Bernadette McGrade leads an Atlantic 10 Conference built around basketball and with a greater focus on earning multiple berths in the men's NCAA tournament than anything big-time football-related.
But her league is one of dozens of conferences and numerous schools that will be affected by the NCAA and major college conferences approving a $2.8 billion settlement of a federal antitrust lawsuit that requires them to pay players under a plan set against the backdrop of the football-driven college sports world.
“We have to move forward. We want to continue to protect our rich history in basketball,” McGrade told The Associated Press. “So we have to start strategizing and analyzing.”
Basketball-heavy schools in leagues like the A-10, Big East (home of two-time men's national championship winner UConn) and West Coast Conference are faced with the prospect of spending millions of dollars on players each year, but they must figure out how best to make that happen without the money flowing in from football.
“Along with the opportunities that football brings, football also brings a lot of (financial) obligations,” said Gonzaga University athletic director Chris Standiford, who oversees a WCC basketball program that has grown from middling to national powerhouse over the past quarter century. “So it's a lose-lose win-win. You don't have the operational and new expense obligations associated with football player compensation, but you also don't have the revenue benefits that come with that, especially television revenue.”
The settlement involves the NCAA and conferences paying $2.77 billion over 10 years to more than 14,000 former and current college athletes who say the now-defunct rule prevented them from earning income or receiving sponsorship deals since 2016. Under the plan, universities would be allowed to set aside up to about $21 million in payments to athletes, though that cap is subject to change. It could begin as early as the fall semester of 2025.
The suit targets Notre Dame and the so-called Power Five conferences — Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Southeastern — but coming up with a settlement would also hurt hundreds of other Division I schools in the form of small annual payments from the organization, which gets most of its revenue from lucrative television contracts with the NCAA for the men's basketball tournament and other championship events.
The NCAA isn't involved in the College Football Playoff or bowl games — football television contracts are made at the conference level — but schools with smaller or no football programs will have to foot the bill for a share of the settlement before they can start paying prospective athletes.
“I think the real interesting thing here is why men's basketball is footing the bill for all of the overhead costs of college sports and college football doesn't contribute,” Standiford questioned.
McGrade went a step further, noting that the CFP's projected per-school payment to the Big Ten and SEC (about $22 million) alone would nearly cover the estimated annual amount schools could pay their players. By comparison, McGrade estimated that the league's basketball-focused schools could pay about $3 million to $5 million a year.
“I knew that a settlement was being discussed and I think everyone at DI has been in support of it all year,” McGrade said, “I didn't know the gory details of what the payment model would be. The imbalance was a real concern and it wouldn't have taken so long for that balance to be a little more balanced and for everyone to be a little more respectful of each other.”
Jay Bilas, a former Duke player, lawyer and ESPN basketball play-by-play announcer, said NCAA member schools put themselves in this position by voting “in lockstep over the years to limit what players can earn.”
“There's no difference between Georgia and Marquette in terms of liability,” Bilas said. “They're all equally liable for violating federal antitrust laws, so I think we have to remember in this case that they were all on the same page, that the players were only getting scholarships or stipends or whatever.”
Finding the best answer for each school across vastly different economic models will require significant work.
At Gonzaga University, for example, the men's basketball program generated about $19.2 million in revenue for the 2022-23 season, nearly 45% of the school's total athletic revenue for the year ($42.9 million), according to Department of Education statistics.
That was tied with Atlantic 10's Dayton, which was ranked 24th in this season's final Associated Press Top 25 rankings. The Flyers' men's basketball program accounted for 44 percent of sports revenue ($40.1 million). In the Big East, schools without football, such as Marquette ($42.6 million) and Creighton ($35 million), had men's basketball account for more than 48 percent of total revenue.
In comparison, at top football-driven conferences such as Duke, North Carolina (ACC), Kentucky (SEC) and Kansas (Big 12), the men's basketball programs accounted for less than 29% of total revenue, all exceeding about $138 million.
At football-crazed Alabama, the men's basketball program, the No. 1 overall seed in the 2023 NCAA Tournament and a Final Four appearance this year, accounted for just 10.8% of the school's total revenue ($191.2 million) for the 2022-23 season.
“I think we can all agree that it's important for Villanova University, or the University of Connecticut, or any other university, to invest in Villanova basketball. They're going to continue to do everything they can to compete at that level,” Standiford said. “We're going to do the same thing. But where is the money going to come from?”
“I don't think it's an advantage for us,” Standiford added, “but I also think we're a very unique group of schools, and I don't see how we can earn that status if we don't already have it. I think that's going to change.”
But Bilas remained confident the basketball-focused program “will be successful,” noting that sports success can spur transformative growth and improvement outside of sports for a school.
“Those revenue streams are growing and will continue to grow because live sports are so valuable,” Bilas said. “Football isn't the only thing that's valuable. Football is the most valuable. But basketball is really valuable, women's basketball, other sports. We'll see how it goes.”
“I think institutions continue to compete at a high level, but now they have to compete for talent in the economic sector.”
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AP College Basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball
