Disruption in College Athletics: Turmoil Over Intercollegiate Athletics Sets Presidents and Boards Scrambling

When 40 former University of North Carolina football players and their old coach, Larry Fedora, journeyed back to Chapel Hill for a teammate’s wedding, one turned to Fedora at the reception and said, “Coach, I feel sorry for these guys, today’s players.”

“What do you mean?” asked Fedora.

“They’ll never have this, ever,” he replied, gesturing toward the former Tar Heel athletes. “Four years of blood, sweat, and tears together are the reason why we have the bonds and friendships that we have. None of (today’s players) are going to be here [for] four or five years. Basically, they’re mercenaries and they’re going to go for the highest payday.”

That lament reflects how much the world of college athletics has changed since Fedora guided the Tar Heel footballers’ fortunes.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), following a string of court losses, in 2021 allowed student athletes to cash in on their name, image, and likeness (NIL) and to transfer to other schools without sitting out a year. Boosters in so-called collectives began openly paying star athletes tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to come play for their college.

Then last summer the NCAA and its powerhouse athletic conferences tentatively agreed to pay upwards of $2.8 billion over 10 years in back damages for all Division I athletes who played between 2016 and 2024 and were denied the opportunity to capitalize on their name, image, and likeness. Ninety-five percent of that money would flow to football and basketball players in the big conferences.

To cover the back damages, the NCAA would reduce its future distributions from March Madness television revenues to all 365 colleges and universities in Division I by $1.6 billion and pay about $1.1 billion from its own coffers. The basketball championship tournament garners huge television audiences each spring. (The NCAA does not control or share the television revenues from the college football championship.)

The biggest conferences—the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, SEC—would absorb 40 percent of the reduction in payouts from the NCAA while 60 percent would come from all the other conferences. The settlement in the House vs. NCAA case and other antitrust lawsuits is still subject to a federal judge’s approval at a hearing in April.

Going forward, the deal would allow Division I colleges to pay athletes directly up to $20.5 million starting this fall, while lifting scholarship limits and capping roster sizes. The 69 schools in the five power conferences and the University of Notre Dame would have to follow the terms of the settlement, but each of the other 280 Division I schools could decide for itself whether to start paying athletes and abiding by the settlement terms.

In its final days in office, the Biden administration leveled criticisms at the House settlement that could undermine the 10-year deal.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said the payments to athletes constituted financial assistance the same as scholarships and under Title IX must be allocated “proportionately” between men’s and women’s teams, not by which sports generate the most revenues. Separately, Biden’s Justice Department, in a court filing, criticized the $20.5 million cap on player compensation and suggested that the deal might still run afoul of antitrust laws.

(A number of leaders have discussed their preliminary athlete revenue-sharing plans that appear to run counter to the OCR guidance, Amy Privette Perko, chief executive officer (CEO) of the independent Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, noted.)

However, the new Trump administration could reverse those Biden positions. Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas predicted it would.

The roster caps could be troubling for colleges that count on attracting students with the wide number of Division I varsity sports they offer and the opportunity to play for national championships. The roster limits would apply to all teams, even if the college was only paying its football or basketball players.

Division I football teams would be limited to 105 players, down from more than 125 on average, but all 105 would be eligible for scholarships, up from 85. Baseball teams would lose six players with rosters limited to 34. Women’s soccer would have 28 spots, a loss of three. Any player would be scholarship eligible. Some sports might grow, but overall, Sports Illustrated predicted the limits would mean “the death of the walk-on athlete.”¹

Division II schools, which offer partial athletic scholarships, and Division III, which offer none, are not included in the settlement or restrictions.

Some former athletes could get six-figure payments from the House settlement, spread out over a decade.

“The next wave of change is coming to intercollegiate athletics. It is going to have wide-range implications, including for academics, for budget, for operations, for students, for the student-athlete experience,” Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud told the University Senate recently.

“The athletic experience here is part of our defining experience that recruits students and not just student athletes. It’s part of our academic programming. It’s part of our brand nationally. It’s very important to why we’ve had fairly significant enrollment success,” Syverud said.

Smaller schools have a stake in all this, too, not least because of that transfer portal that Fedora worries about. “It’s a nightmare to just try to maintain a roster,” said Fedora, a trustee of Austin College in Texas, where he played wide receiver on a team that won a small college national championship. “If you develop a player, you’re not going to have him very long. Somebody’s going to come along and buy him out. It’s going to be very difficult for those smaller schools.”

“There are so many unknowns,” said Fedora, who coached at Chapel Hill from 2012 to 2018 and at University of Southern Mississippi University earlier. “I’m not even sure the people that are making these laws and that are changing these rules really understand all the ramifications.”

