What does the NCAA antitrust settlement mean for the future of Track & Field/Cross Country

Who knows?

Schools that decide to pay a lot of athletes in revenue generating sports like basketball and football may mean they will decrease funding for Olympic sports.

Stanford has a ton of money and was very close to dropping volleyball recently and they have had good but teams that were not good enough to win national tittles. I can guess that a lot of schools that want to be high profile might drop other Olympic sports and track and cross country and swimming and wrestling if they have little chance to win a national title and go all in with their football and basketball teams that generate revenue and are teams that are shown on TV and add name recognition and alumni interest to the schools.

Track and field athletes generate no money for their schools so they won't be receiving any money.

Men's programs in Olympic sports are going to get gutted. I predict that 50-60 D1 men's track and/or XC programs get eliminated by the end of the 2025-2026 academic year.

Some women's programs will get cut but Title IX gives them much more protection, especially at football institutions.

I also would not be shocked if many smaller, academically focused schools just got rid of sports completely. It would eliminate a great deal of compensation and equity related headaches.

The conflicts are still to come. Since the football earns the majoiity of the money, it is natural to assume that most of the dollars will go to football players. A title IX issue is waiting to happen, as female athletes will see very little of the revenue. An extreme response would be to cut out many male minor sports as a way to offset some of the imbalance. This would also allow departments to pare some female sports, but the lawsuits will be ugly.

Moving to a pro league paid system for football and college basketball is going to happen and since these pro eague sports pay for everything, the structure of minor sports in college is bound to change. D1 track may become like DIII.

No one genuinely knows.

NIL did not make the majority of NCAA DI track athletes money. I don't suppose this settlement will either.

Track (and other sports) may move to a head count model, and roster caps to keep costs down. That has been talked about a lot, and I don't think it would be a terrible thing.

We could see the dissociation of Title IX with professionalized college athletics, and the moving of non revenue sports to a more local club model.

We could also see the splitting of divisions (or the dissolving of the NCAA as a whole) resulting in new and different models for regulating and governing support structures for a sport like track.

Hard to say. Anyone who has the answers already is lying. But we are likely to see some change.

Why can't we just eliminate title IX? Women don't deserve the same amount of revenue $ as male football players. But under Biden's equity regime they're trying to force it

A lot do earn money, but it's insignificant. Even the 5th best runner on a good program with 2000-5000 followers will likely have a couple tiny deals.

Nothing like Caleb Williams' rumored $10 million over 2 years though

Title IX is federal law and has been since Richard Nixon signed it into law a half century ago. Even this SCOTUS won't do away with it. It's a political third rail.

Where this is going to get ugly, really ugly, is when compensation starts happening. You can make the argument that a D1 football player should get $50K/year for playing in a revenue producing sport, but that will invite lawsuits from players in non-revenue sports. How do you legally quantify that the back-up punter on the Florida Gators football team that never played a down is entitled to money but, Parker Valby gets nothing for multiple national titles? Perhaps a lawyer could chime in but, would women athletes have Title IX claims and non-revenue athletes make equality claims for equal compensation because they "equally" represent the university as a student-athlete and that the policy of only paying revenue sports athletes is discriminatory?

This is why Loyola Marymount axed several sports earlier this year. They believed that if they had to pay revenue producing male basketball players a certain sum for their services, they would also have to pay an injured XC runner or a back-up softball catcher the same amount. They proactively eliminated sports to cull what they saw as a huge payroll issue.

I honestly feel that, in the short term, many schools will simply stop recruiting athletes for sports that could get eliminated and will probably boot walk-ons off of their rosters to minimize any downstream financial obligations.

I have no idea what's going to happen. But, it feels like the next step (legally speaking) for revenue-making athletes is to become classified as employees. The NCAA and individual universities will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent this from happening, but I think it's definitely possible.

If this were to happen, I do wonder if eligibility rules could be next on the chopping block. In other words, if athletes were employees, how could you set a limit on eligibility? For example, up until the 1980s, most universities enforced mandatory retirement for tenured professors, but that was deemed illegal. If the QB on the football team is an employee, it seems like the same rules (no mandatory 'retirement') would apply.

Sorry for all of the speculation and what-ifs, but I do wonder if this is where we're heading.

The Republicans are now calling themselves "defenders of women's sports." There is no chance they will vote to overturn Title IX, even if they have the power to do that.

It's Biden who is trying to erase women's sports. /s

Greed is good.

Probably means the death of the sport as we know it at the DI and DII (high) level.

I said it somewhere else I see most Olympic sports moving to the DIII model. Plenty of availability to participate but scholarship, travel, gear, etc will be gone.

Also this is the first of many lawsuits coming down against the NCAA. I don’t think congress will get involved, they can try but I think it’ll be a slow death of schools choosing to defund

150 years ago few people could read and write. Teachers Colleges sprung up to train millions of teachers to make America functionally literate. The teachers colleges also featured sports teams as recreation. 150 years have passed and this model has become outmoded and obsolete. Online Classes educate billions of people across the globe. Billions of people are today are middle and upper class and form and operated sports teams, franchises, and leagues.

The money is just too good to really do much about it. Look at what Vanderbilt does in the SEC. They fund the bare minimum of male sports, just make a token effort at football, but they get the same SEC TV check that Alabama gets. The non revenue sports are an unwelcomed but requirement to get this money, but a rounding error when it comes to the actual budget of a major university. Also these non revenue and women's sports are basically a built in DEI program for the school.

In the end they get to justify having a few more black kids on campus and they get to pocket wads of cash.

The ONLY way this changes if the top 40-60 schools truly break away into a minor league where the players are have contracts and play under the name of the school, but they are really not associated with the school as far as being actual students.

I think that the previous post hits the nail.

Look at Vanderbilt as the new model.

For men (6 sports): Football and basketball bring in the money. Then you have baseball, golf and tennis and cross country.

THAT'S IT!

Then you offset the football roster with these sports for women (10 total): basketball, cross country, lacrosse, swimming, track and field,. bowling, golf, tennis, soccer, volleyball.

Unfortunately this seems accurate.

Our department is seeing a decrease in half a million due to the cut in NCAA distribution.

On top of this the school is looking at paying men’s and women’s basketball.

We were told to expect budget and scholarships cuts in order to help offset set these budget issues. Fortunately we do not have football and our department has been doing well recently, but that will not be the case for others.

Had to check...

That gets them to 16, the minimum required to compete as a Division I FBS school, and is in the "safe harbor" for proportionality for Title IX.

So, yes, that is a model we could be looking at in the future.

Unless you are a really big school the best thing to do was be to drop football. I know I know pure heresy but here me out...

You drop football, because NOBODY cares about anything but the top programs. Then you (assuming you want to have sports) fund they non revenue sports.

If you drop football, where the revenue actually comes from, why then would you continue to have sports that don't generate revenue?

Those who can't keep up (all but 60 -80 schools) will drop football and make all sports club.