How will the House v. NCAA settlement affect the Olympic pipeline?

Grant House is a named plaintiff in arguably the most consequential antitrust lawsuit in college sports history. Grant House is also a swimmer, a recent graduate of Arizona State who served as a key piece of the program’s emergence as a national championship contender and still trains with the Sun Devils as a post-grad.

And therein lies the awkwardness of House’s current predicament. His name is shorthand for the three antitrust cases (House v. NCAA, Hubbard v. NCAA and Carter v. NCAA) that the NCAA and power conferences are in the process of settling. The settlement will pay out approximately $2.8 billion in damages and set up a revenue-sharing model in which schools may pay up to $20 million directly to their athletes per year. As athletic departments nationwide brace for the new price of doing business, a number of athletic directors and commissioners have already alluded to necessary cost-cutting measures. For some schools, that will include dropping Olympic sports that don’t drive revenue for the athletic department … like swimming.

House did not respond to interview requests for this story. His coach Bob Bowman said he respected House’s right to involve himself in the lawsuit and that House wanted to play a role in something bigger than himself.

“Grant is a great person,” Bowman said. “And he was the best recruit we had at ASU in the early years. He was interested in taking a chance on us because we didn’t really have a proven program — so that was good. He’s technically quite good (at swimming). He has a good background. He’s a forward thinker, and he’s a free thinker.

“I just think that he’s involved in something now that is a lot bigger now than he thought it would be when it started.”

Indeed, it’s hard to downplay the impact the settlement will have on non-football and non-basketball college sports. That’s why the uncertain future of college athletics is so concerning to those who care about swimming — and other Olympic sports that have long been supported and sustained through the NCAA model. So much has changed in the past few years, and an even more significant makeover is ahead.

But what will that mean for Team USA’s pursuit of gold?

Although Team USA will wear swim caps adorned with American flags instead of collegiate logos in Paris, the impact of the American higher education system is never far from mind when the topic of Olympic swimming is raised. Places like Stanford, Cal, Texas, Florida and Michigan have been incubators of talent for college swimmers but also for those who choose to train as postgraduates after exhausting their NCAA eligibility.

“The college swim system is our secret sauce,” USA Swimming CEO Tim Hinchey said. “Not only do we train our best swimmers to make our Olympic teams, but we train our competitors around the world.”

A prime example: French swimming star Léon Marchand will be the face of his home Olympics this month in Paris; he trained with Bowman first at Arizona State and now at the University of Texas. Examples like that abound in other Olympic sports. For post-grads, it’s often the best or only option for elite training at top-of-the-line facilities — and with the sport’s best coaches. Those coaches split their time between their undergrad and post-grad groups, divvying up the facilities and practice times.

More than 1,000 current, former and incoming NCAA athletes will be competing in Paris, and it’s not only the power-conference schools centered in the House case that are sending athletes. The group includes athletes from 57 different conferences and all three divisions, with 37 Division II athletes and 10 from Division III. The athletes will represent 103 different countries in the upcoming Games. (Swimming alone has athletes representing 67 different nations.)

“I get a huge kick out of how many international student-athletes we have, and I do smile when I think about all these young people who are coming to us to master their craft and then go home and compete against us,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said in a recent interview. “There’s something beautiful about that. And I really hope that whatever we do here to deal with our current set of challenges and circumstances, we find a way to continue to make the U.S. the place where young people who are great performers in sports believe that they can come and maybe win Olympic medals someday.”

The proposed House settlement would require the payment by the NCAA of the $2.8 billion in back damages to athletes who could not profit off of their names, images and likenesses prior to 2021, as well as the formation of a new revenue-sharing model that allows schools to directly distribute to athletes up to approximately $20 million per school, beginning as soon as fall 2025. (That dollar figure will increase slightly over the course of the upcoming decade because it is calculated to be 22 percent of the revenue brought in by the average power-conference school.)

Power conferences are also in the process of deciding on roster caps for each sport; each school would then be allowed to offer as many scholarships to athletes as it wanted, up to the maximum number of roster spots. There remain important questions about how Title IX will apply in the new model, particularly with the revenue-sharing distribution. But while they wait for clarity, athletic directors are operating under the assumption that they will still need to offer the same number of scholarships for both male and female athletes across the athletic department, as federal law requires them to do now. It’s quite possible the roster cap for women’s swimming will be higher than men’s for this reason, as football gobbles up so many male-sport scholarships.

“Part of the challenge for everyone at this point in time is that people want to see the picture of what it’s going to look like next,” Baker said. “Will (Division) I schools redirect a lot of resources that might have gone one place to another? Yes. I think that’s a good thing. But I don’t think anybody has a clear handle on exactly how it’s all going to play out.”

The United States is one of the only countries in the world without a sports ministry (or department) within its government and the only one at its competitive level that provides no government funding for its National Olympic Committee. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (the USOPC) generates revenue through corporate sponsorships and media rights deals. And it does not use its revenue to fund its sport pipelines at colleges and universities.

Former legendary University of Georgia swim coach Jack Bauerle said he thinks the USOPC will have to help out what he calls its “minor league system.” For decades, the country has celebrated its gold medals without directly funding the coaches and facilities that support the athlete development that is necessary to achieve them. If it becomes more expensive for schools to do that in addition to supporting big-time college football and basketball, it’s fair to ask how many will continue to do so.

The richest athletic departments and schools with storied history in the sport will likely continue to fully fund elite swimming — there’s no need to worry about Texas or Michigan suddenly dropping their programs or cutting corners — but what about the tier below it? What about the other hundreds and thousands of swimmers who dream about developing to become good enough to make a national team? And what about those who will never make it to that level but fill out rosters of sports at enough schools to allow for a true and competitive national championship? Those national championships allow for training schedules and annual structure. They create team environments in which athletes train and stay engaged. It would be harder to train elite-level swimmers without them.