Heart-warming scenes of players singing the alma mater after the last whistle blows on the gridiron could become a thing of the past. They may not have been on campus long enough to learn the words.

There are implications still to be sorted out: What will the settlement mean for Title IX, which since 1972 has prohibited sex discrimination in education and helped trigger the explosion in women’s intercollegiate sports? Notwithstanding the recent surge of interest in women’s basketball, most of the back compensation in the House v. NCAA settlement will go to male football and basketball players.

“For programs that share revenues with athletes, boards should address and monitor Title IX compliance,” the Knight Commission’s Perko told Trusteeship.

“Ultimately, a turn toward the full professionalization of college sports by some programs could create an existential risk to all college sports, regardless of competitive division, by propelling a collapse of educational purpose within the college sports model as a whole,” she warned. [See the Trusteeship September/October 2024 issue.]

One perceived threat to college athletics has evaporated. Men’s basketball players at Dartmouth College dropped their bid to unionize, which a regional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) director had ruled they had a right to do, entitling them to pay and overtime rules.

Dartmouth refused to bargain and the players and the Service Employees International Union in January ended the union drive, probably in anticipation that the NLRB under President Trump would reverse the regional director’s ruling. Another group of University of Southern California athletes also dropped their lawsuit against the NCAA.

But courts in other jurisdictions are still being asked to reshape the future of college athletics. A federal appeals court in Pennsylvania rejected an attempt by the NCAA to quash a lawsuit brought by a former Villanova football player.

That 2024 case, Johnson v. NCAA, could have repercussions far greater than allowing athletes to share television and ticket revenues, believes Peter McDonough, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education, a principal voice for higher education in Washington.

“I really think that if we were to find a new reality where student athletes at colleges were presumptively employees, many colleges will go out of business,” said McDonough, a former general counsel at Princeton University. “Only 25 schools in the entire NCAA had athletic departments that took in more than they spent in 2019.” (The NCAA has not published later figures.)

“Enrollment management at a lot of schools depends upon the attractiveness of being able to play a sport there,” McDonough said. “For schools that are stretching to fill their classes, that’s really important.”

Perko, the Knight Commission CEO, said the issue of whether athletes are employees may not be fully resolved “for at least a couple of years.”

The NCAA is lobbying Congress to enact legislation that would provide some antitrust protection, forestall giving players employee status and override the patchwork of 30 state laws on how athletes can profit from their name, image, and likeness.

The NCAA also took a step it hopes will blunt criticisms that women’s basketball teams get short shrift from the lucrative revenues that men’s teams share. It announced on January 15 that starting this year, women hoopsters will earn a share of revenues for their conferences for every game they win in March Madness, starting at $15 million and rising to $25 million in three years. The move comes after the rivalry between the Caitlin Clark-led Iowa Hawkeyes and rival Louisiana State Tigers and its star Angel Reese triggered an explosion in interest in the women’s games, both in fans going through turnstiles and those watching on television.

“It’s the wild, wild West out there,” said Karen Weaver, University of Pennsylvania adjunct professor and authority on intercollegiate athletics, who has a podcast aimed at educating trustees and presidents about this complicated corner of their responsibilities. “The landscape has changed, and the money is finally taking front and center compared to all the other (athletics) issues,” Weaver said. “When you think about how many of these schools are trying to either keep or raise their profile as a legitimate Division I school, trustees play a huge role in that.”

“These are foundational changes that I’m not sure anybody has a handle on,” said Tom McMillen, an All-American basketball star at the University of Maryland, Rhodes Scholar, Olympian, National Basketball Association player, and former congressman. He remembers a congressional hearing in 1992 when “we were approaching the first million-dollar football coach, and I said at the time, ‘We’re soon going to have million-dollar players.’ Well, it took 37 years to get there, but what it means for higher ed is still up in the air.”

McMillen, a regent for the University System of Maryland, said, “These issues are so novel that I don’t think there’s a lot of expertise anywhere across the country on boards of regents on these matters.”

The Big Ten Conference made $880 million in revenues in fiscal 2023 and lured Oregon, UCLA, the University of Southern California, and the University of Washington to jump from the PAC-12. Several other Western athletic powers joined the Atlantic Coast Conference, now a misnomer. Athletic budgets top a quarter-billion dollars at Ohio State and the University of Texas, with others on their heels. For the schools in the Power Five conferences, the median athletics department budget is $145 million, whereas the median is $42 million for the 67 other colleges that also compete for the top football laurels.

The new president of Ohio State University, Walter “Ted” Carter, listed athletics among his top strategic priorities at his investiture in November. The former captain of the ice hockey team at the U.S. Naval Academy said that with three dozen sports, more than 1,000 athletes and the country’s largest athletic budget, “we need to be a leader … (and) make sure that our student athletes remain students first.” The Buckeyes went on to win the national football championship in January 2025 after the first 12-team playoff, for which ESPN paid $7.8 billion for the television rights for six years.

