If you want to understand what's going on in NCAA (NCAA vs House), but haven't been following it, READ THIS ARTICLE NOW

For freshman Jessie Cox, another Liberty runner, college sports were a ticket to a college education in pursuit of a career. The seventh of 10 children, she was expected to pay her own way for school, she said.

When she was still in high school, a Division II program in her home state of Pennsylvania had offered her a full ride to run track and cross country, she said. But when Liberty offered her an academic scholarship and a walk-on spot on the team, Cox jumped at the chance to compete at a Division I level.

She should have taken the full ride offer from the D2 school.

The bottom line is that athletic programs used to be able to keep the money generated by football and men's basketball and use that money to subsidize non-revenue sports. If you start paying that money to football and basketball players you have less for the non-revenue sports. The swimmer in the article complaining about being cut really didn't think things through, because swimming will never pay for itself.

Whether existing athletes are grandfathered in or not, in the long run the income-generating sports will have to keep their income, and there's not going to be much money left to subsidize sports that don't pay for themselves, especially with the hard times coming from shrinking enrollments and slashed federal money.

Personally, even with the revenue-generating sports, the constant turnover from the transfer portal has seriously dampened my interest in college sports. I wonder how much longer there will be a big audience for chaotic second-tier professional sports with players randomly jumping from team to team, when you can just watch the much more talented pros in the NFL and NBA.

This is so much the problem. I saw it with my own kids. There is this tremendous pressure to compete in D1, when there are many D2 and D3 schools that might be a better fit and more financially feasible. My kids are both outstanding athletes who have received significant scholarships, and I'm appreciative of how their athletics helped them in the admission process. But I sometimes wonder what would happen if we replaced the NCAA system with a club system. Kids would go to the college that would suit them best (probably within the same region) and not have to also worry about which athletic program was the best. Imagine an RTP Track Club that combined kids from NC State, North Carolina Chapel Hill, and Duke or a Colorado/Denver Boulder Track Club with kids from CU, Mines, DU, Metro.

Let’s imagine that club. Who is paying the coaches? Who is paying for travel? Who is paying for physio? Who is paying the kids to go to school? It is different. Better is hard to say. Hard to imagine anyone dumping as much money into these sports as colleges do.

Club sports exist today at many colleges. As I mentioned above, the expenditures are minimal - no physios, no scholarships, no gigantic coaching staff, no separate dorms or chow halls.

Based on my experience years ago, the university paid for our uniforms, small budget for regional travel and provided the coach with a stipend similar to a HS coach.

People do it for the love of the sport and there is definitely a DIY element to it. I recall many a day piling into a teammates car to drive couple of hours to a tournament followed by bad fast food and worse beer. Good times though.

The beauty is that colleges could have a much larger team. Hell, my kids HS XC team has 150 kids on it. Imagine what a D1 school could support for the price of a single scholarship.

Roster limits are BS. If a school wants to field a team of 50 for xc let them. Artificially restricting the market (by not letting athletes get paid) is how we got in this mess in the first place. Roster limits is just another way of artificially restricting the market.

Just grandfathering in the current athletes could help thousands while hurting the hundreds of thousands not yet in the system who won't ever get a chance to compete in college. For serious athletes, it plays an enormous role in their motivation in high school and for their education. They often eat together and live together with their teams. It provides the motivation to keep studying. It plays a huge role, well beyond the question of scholarships. So, setting smaller roster limits is by no means making the situation better. No decisions should be made simply to satisfy a number of money-grubbing lawyers.

Some teams have already cut 20+ athletes, and set roster limits at 32 or lower for male track & field. While other teams still have 30-40+ athletes on their XC roster alone, and are acting as if nothing is happening.
If they grandfather current athletes in, or change roster caps, there's a big imbalance between teams who cut current athletes and limited recruitment, and teams who continued on and retain and recruit as normal. It's such a mess...

They always talk about keeping the athlete in mind, but I see anything but keeping athletes in mind at the moment.

Hypothethetically, would there be a way to allow walk-ons to practice and compete even if they exceed roster caps without being tied to the NIL revenue-sharing? It's not even a big thing in track. Also, if roster caps/limits go through, schools should need to publish and be transparent so there is no fudging the numbers.

The fact that this is being done through a class action settlement is what make it not so straight-forward. It just seems odd to me that a class action settlement can benefit certain members of the class at the expense of other members of the class. Plaintiff attorneys are essentially representing only some of their "clients" and ignoring (at best) or actively working against (at worst) their other clients. Is there some sort of legal ethics issue with this situation? Should all these people with very divergent interests have been placed into a single class?

