. Yes, if the model changes there will be some non revenue sports that will get whacked. It's happening now with the current model. But there are far more schools struggle to get as many applicants as they want than ones that don't. I don't see schools in that first group having an orgy of non revenue sports dropping.
Private equity firms are already developing plans in line with what you've suggested. Will this come to pass? I would say it's very possible as they anticipate that revenue streams for college football can potentially exceed that of the NFL, and universities and boosters certainly show more interest in the dollar than the diploma when it comes to athletics. But I'm assuming only the power 5 schools, and maybe not even all of them, will be the winners in this game. Could this actually be a good thing for minor sports? Maybe separating out football (and maybe basketball) as a totally separate entity will help rebalance title 9 issues (no more football skewing the numbers). And schools will would be making profits from the licensing that can be funneled to the sports department. In any case, I think earth shattering changes are coming in the next decade.
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