DOE & Title IX requirements for school-provided NIL

movingtothebeach
Sun, 19 Jan 2025 07:32:28 +0000

We have a few threads that sometimes mention this topic, but we don’t really discuss the monster in the athletics room these days: the settlement in NCAA v. House and the absolute chaos that this has unleashed around scholarships, roster spots and sizes, athletic department revenue and payouts, etc.

I’m not going to write a summary of everything that’s happened - I’d need to block off a whole night for that! - but we do have yet another potential wrench thrown in the works, to mix metaphors: the Department of Education came out this week and said that NIL payments from schools are subject to Title IX requirements.

Why does this matter? Well, the NCAA v. House settlement, among other things, allows DI programs that opt in to pay $20.5MM per year to their athletes through school-sponsored NIL programs. Essentially every program was planning to use this to primarily pay football and men’s basketball players, since that’s the most in line with market expectations. The DOE has said that you have to spread that $20.5MM equally across men’s and women’s sports. (If you think I’m misunderstanding this, please correct me.) Sportico provides their own summary.

Note that this interpretation does not apply to outside NIL payments, like collectives, though the DOE would like schools to act as if it does - see Section 5 of the DOE document. The DOE “does not offer specific guidance” on that matter.

If you’re wondering if the $20.5MM is too small to matter, it’s not - I don’t know the size of every collective, and of course there’s the news that Larry Ellison gave $10MM to the new QB coming into Michigan, and who knows what might happen in the future, but right now $20.5MM is still a substantial percentage of NIL-available funds.

So this is yet more chaos in the college sports landscape. It’s a DOE interpretation, not a law - the next DOE could interpret this rule differently, and one might assume that this will happen (Ted Cruz thinks so).

If CC is going to be a reliable source of information for parents of athletic recruits, one thing it could do is provide some real-world interpretations and experiences of how programs are responding to this current landscape. I don’t really understand what’s happening with these “Roster Limit Objections” that I’m reading about, for example: they seem like spitting into the wind but I might be missing something.