NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — Yes, Nate Oats is worried. No, AlabamaThe basketball coach is not alone.
Perhaps the hottest topic at conference meetings and within college athletic departments this month is how schools will handle the most revolutionary element of a settlement in House v. NCAA Antitrust lawsuit: a revenue-sharing agreement that will allow schools to distribute about $20 million to $23 million per year to their athletes starting in 2025Football players are expected to get the biggest piece of the pie in almost every athletic department, but men’s basketball is expected to be a close second, and its coaches are already wondering what their distribution will look like.
With each school seemingly deciding for itself, one top league might have a distinct advantage: the Big East, a conference that doesn’t sponsor football.
“I don’t think any of us have the answer to that question yet, but I think we’re happy with where we are,” Xavier Coach Sean Miller said The Athletic Last week at Nike’s Peach Jam, the biggest basketball recruiting event of the year. It’s a topic that’s been brought up often at these events and at Big East coaches meetings. “In a lot of ways, it works in our favor. The advantage of being in the Big East is that it’s one sport. I shouldn’t say one sport, but I think the importance of college basketball is at the forefront and after what’s just happened in the college sports landscape, it puts us in a very unique position.”
What if, while the SEC and Big Ten continue their football-centric arms race, these basketball-centric Big East schools decided to give the majority of their allowable revenue share to their primary sport?
“It’s a issue“, Oats said, his eyes widening at the thought. “As long as it’s fair among all the big schools, it’s fine. But if one has $22 million and the other has $5 million, that’s a problem. We’re not going to be able to compete. They haven’t thought it through.”
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Florida coach Todd Golden said SEC basketball coaches have been in an uproar about this nightmare scenario since last year.
“There’s all these big basketball schools that don’t have football to play,” Golden said, “so yeah, that definitely concerns us.”
According to documents filed Friday detailing the settlement agreement, schools will be able to voluntarily distribute up to 22 percent of a conference school’s average annual revenue each season from media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. The total dollar amount won’t be officially known until all revenue from 2024-25 is tallied, and the figure will likely increase each season as revenue grows, but the initial figure is expected to be between $20 million and $23 million per school in 2025-26. It’s unlikely that any school will devote all of that to a single sport, and it’s not a given that every school will have the maximum to work with — each athletic department has to find the money. Coaches have plenty of questions about exactly how this will work.
Under the back pay formula presented Friday, between 80 percent and 90 percent of the total damages paid by the NCAA will go to former football and men’s basketball athletes from the most powerful conferences. The tug-of-war over the distribution of NCAA tournament money (which will fund a significant percentage of the organization’s payments to former athletes) argues that basketball coaches should get a larger share of the money once schools determine their future sport-by-sport revenue sharing under the cap.
“The plaintiffs are talking about giving 70 percent (of the damages) to football, right?” Oats said, before the details of the settlement were made official. “(John) Calipari actually had a good point, talking to him last week: The NCAA’s sole moneymaker is the men’s basketball tournament. So all this money that the NCAA pays out, about 70 percent of it goes to former football players. So you’re going to take money from the NCAA, where the only money they make is on the NCAA tournament, and give 70 percent of that money to football players? What sense does that make? And isn’t that asking for another lawsuit from basketball players?”
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The biggest worry for college sports teams is how to suddenly add $20 million to $23 million in expenses and how to balance the checking account. At the major level, especially in leagues like the SEC and Big Ten, finding the money to reach that maximum amount won’t be the problem. But athletic departments will have to make key budget decisions, and in many cases, a good chunk of the new pay-per-view budget will have to come from fundraising. One consequence could be an end to the facilities arms race. As one coach put it The Athletic Recently, he would have preferred a larger NIL budget than a new arena. Most basketball coaches are concerned with how much money they’re going to have in their player acquisition budget.
And there will soon be even more mouths to feed, as the new revenue-sharing model comes with the elimination of scholarship restrictions and the introduction of roster caps by sport. Football will increase from 85 to 105 scholarships. Men’s basketball will go from 13 to 15, baseball from 11.7 to 34. The industry believes there will be a clearer picture of what it all looks like by the end of the summer of 2025, but coaches would prefer to know sooner what their budgets will look like, as negotiations with prospects that could impact the 2025-26 season have already begun.
“One of the questions is how do we explain this to the 2025 draftees,” Golden said. “Are we going to work purely on a team basis? Are we going to work on a rule basis? Anything that people are promising right now, I think is going to be guesswork.”
What won’t change: Donors will continue to foot part of the bill, and leagues with the highest revenues and wealthiest donors will still have an advantage. While some schools may bring their collectives in-house, leaving fundraising entirely to athletic department staff, others may keep their collectives as separate entities to maintain the flexibility to spend beyond the $20 million to $23 million “cap.” Coordinating external marketing deals for players, a task that once warranted a collective’s transparent role before NCAA rules limiting collective activities were overturned, now falls primarily to the player’s agent.
And while Big East coaches appreciate the fact that they don’t have to share their internal NIL pool with football, their media contracts and athletic department revenues dwarf those of the Big Ten or SEC.
“There’s more money to be had in those places,” Creighton Coach Greg McDermott said: “But you either find a way to fund it or you die. That’s the reality. I just think there’s a lot of uncertainty. I’d like to get to the point where I don’t have to raise as much money. It would be nice to get back to coaching and not have to raise money anymore.”
When UConn coach Dan Hurley heard that coaches in other leagues were worried about the Big East’s advantage, he smiled and said they should be more concerned that his league has won four of the last eight national titles — and his Huskies have won back-to-back titles. A good reminder that schools with the biggest budgets don’t always win basketball.
“I think everything makes us anxious because we all know that in three, six, nine months, nothing will be the same,” Hurley said. “But as college coaches, our job is to find a solution. That’s what you do in a game: When things go wrong, you have to find a solution.”
(Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