Trump and Saban and the TT guy aren’t who I’d pick for heading up a Presidential Commission to reform college sports, but the potential for major relevant changes being forced by an act first analyze later President shouldn’t be overlooked.

We’re talking about the House settlement here, but I don’t know how they can get a sensible settlement until we know if some combination of an executive order and/or legislation completely changes the system in the next short while.

Alarmist obfuscation. The roster limits are essential to ensure the Power 4 conferences can avoid the settlement option (to maintain competitiveness) preferred by the other 22 confs, an option that would require no roster limits at all: 1) greater revenue-sharing, including access to new media revenue from CFP.

Parity from sharing the wealth. Everybody eats, some get seconds, no one gets thirds or goes hungry.

I enjoyed your post. There was nothing wrong with the current system in my mind. If you want to go to minor league sports or try out for the NFL or NBA, go ahead. If you want to go to college, go ahead. Congress should have given the NCAA anti-trust exemptions.

They should have let the stars make some money on endorsements. And they tried that, but the problem is that's impossible to regulate and right away people started getting paid to play.

People like yourself should not be receiving thousands of dollars. You were in a non-revenue sport and got a scholarship.

Maybe the solution is an ending of all NCAA sports for football/basketball - those that make money. Let's just have relegation / promotion system. We've got our 32 NFL teams. Then the big boys in college - Texas, Ohio State, etc. are in the Championship. ACCs and others are league 1. Let the free market work. Bottom 3-4 teams are out. Top 3-4 teams are in.

Of course, that would kill my favorite thing about the NFL - parity and the how the draft creates that. But a system like this would greatly help minor league baseball players, NBA Dleague guys. They'd make real money.

And then we go back to scholarships for non revenue sports like track/field hockey, etc.

Agree with your point that the current system works. The whole point of college sports is that they are college/amateur sports not pro sports. This includes football and basketball. The U.S. has an incredible tradition of amateur sports within the college/university system. No other country in the world has this. It is unique and culturally significant. People have stronger connections to college football than they do to pro football. Creating pro leagues for college teams goes against 75 years of tradition and will produce a watered down third tier product. No one wants to see college "pro teams" that aren't at pro level ability play. Does anyone watch the English third division in soccer or the Serie 3 in Italy? The root of the problem is the expansive and somewhat erratic interpretation of existing law. Can anyone seriously say there are anti-trust issues with how the NCAA operates while airlines and hotels clearly price fix and collude and there is no attempt to regulate the mega-corporations that operate in ways that impact far greater numbers of people on a daily basis?

Would and should roster limits put the squeeze on foreigners on rosters? With roster limits would there be a foreigner backlash? How say u?

Remember, there are no Americans on roster at University of Taranaki.

NCAA athletics are rapidly headed in the direction of the American economy. Its haves and have nots, with a large and growing gap between the two.

The perennial powerhouses and programs with booster backing will be better than ever. Everybody else will be worse than ever or will fold. It’s the American way.

From a market economy standpoint, this makes sense. Division 1 men’s basketball and football make money. Everything else loses money. Now that football and basketball money is going to the players, the model doesn’t work. There’s not enough money to go around to the other sports as the schools need their portion as well.

I think professionalized college football and men’s basketball and non-scholarship, non-pay, maybe-NIL for all other sports. Basically one D3 division for all other sports.

I think this would be a good thing for XC/Track.

Do you know what this law suit is specifically about?

It's about paying former athletes damages because they were prevented from earning money by the ncaa . it has nothing to do with current athletes or roster limits.

the settlement is simply an attempt by the ncaa to pay past athletes and establish a workable system going forward which would be deemed somewhat equitable and avoid future lawsuits.

letting the lawsuit roll forward without trying to settle would only cost the ncaa more money and force more change to the current system

what you seem to be missing is that if the schools are going to share revenue with the athletes, the money has to come from somewhere. some group or area will end up losing something. if it's not roster limits it will be something else.

Yes. It's called club sports.

I liked your post except for the Trump/Conservative Derangement syndrome. To blame this on the "Supreme Court's move to the right" is laughable.

Do you not realize that "in the 2021 case of NCAA v. Alston, the Supreme Court unanimously sided with former college athletes?"

I'm for rules. My favorite sport is the NFL. They have a draft. Everyone has the same roster size. Everyone shares the money. I don't want Oregon to have 150 full rides and the next school to have 10.