“We are the feeder system for the Olympic Games,” Bauerle said. “Something’s going to have to give, because if we lose that, we will be in big trouble internationally. Those other countries already had their systems in place. … I don’t see how our dominance in swimming could be continued at that level unless something happens.”

The NCAA has been working with the USOPC on the issue. The two entities paired up to form the Collegiate Advisory Council, with a stated mission to “strengthen and lead collaboration efforts to align our country’s unique collegiate athletic landscape and the Olympic and Paralympic movements to support Team USA’s collegiate athletes.” The group features a handful of power-conference athletic directors who will have to make their own tough decisions about sports sponsorship in the coming months and years.

Baker said he does expect the issue of federal funding for Olympic sports to be broached at some point.

“I don’t know when it will turn to that or where it will go,” Baker said. “It’s a complicated issue for the feds for a million reasons.”

But he understands the importance of the topic, and Baker remains optimistic that schools making decisions about their financial futures will still find value in sponsoring Olympic sports that remain crucial to their missions and identity and attract both domestic and international athletes. Simply put, it is important to create pathways for athletes to the biggest world stage. And it’s going to be particularly important for the U.S. to be well-positioned heading into the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

“The Olympics, at the end of the day, is a showcase of opportunity for each country that participates to show the product of the grit and the grind and the work,” Baker said. “And there are always moments that come out of the Olympics that are unique and last for decades. I’m old enough to remember Bob Beamon and his 29-foot long jump in Mexico City in 1968. That was also the same Olympics where the sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos put their fists up during the ceremony.

“The Olympics are a world stage on which countries and athletes have a chance to perform, and it has everybody’s attention. … There’s a ton of work and a ton of resources associated with getting from here to there, but it is really unique, and it is very iconic. In the end, most of the messages that come out of it are enormously positive.”

So, how can the Olympic movement sustain its success in a future in which key parties’ financial incentives may change? It might require outside-of-the-box thinking.

Victoria Jackson, a sports historian at Arizona State, says this is the time for each sport to think hard about its goals and usages within the collegiate model. For so long — in large part to defend its stance against paying football players — schools and the NCAA have operated like all athletes and all sports are the same. But they’re not.

“We need to have historically important change happening domestically within the way we design the American sports ecosystem,” Jackson said.

She suggests a shift more toward the club model that exists in other countries, which could fully separate college football from other sports, untethering it from higher education and allowing elite players to advance through levels in the sport without it affecting conference affiliation or travel costs for the other sports in university athletic departments.

Jackson said over the five years before the pandemic, head-coaching salaries in Olympic sports increased by 43 percent, despite the fact that the revenue in the respective sports did not increase by that same amount. As she puts it, it was college football paying for the Olympic and Paralympic development. That financial model is now changing, with fewer reasons to invest in a sport that is not bringing in more money than it costs.

“It’s hard to get people to be excited about a future where we admit that we were living beyond our means,” Jackson said. “It’s going to have to look more like what we know to be scholastic sport going forward — local and regional competition, lower budgets. The emphasis on winning doesn’t go away when your budgets are reduced, like athletes still want to win and coaches still want them to be the best that they can be.

“But I do think there will need to be a recalibration of what this experience will be for athletes who are trying to be the best that they can be in their respective sports, and that’s a hard reality.”

Each time Kate Douglass entered Lucas Oil Stadium to compete at U.S. Olympic swim trials, she faced herself. Well, she technically faced her face — which stretched multiple stories across the main entrance to the football stadium, greeting attendees and her would-be competitors alike.

“When I saw that I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I really need to make this team,’” Douglass said. “It was definitely scary just because I knew a lot of people had expectations for me.”

That they do. Douglass will be — literally and figuratively — one of the faces of the U.S. swim team in Paris. The former University of Virginia star will swim the 200-meter breaststroke and the 200-meter individual medley there, in addition to the women’s 4×100-meter freestyle relay and the women’s medley relay (with perhaps the mixed medley relay to boot). And she’ll be joined by a handful of UVA teammates, including sisters Gretchen and Alex Walsh as well as Emma Weber, a surprise Olympic qualifier in the 100-meter breaststroke. The American women will be led by head U.S. women’s coach Todd DeSorbo, who is also the head swim coach at UVA.

Meanwhile, the American men will be coached by University of Florida head swim coach Anthony Nesty, who trains a who’s-who of past and present Olympians (Katie Ledecky, Caeleb Dressel, Bobby Finke and more) in Gainesville, Fla. These appointments aren’t accidents; USA Swimming is strategic about picking head coaches who serve as personal coaches for a good portion of the roster to help maximize the potential for success. And Virginia and Florida are epicenters for the sport right now.

That setup is both the point of the college-to-Olympics pipeline and a huge benefit of having the entities so closely linked. Although nobody expects those specific programs to cut their elite swimming programs, roster caps could shrink their sizes. Schools with similar athletic department budgets but less historical success in this particular sport may make the difficult choice to cut the program altogether.

If the number of colleges that sponsor the sport decrease and there are dramatically fewer scholarships available for swimmers, would that depress participation in swimming clubs, which many young swimmers join with the primary goal of earning a free ride to college? Would the “secret sauce” still work? It’s easy to get buried in such questions and anxieties. Even as Paris and its glimmering gold medals await in the coming days and weeks, these existential questions remain.

“The biggest fear is for down the road,” Baurle said. “We have enjoyed so much success — you can go back Olympics after Olympics after Olympics. We’ve been the golden child. We’ve brought back the most medals, the most golds. And all of a sudden, we’re in a place where this could be now put in jeopardy, and that’s a scary thing.”

(Photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)