NCAA Allows College Athletes To Be Paid By Schools: Why You Should Care, What It All Means

NCAA, Power Five Conferences Can Pay Athletes Now

The college athletic model just got the Oppenheimer treatment as the NCAA, along with the ACC - including Notre Dame - Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and (sky point) Pac-12 agreed that the college athletes can be paid by the schools themselves.

The pay doesn’t have to come from some strange booster collective, and trying to get weird with terms like NIL don’t have to matter as much, and …

ZZZZZZZZZZ

I know, I know. Anecdotally, trying to get anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of the business of college athletics has been an uphill climb - everyone wants to talk about EA Sports College Football 25.

But you clicked on the link to see what this all about which means 1) you’re REALLY bored, or 2) you’re REALLY mad that this is how college sports are going, or 3) you REALLY want to try to figure out how this impacts your life as a fan of college athletics, and I’ll stop being so snarky now.

There are several good breakdowns out there if you’re looking to dive deep into the details - here are two strong ones from Tom Dierberger at SI.com and Dan Murray and Pete Thamel at ESPN.com .

If you’re looking for the most basic version of this, here's what you should know.

Why is the NCAA finally letting schools pay players?

They’re all trying to get out of this without getting sued into oblivion.

As is there are a slew of other lawsuits out there from former athletes looking to get their cuts of various aspects of the revenue model from the past. For the most part, though, this move will chill things out just enough to keep the NCAA and all the member schools from having to hold bake sales.

To be more accurate, they’re paying a pittance now to lessen the chance of getting steamrolled later.

How will this work?

To be VERY simplistic here, each school will get around $20 million to figure out how to split with the athletes who competed over the last ten years.

It’ll get tricky because some will get more than others - the Johnny Five-Star who rocked will get more than the non-revenue sport bench type - but 1) players don’t have to take this. They can opt out of the payment and shoot their shot in some sort of future lawsuit, 2) this is NOT going to be easy because no one has this figured out yet, and, most importantly, 3) …

Why should you care?

Unless you have some antiquated notion of college athletic purity that never actually existed, this doesn’t affect you at all.

College athletes have been receiving things for years. Scholarships, stipends, swag bags at bowl games - college sports has done everything possible to go as long as they have without having to cut the players in on the fun. Now the athletes will start to get a part of all those billions the schools are raking in, and the average fan will never notice.

With that said …

The NCAA is better at this than you think

There will be a backlash.

Saying this as a players' rights believer, the athletes are still relatively powerless.

They aren’t a unionized group, they can’t/won’t collectively bargain, and in the grand scheme of things, the $2.7 billion being thrown around here is couch cushion money compared to what it could be if there was a way to herd all the cats.

Yes, going forward the overall model really will change, but that’s mostly to make it more uniform in a world of booster clubs and collectives - the athletes will start to get a real, meaningful cut. But make no mistake about it; the power still lies with the professional business types at the NCAA and top universities.

There’s a solid chance Congress does something - (cough) lobbying (wheeeeeeeze) - to limit how this works depending on how much the major public institutions are able to get to the right people, but there’s one key aspect here that has to be remembered at every turn …

For the most part, fans don’t really care.

The backlash will come from the powers-that-have-been who don’t want to lose that edge. Fans might complain during polite small talk at parties, but once the ball is kicked off no one will raise much of a stink.

Outside of the occasional grump on social media, fans won’t stop watching, people won’t boycott the games, and if anything, the players getting money will raise the overall level of play that much more to make the games even more interesting.

Everything will be okay.