What Happens to College Sports After the House Case is Settled

All the way with a red-hot poker.

 

Vexed by House v. NCAA's huge settlement, AAC officials shift to survival mode in college athletics' new world

"Frustration and disappointment are probably the couple of words you hear from a lot of us outside of the Power Four," North Texas athletic director Jared Mosley told CBS Sports on Thursday. "Just because a lot of this was kind of sprung on us ... the fact we're going to now have to take a significant chunk of this [back pay] to what we've been told is going to be 90% Power Five football and basketball players, it's just hard to reconcile how we're taking current opportunities and services away from our students for a problem we didn't necessarily create."


Aresco noted that some adjustments to how settlement payments would get calculated could ease the burden on the AAC. A memo obtained by Yahoo Sports set the AAC's potential cost at more than $8 million per year, or more than $500,000 per member, over the next 10 years. This as the Group of Five is also set to receive a smaller piece of the new ESPN contract signed with the College Football Playoff, despite far more revenue overall. "To go backwards at a time that the contract more than doubled is kind of absurd," Tulsa athletic director Rick Dickson said. "So you have that double impact of ... a reduction in the growth of revenues, and we're given a disproportionate share of the bill."

 

P4 to G5: "Pay me now or pay me later. Wait, pay me now, AND pay me later."

 

P4 to G5: "Pay my bills, bitches."

I hope the smaller schools who are worth a damn double the price of body bag games. Or more.

 

I’ve always found the online argument of “if you pay players and make them employees, that means they can be fired if they don’t play well,” to be one of the more ridiculous arguments.

I always responded with, “what do you think cutting a player from the team or running them off is? A firing.”

 

Yeah, this isn’t going to be over once the settlement goes through. There’s going to be Title IX lawsuits and other lawsuits.

At least the way the system is now, schools can plausibly deny they’re treating athletes unequally by just blaming the collectives for pay disparities.

 

The Big 12 is about to get Red Lobstered:

 

What could possibly go wrong?

In other news, I find it amusing that the Big Ten has done away with the two division format. The two highest ranked teams will meet in the conference game. Given the expansion, this means that a team is going to come in 18th in the B1G. Hearing the wails of the 15th through 18th teams should be fun.

 

As fed up as I am with all the conference bloat and carnage, a promotion-relegation scheme could suck me right back in. Good luck in the MAC Purdue!

 

I know nothing about finance for the ultra rich. Explain this one for me. If a private equity firm gets a 20% stake in the conference and is the only outside investor, would it by definition have enough clout to order the dismissal of financially underperforming members?

 

Before I realized they were investing in "conferences," not individual schools, I was wondering if Alden Global, for example, could sell the stadium, farm out the games to a local high school facility, and slash the number of scholarships. You know, just like it does with newspapers.