Perko said that outside of the Power Five, more than 60 percent of Division I schools’ revenues come from institutional funding and student fees. Institutions “are going to face really hard choices. [The money is] either going to come from increased institutional support and student fees, increased fundraising, or a reallocation of their current athletic expenses. Those are really the only three choices they have.”

Student athletic fees, while modest at many campuses, are a sore point at others and steeper than many parents recognize until they see a breakdown of the tuition and fees bill. James Madison University, for example, helped finance its rise into the ranks of football powers by charging student athletic fees that now exceed $3,000 a year. Most of Virginia’s 15 public universities charge less, but the fees still average $1,900 across the Commonwealth and the legislature has imposed a 3-percent-cap on increases.

While one-and-done basketball stars who jump to the pros after a single season may create an impression that their education is secondary, there actually has been major progress toward ensuring athletes earn diplomas. (The independent Knight Commission was formed by college presidents, trustees, and former players in 1989 in response to athletic scandals and low graduation rates at the time.)

Graduation rates rose to a record 91 percent across all Division I sports in 2022, according to NCAA figures. It’s somewhat lower for football and men’s basketball, but higher for all women’s sports, including 98 percent for field hockey, gymnastics, and lacrosse.

The NCAA says more than 535,000 students played varsity sports in 2023–24 and colleges on average fielded 18 teams.

Athletics have always had a place on the agenda for boards of trustees, from setting coaches’ salaries to approving new, multi-million-dollar facilities to dealing with infractions and scandals. Athletic directors who regularly brief their boards. Athletic committees are increasingly common, with star athletes from the past such as McMillen and Fedora often serving on them.

The chance to play at the college level is a major draw for students and not just those hoping to land an athletic scholarship. Travel, camaraderie, and the competitive drive are all part of the attraction. At some schools, as many as a third of the students play on varsity squads and even more play club sports. Aspiring Olympians look to college athletics as the proving ground to make the U.S. team in a host of events, from gymnastics to swimming to track and field.

Even students who sit in the stands may choose a college based on devotion to its teams.

“Part of it is tradition. College athletics, particularly football, goes back to the 1800s. It’s been an important part of the higher education landscape. For many institutions, it is a form of alumni engagement. For others, it’s part of their enrollment model. Offering competitive athletic opportunities is a way to attract students,” said Lawrence P. Ward, the new president of the University of Hartford and a former member of the NCAA Board of Governors.

“And lots of students want to go to school and go to football Saturdays,” said Ward, who did his master’s work at the University of Michigan. “They love the idea that they can wear their Michigan sweatshirt and travel across country and see someone who’s got the exact same sweatshirt on.”

While it is common for universities to try to move up into the NCAA’s higher ranks—the James Madison Dukes cracked the top 25 the first year they played in the top football division—the University of Hartford went in the other direction in 2021 when it decided to stop giving athletic scholarships and move its 17 teams down from Division I to Division III. It was a hard pill for some to swallow, especially since the Hawks made March Madness that year. Enrollment, already strained by COVID-19, sagged, but is now rebounding.

Ward came to Hartford from Babson College, where he was vice president for learner success and dean of campus life. Babson’s 23 varsity teams play in Division III, where its field hockey team made the Final Four last year.

“College athletics is best when it is driven by the best interest of our schools and student athletes, versus television executives,” said Ward. “The arms race for facilities, for athletes, for coaches, for television deals strikes me as absolutely chaotic, but more importantly, just not sustainable.”

“I think a lot of people interpret Division III as a step above club sports and sort of a mom-and-pop approach to athletics. I just don’t subscribe to that characterization,” said Ward, who wrote his University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation on how universities can best align athletics with the academic mission.

“The Division III model prioritizes a more fulsome experience for the student athlete, where it’s possible to do an internship, to study abroad … or participate in another student leadership opportunity on campus,” Ward said.

Not everyone was happy with the switch. “I’ve been trolled by a parent alum on social media,” Ward said. Any time he posts a photo with a student or at an event on campus, that disgruntled alum responds, “You need to fix finances and bring Hartford back to Division I!”

Mount St. Mary’s University, a two-century-old Catholic institution in Emmitsburg, Maryland, is proudly ensconced in Division I and recently decided to add women’s flag football as its twenty-sixth varsity sport. The Mountaineers’ athletics website boasts, “We take athletics seriously around here. We like to run, jump, hit, dunk, lift, dive, throw, and anything else that keeps us active and moving …. Each and every one of us is filled to the top with bona fide, blue and white, busting-at-the-seams Mount Maniac school spirit!” A third of the 1,650 undergraduates earn varsity letters.

