What I was referring to are NIL deals that are essentially pro-type shoe contracts for college athletes. I’m more familiar with the running side but I think similar things are happening with gear contracts in other sports.
NIL takes other forms too, of course, just mentioning this variety because the question was about NIL deals just for doing the sport. That’s pretty much what these are. There are social media responsibilities too but that isn’t the core of it.
And if you break it down by conference, Ivy League is 5th. Not too shabby. 2024 Olympic medals by NCAA schools and conferences - ESPN
[quote=“politeperson, post:59, topic:3671881”]]important to keep in mind that there were athletic departments before the explosion in revenues and there are athletic departments now at schools that cost the school considerably more than revenues.
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At big schools with big football, the football revenue pretty much covers all the sports. U of Texas only plays 21 varsity sports, and the football team and especially the TV network cover all those costs. It’s mostly accounting. Is the money for parking revenue for the home games going to the athletic department or to the general fund? Are the cheerleaders covered by the basketball or football team for their expenses? It’s really just accounting. If everything is considered an athletic expense (stadium, practice facilities, scholarships, staff, buildings) and none of the revenue, it’s going to look like the athletics is a drain on the university.
You can’t believe the money CU football brought in this year, not just to the football program but to all of athletics, the city of Boulder, the businesses, merch sales, special TV programs, ticket revenues, parking. Also for future years. Tickets used to be $50 but this year for NORTH DAKOTA, a non-conference game, the cheapest I saw was $150 - on a Thursday night game!
When NIL was allowed, it wasn’t just the Million Dollar Babies who were bringing it in but a lot of students benefited. A pizza place gave unlimited meals to the offensive line, a local car dealership provided cars to a team for the school year, etc. I think every athlete at Baylor gets $25k from the NIL boosters. That’s huge money to a high jumper or cheerleader or the third string tackle walk on who doesn’t have a shoe contract or even a scholarship. It may be enough to keep a student in school for one more semester or one more year.
The Ivies have always been able to retain their athletes but now some of the other schools can too. And the ones the Ivies are losing? They need to offer more to retain them like the other schools have ALWAYS had to do. Basketball players stayed at Yale or Princeton to get their degrees while most of Kentucky’s team was One-n-done. Duke had an alum (or fund or somehow found the money) to extend the scholarships for athletics who had used all their athletic money but now had extra eligibility because of covid (and at least one of those came from Princeton to play lax when Princeton wouldn’t/couldn’t let them play because they were grad students). Olivia Dunn is returning to LSU for another year. Not sure if she still has a scholarship but she can pay her own tuition (and you know she’s not even a top performer and doesn’t get to be in every meet).
I think it will all shake out just fine for the ivies.
speaking of conferences, the two newbies, Stanford & Cal, comprised over half of the ACC total.
Perhaps they should rename it the Pacific Coast Conference.
The non-revenue NCAA sports that the Ivy League schools are competitive include but are not limited to men and women’s lacrosse, field hockey, men and women’s rowing, men and women’s water polo, and men and women’s fencing. In each of these sports, there is stiff competition from teams representing the Big 10, SEC, and ACC conferences.
It’s unlikely right now; but a scenario exists where a school like Michigan, with an athletics department flush with > $255 million dollars in annual revenue, could decide to fully fund the entire roster of a non-revenue team to make it prohibitively competitive. Other teams from the Big 10 or SEC schools could successfully match them. But how would an Ivy League team successfully recruit players and compete against them?
Under the previous NCAA system, there were guardrails that prevented schools from outspending each other by curtailing the # of scholarships in non-revenue sports.
There is also another issue which is becoming more prominent every year, NIL
or, All Coast Conference.
Not a comment on @Thorsmom66, because lots of people say things like this, but I always find the framing of university athletic departments as “profitable” or “unprofitable” pretty strange. We don’t talk about this for any other institutional priorities at wealthy and high-profile institutions, whether primarily academic or not: it’s not a consistent question if campus theater performances or support structures for potentially-Nobel-Prize-winning chemistry researchers are profitable. Universities need to balance their budget, generating revenue through fees, donations, financial investments, and auxiliary sources of income, and incurring costs for staff, facilities, debt, and institutional priorities. These schools care about athletics as part of their holistic offering: they are a priority for non-financial reasons.
every time the ACC promoted Stanford or Cal’s performances in their social media, a little part of me died. #pac12lives
The same way they’ve done it for years - prep school players who really want to go to an Ivy League school. The school hires (or retains) a top coach, and the kids want to play for him/her, and those good players and good results attract other players. Princeton had Bill Tierney and players went to play for him. For most of the sports they are competitive in, the Ivies recruit on the same timeline (early) as the other big D1 schools.
There are always going to be top athletes who choose to go to an Ivy or an NESCAC school that may not win a national championship but it’s the school they want to go to. But, there are always going to be students who need/want the money so they have to/want to go to Penn State or Alabama or Florida. And they get a good education too.
I understand. Given the current Ivy League stance concerning athletic scholarships and NIL, an Ivy coach of a non-revenue sport will
have a much harder job getting a recruit to commit to his school when the Michigan (and potentially even the Duke and Stanford) coach is able to tangle a full ride scholarship plus NIL money. That’s a lot of money to walk away from. Some athletes with deep-pocketed parents will still pick the Ivy school. I bet most won’t if given those 2 options. This scenario could also adversely affect NESCAC recruiting.
However, no one knows how this will play out in the future. The actual # of scholarships offered may not change after the House settlement because schools may not be interested in paying more money to fund money losing sports teams. The effect of NIL for these sports is also difficult
to predict.
General opinion is that there will be a squeeze in most sports and D3s and Ivies will become even more competitive.
It will have to, right? If there are roster caps, that will trickle all the way down.
I think it depends on the sport and the school. Some team rosters are already significantly below the proposed roster caps.
And beyond roster caps, whole teams will be eliminated (talking at the P5 schools and any others that opt-in to revenue sharing), putting further pressure on the number of opportunities out there for incoming first years and transfers.
For a bit of historical context of the importance of the money derived from big time college athletics in football:
In the late 1970s / early 1980s , the big-time college football schools used the NCAA to pass rules regarding stadium seating capacity (30,000+) and average attendance at college football games (17,000+) which resulted in Ivy League football being demoted from Division 1 to Division 1 AA. In an attempt to comply in order to remain in D1, the Ivy League informally pursued Northwestern University (Northwestern’s athletic director stopped the talks due primarily to the amount of travel that would be involved). Army & Navy again tried to join the Ivy League. The Ivy League was attracted to Northwestern because of similar academics and by Northwestern’s horrible football record (31 consecutive losses) in the Big Ten Conference:
https://nytimes.com/1982/01/10/sports/ivy-league-considers-adding-2-schools.html
I guess I’m thinking of XC/TF. Most rosters are currently much larger than the proposed caps.
Exactly. This is also true for many top swim programs.
My understanding of how this will work for XC/TF is that the rosters will be separate. 17 for XC, 45 for TF.
Only rostered athletes will count for each sport. So in practice the only rostered distance runners for TF will be impact conference and nationals competitors. Some of the mid-d runners that would currently be rostered for XC won’t be. Athletes can compete unattached in either season and/or redshirt without counting.
This still will create pressure, especially on walk-on type athletes, but not as much as if the TF cap applied to entire current TF programs (where XC is under the umbrella of the TF program).
In practice most programs emphasize some areas more than others anyway, so they shouldn’t have trouble operating successfully under these caps.
