By the time Congress steps in to address the issue of compensation for college athletes, “we’ll all be dead,” Mike Leach told Sports Illustrated back in 2022.
Leach, a highly esteemed two-time national college football coach of the year, passed away later that year having spent his final years lamenting the problem plaguing big-time college football. Paying athletes outside the framework of a professional league creates huge imbalances. The NCAA’s efforts to provide greater parity via a college football playoff system have been washed away by name, image and likeness (NIL) deals that have effectively professionalized the game.
Boosters and donor-led collectives are using NIL to lure high school superstars and college transfers to their programs, paying out millions in what Sports Illustrated dubbed “the industry’s newest arms race.” The best college players are making millions and gravitate to the schools with the resources to offer the best NIL deals.
Before he died, Leach offered a simple plan, summarized by Matt Hayes in a recent column for USA Today Sports. College sports should make a distinction between student athletes and professionals. When a high school recruit signs a letter of intent, he chooses one track or the other. Student athletes could receive a stipend and couldn’t be cut for playing ability. If players graduate in four years and play all four seasons of eligibility at the same school, they would receive a significant retention bonus. If they transfer or don’t graduate, no retention bonus.
Professionals, on the other hand, make a gamble. They’ll be eligible for a much bigger payday. There’s no cap on NIL money and a player can make whatever the market will bear, but they can be drafted by any school. And they can be cut or traded. No more of the biggest and richest schools paying the most money for the best players.
Embracing this hybrid professional-amateur model may restore parity to college football, but it’s highly problematic. As Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger summarized, “one half of a team (amateurs) would operate under NCAA rules that limit compensation — a potential antitrust problem — while the other half (professional) is governed by state employment laws as well as a collectively bargained agreement.
“Any direct pay or revenue-sharing model would trigger athletes’ becoming employees, something many college sports leaders are against. Title IX is a hangup, too. Payments would need to be evenly spread across sports — male and female.”
Leach’s bold plan may offer the beginning of a solution to this conundrum. At the very least, it plainly recognizes that college athletics is a market for talent and challenges everyone to stop pretending that college sports isn’t operating as a professional league.
The sooner the NCAA can come to grips with that, the sooner it can devise negotiated frameworks to stop money from corrupting competitiveness.
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