“It’s definitely a draw for students to be able to play Division I sports here,” said Mount St. Mary’s new president, Gerard “Jerry” Joyce. Flag football was a new sport to him, but he learned it is increasingly popular in the region and poised to grow as lacrosse once did. He has concerns that the caps on roster sizes in the House settlement “could have a dramatic impact on the university.” For instance, Mount St. Mary’s couldn’t have started a junior varsity baseball team as it did this year, giving 20 players a shot at making the varsity later as walk-ons, he said. One possibility is to make the junior varsity team a club sport like rugby that travels widely and won a national championship in 2023.

As for losing any star players wooed by larger schools where they may get paid, Joyce said he would never want to hold a student back from that opportunity, “but I want a culture where it gives them pause that they are leaving something behind, and it’s not about the money.”

When Joyce, then executive vice president of DeSales University, was under consideration for president of Mount St. Mary’s (affectionately called the Mount), the discussions revolved around enrollment, fundraising, and athletics. “I knew that they were going to be the three priorities in the new strategic plan we’re writing,” he said. “Athletics is a big part of what the Mount is, but it’s just one piece. The Mount aims to produce citizens with a mission of service to God and others. It can’t be that you’re just here to play sports.”

Trustee Koki Adasi, a successful real estate agent and executive who was a shooting guard at the Mount in the 2000s, said that experience was “a huge part of my life. The majority of things that have happened in my life, the connections, happened through the game of basketball.”

Small or large, the proper role of athletics is a perennial topic of interest and concern for boards.

Juan “Jay” Rosselló, vice president and general counsel of the University of Maryland, College Park, the flagship of the University System of Maryland said his institution is fortunate to have a president and athletic director “who are heavily involved in not just the NCAA but intercollegiate athletic issues across the board. They have a good sense of the direction of intercollegiate athletics and, as much as possible, in preparing our campus for the dawn of the new age” of compensating players. The Terrapins joined the Big Ten a decade ago.

In Maryland, “we are the only [college] in one of these powerful conferences, so naturally athletics is more of an issue for us than our peer institutions, and we try to educate as much as possible not just our system peers, but the Board of Regents itself,” said Rosselló, who once directed the NCAA’s office of legal affairs and enterprise risk, ethics, and compliance.

“We have a committee that’s focused on athletics. Our athletic director often reports out to the board. We have a myriad of issues, not just the (House) settlement, but things like coaches’ contracts and sponsorship agreements that are high ticket items” so the Board of Regents can fulfill its oversight duties, he said.

The House settlement would provide “some clarity and what we hope will be a period of litigation peace” over the issue of compensation for athletes “in exchange for some sort of immunity from ongoing antitrust litigation,” he said. But “there are ancillary issues that I think will need to be worked out as time goes on,” including how Title IX affects the distribution of revenues.

“There’re still some issues that I don’t think anybody at this point has true clarity [on],” he said. “There may be a situation where most, if not all, of the money goes to certain athletes in football and basketball. And the question is what does it mean for the future of the other so-called Olympic sports, and what sort of dynamics would you have, even within football and basketball, of some players’ earning potentially six figures or more, when others on the team may not be getting anything?”

“It’s unclear how all these dynamics will play out. But one thing that’s clear is that the public wants to watch sports. The TV contracts grow bigger and ratings continue to go through the roof,” he said.

McMillen, the college star and Rhodes Scholar, worries about “the incredible pressures and time demands on these kids. They’re flying all over the country. They often can’t make classes and have to do this virtually, or whatever. I don’t think I could have been a chemistry major.” But on the positive side, the NIL money has kept some athletes in school furthering their education and not just scrambling to make ends meet on an athletic scholarship, he said.

Still, McMillen is troubled by “the transience” of today’s players. “I was looking at a Maryland game the other night and only one starter was there last year,” he said. “Part of me says that’s too bad because one of the great things about college sports was watching a kid mature and become a better player every year. I think those days are gone.”

When Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts and onetime Harvard basketball player, took over as president of the NCAA in 2023, he observed: “Although it’s a particularly interesting and complicated time, college athletics is still one of the truly great human potential development programs we have. I know all kinds of people who wouldn’t have gone to college or graduated if it wasn’t for college athletics.”

Penn’s Weaver believes trustees need to spend more time digging into athletics issues and challenges. “Their agendas are jammed, and I understand why it feels like there’s just so many more things that seem to take greater priority at the moment,” she said, but if there ever was a time that athletics demanded more attention from trustees, this is it.

Christopher Connell is a higher education writer based in Washington, D.C. and a frequent contributor to Trusteeship.

---