The major lawsuit House v. NCAA was finally settled this week, paying back athletes of the past while also providing a model of revenue-sharing for the future.
Schools will now have an allotted amount of money in their athletics budget to share with its athletes — although the rules of how they’re allowed to do so are still up for debate. Estimates are that schools will have somewhere right above $20 million per year to share with their student-athletes.
However, ESPN’s Pete Thamel had some questions to bring to the table regarding that figure and how it will actually be distributed. He joined the Pat McAfee Show this week to raise some of those concerns.
“How that stuff gets divided up hasn’t been determined yet,” Thamel commented, before bringing up the ever-complicated Title IX aspect that could come into play.
“I think this is the other probably crucial point right now. As we look into it is, nor has a school said: ‘Okay with this roughly $20 million, does 10 million go to women’s sports because of Title IX, or can we take 18 million and direct that towards football?'”
If Title IX rules do not apply, then Thamel believes that money will ultimately be mostly shared with the sports generating revenue back.
“Because football — and I think it’s a safe estimate — is about 85% of the revenue at most schools, proportional to the TV contracts.”
Whether Title IX laws apply to the distribution of revenue that’s set aside for the athletes (the ~$20 million figure) is not officially decided yet. However, one prominent college athletics attorney, Mit Winter, detailed in a Twitter thread that he doesn’t believe Title IX laws are applicable to the new revenue-sharing model.
However, Title IX rules do come into play on a separate issue created by the settlement. Scholarship limits are set to go away, which means schools can put their baseball team on full scholarship if they’d like, or they could give out 150 scholarships to the football team if they so chose.
But since Title IX laws are centered around opportunity — and scholarship opportunities have long been required to be equal among men’s and women’s athletes at colleges — if a football team, or any men’s program, decides to add scholarships, then the school will still have to add that same number in their women’s programs.
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