Mandel: What college sports’ pay-for-play era will mean — and won’t mean

This week, the NCAA, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC voted to allow schools to pay their athletes.

Let that sink in for a moment.

A day few would have deemed imaginable even three years ago, much less 30, has (almost) arrived. Technically, their votes were just the first step toward reaching a $2.7 billion settlement in the landmark House v. NCAA antitrust suit. A judge still has to approve it. There will be more hearings. Still, the leaders of college sports have agreed to something they’ve spent a century railing against — albeit begrudgingly, and only due to the pending threat of a verdict that would likely bankrupt the entire system.

There are so many details still to sort out: how many schools will actually offer the entire $20 million or so a year in revenue they’ll now be allowed, but not obligated, to share with their athletes; how they will meet Title IX requirements; whether they’ll establish collective bargaining with the athletes, etc.

All I’m willing to forecast at this point are all the widely predicted ramifications of paying college athletes that WON’T ever come to fruition.

Fans will not stop watching college football

It’s the doomsday scenario NCAA attorneys, expert witnesses and certain fans have been threatening for years: The public will lose interest in college sports if the athletes are ever compensated beyond their scholarships.

“If we go down the road of paying players substantial sums, all will be lost,” former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson testified during the 2014 O’Bannon v. NCAA trial. Citing misleading public opinion polls the NCAA invoked during the case, he predicted viewership would fall by 15 to 20 percent.

Well, we have nearly three years of data now that confirms this argument was complete bunk. Many college athletes — not just in football and men’s basketball — began receiving “substantial sums” of NIL money beginning July 1, 2021. What has happened since?

Thirty-seven regular-season college football games last season garnered at least five million viewers, up from 29 a decade earlier. Last year’s Ohio State-Michigan game drew the sport’s largest regular-season audience (19.1 million) since 2011, back when serving cream cheese on bagels was still an NCAA violation. And then of course there’s women’s basketball, which has seen stratospheric audience growth, arguably in part because the biggest stars — Caitlin Clark, JuJu Watkins, Cameron Brink — are now paid to appear in national advertising campaigns.

People will keep watching college football because A) there is no greater loyalty in American sports than a person’s favorite college and B) fall Saturdays remain awesome.

The athletes’ academic experience will not be affected

The NCAA for years framed its arguments for preserving amateurism as a noble-minded attempt to protect its “student-athletes.”

“It is incredibly important that we … protect the amateurism of college sports and support rather than detract from the student-athlete’s educational experience,” former NCAA president Mark Emmert said in testimony before the Senate in 2020.

That would be well and good if it had actually been happening. If we completely ignored the decades-old practices of steering athletes to the easiest possible classes; “clustering” high percentages of athletes into easier majors; athletes spending far more than the supposed 20-hour-a-week limit on activities focused on their sport; embarrassing graduation rates; and, in certain cases, outright academic fraud.

That’s not to say all football players treat school as a joke. On the contrary, as on any campus, there are highly motivated students preparing well for life after college and others who couldn’t identify the library on a map. And that’s not going to change for better or worse because of revenue sharing.

NIL collectives will not go away

In administrators’ ideal world, the House settlement will bring an end to the “wild, wild West” era that sprouted up when the NCAA was forced in 2021 to allow NIL but instituted few if any regulations around it. Fat chance.

The settlement will allow, say, Ohio State, to share up to $20 million with its athletes. Which seems like a lot. But schools won’t be able to give all $20 million of it to the football team, lest they themselves want to be sued by their women’s sports athletes.

In The Athletic’s recent reporting about the transfer portal and NIL, one CEO of a collective said, “We’ll spend around $14.5 million (this year). Football is probably 80 percent of that. Another: “We’re at $12-$13 million.” And this reporter has heard of several major programs with higher numbers than that.

NIL collectives won’t need to raise as much money as they do currently, but they will likely serve as a salary cap workaround of sorts for the upper-tier programs with national championship ambitions. After all, boosters were inducing recruits well before NIL, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop in the new model.

The NCAA will not stop getting sued

The NCAA and the conferences opted to settle the House case in part because it would be consolidated with several similar suits filed by the same attorney. But the first hint that many more billable hours are in store for the defendants came Thursday when a judge in Colorado denied a motion to move another athlete-compensation case, Fontenot v. NCAA, to the Northern California court overseeing House.

Meanwhile, the NCAA is still ensnared in suits over athlete employment (Johnson v. NCAA; NLRB cases involving USC, Dartmouth and Notre Dame), transfer rules (Ohio et al v. NCAA) and booster involvement in recruiting (Tennessee and Virginia v. NCAA). There’s also Florida State and Clemson’s suits challenging the ACC’s grant of rights, which could have ramifications across the entire industry.

House may reshape college sports unlike any lawsuit before it, but the larger remodeling project may still only be in the early stages.

GO DEEPER

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People will not stop complaining about the state of things

College football is the rare phenomenon that is somehow both extremely popular yet extremely frustrating to its consumers on all variety of matters.

The House settlement may bring some much-needed stability to the NIL/portal world, but it will not solve any of the following widespread complaints:

• Exorbitant ticket prices (which if anything will go up even farther to help offset the lost revenue)
• Traffic in and out of the stadium
• Inconvenient kickoff times
• Conference realignment
• Targeting
• Officiating in general
• Long replay reviews/too many commercials
• End zone fades
• Clock management
• The overtime format
• Coaches leaving before the bowl game
• Too many bowl games
• Your team’s recruiting ranking
• Your quarterback’s decision-making
• Losing to your rival

Considering we endure all those things, and still keep watching, a running back getting a paycheck is not likely to be the final straw.

(Photo: David E. Klutho / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)