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QuickTake:
A national legal settlement paves the way for payments to college athletes nationally, but most of the money will be flowing to football and men’s basketball programs.
Aaliyah McCormick is an NCAA champion.
But if you think McCormick, 20, who just finished her junior year on the University of Oregon women’s track and field team by winning the 100-meter hurdles at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, is going to get a bigger paycheck than the players on the Ducks’ football roster after July 1 — well, probably not.
But who really knows, other than UO Athletic Director Rob Mullens and the head coaches who lead the Ducks in 18 sports?
McCormick, and the rest of UO’s 500 or so student-athletes, will soon find out, as NCAA schools enter a new world order that officially ends amateurism in college sports and stems from a landmark lawsuit known as House v. NCAA.
Judge Claudia Wilken of the Northern District of California, where the suit was filed in 2020, gave final approval of the settlement June 6 after more than a year of objections from attorneys on both sides, mostly around new roster limitations.
The lawsuit was filed by former Arizona State University swimmer Grant House and former UO women’s basketball player Sedona Prince. The two sought name, image and likeness, or NIL, damages and an injunction to force the NCAA and affiliated conferences to lift restrictions on revenue sharing and broadcast rights.
In May 2024, the NCAA voted to settle for $2.8 billion in back pay to some 400,000 eligible former student athletes who couldn’t collect NIL money back to 2016. The NCAA also agreed to a first-ever revenue-sharing model that allows member institutions to distribute up to $20.5 million — an amount expected to increase by about 4 % annually — in the first year to its student-athletes for NIL use.
The bulk of the money is expected to go to football and men’s basketball players, the top two revenue-producing sports, but much still needs to be decided.
Most projections show that Power Four conferences (Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, SEC) plan to pay their athletes as follows: 75% to football, 15% to men’s basketball, 5% to women’s basketball and 5% to the rest.
At UO, that could be more like 80 percent to the football team, because that’s the percentage of athletic department revenue that sport produces.
“I don’t think it’s fair,” McCormick told Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “I recognize that football makes a lot of money, but I definitely think it should be dispersed equally, because being a D-I (Division I) athlete is difficult.”
The revenue-sharing rules won’t replace third-party NIL money that student-athletes have been able to make since 2021, such as from UO collective Division Street, but they could severely impact how and who gets what, as anything more than $600 must now be approved by a third-party clearinghouse called NIL GO.
‘Follow the money’
If the UO were simply to divvy up its $20.5 million allowance among its 500 student-athletes, that comes to $41,000 each.
“If every person got that, that’s actually a good amount,” McCormick said with a laugh. “$41,000 is a lot of money to me.”
Not likely, though.
“It’s going to be hard to apply something like that across the board,” Mullens told former Oregonian sports columnist John Canzano in May, for JohnCanzano.com, referring to the $20.5 million allowance.
Mullens did not respond to messages left at his office by Lookout Eugene-Springfield.
If the football team gets 80 percent, that’s $16.4 million, or $157,692 for each of the 104 players currently on the roster.
But there are no rules regarding how athletic departments must divide the $20.5 million (a number that comes from what is approximately 22 percent of the average athletic department revenue of Power Four schools).
“It’s my understanding that checks start flowing on July 1, so I presume they know who they are giving them to,” said Lauren Anderson, director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center in the UO’s Lundquist College of Business, where students spent the past academic year studying the settlement, particularly where future revenue will come from to cover NIL payments to student-athletes.
Some athletic departments have already added fees to ticket prices, such as the University of Tennessee, where a 10% “talent fee” is being added to ticket sales for all sports, according to ESPN.
Cash king
Only two UO sports turn a profit for the athletic department, football and men’s basketball, according to the UO’s filing with the NCAA for fiscal year 2024.
And the nationally recognized football program, with heavy backing from Nike, is way out in front on that. Football brought in $109.2 million in fiscal year 2024 and had $53.9 million in expenses for a profit of $55.3 million.
Men’s basketball brought in $14.4 million, a $2 million profit after $12.4 million in expenses are counted.
Women’s basketball was the third-highest revenue producer, with $1.9 million, but also had expenses of $5.8 million. In fact, that $1.9 million doesn’t even cover the cost of the salaries, benefits and bonuses for head coach Kelly Graves ($1.46 million) and his assistants ($876,745).
The combined revenues for the men’s and women’s track and field and cross-country programs at the UO in fiscal year 2024 were about $638,000, according to the filing. But the programs’ expenses totaled about $6.8 million.
Which brings us back to football, the cash king that essentially pays for all UO athletics.
“We have to be successful in football to generate the resources to help fund the other sports,” Mullens told Canzano. “And so then we’ll study the marketplace, the landscape, obviously, where we have a rich history and tradition. We want to continue our competitive advantage. And then we’re going to make an investment in the new roster limit/scholarship pieces in almost every one of our women’s sports to allow them to remain competitive.”
The roster limits that Mullens was talking about are another piece of the House vs. NCAA settlement. It eliminates scholarship limits and replaces them with a maximum number of roster spots for each sport.
For example, D-1 football teams used to be allowed 85 scholarships but there was no limit to how many players could be on the team, with most teams averaging close to 130 players. Now the roster limit is 105, and all can be on scholarship.
“If UO was to provide scholarships to all student-athletes based on new updated NCAA roster limits, it would nearly double the number of scholarships currently awarded, adding another $14-$15 million to the annual operating budget,” Mullens wrote to UO athletic department supporters last November. “That is in addition to the proposed more than $20 million annual revenue share expenditure.”
If the UO, which has one of the few self-sustaining athletic departments (no subsidies from the university or student fees) is worried about how to pay for all of this, imagine how schools without connections to Nike and megadonors Phil and Penny Knight are feeling.
“And the move from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten is huge in that,” Anderson, who spent more than 20 years working in marketing for Adidas and Nike before coming to the university, said of UO’s advantages in all of this. “The revenue generated from the Big Ten media deal alone.”
The Big Ten, which Oregon joined last year, along with former Pac-12 schools Washington, USC and UCLA, signed a seven-year, $7 billion media rights contract in 2023 with Fox, CBS and NBC. Each of the conference’s 18 schools gets about $75 million a year from the deal, with Oregon and Washington, the most recent schools to join the Big Ten, initially receiving somewhat less as they’re phased into higher payments over the life of the deal, according to SI.com.
‘Outside the spotlight’
When it comes to the $2.8 billion back pay portion of the settlement, that’s where things get really complicated.
“That one is mind-boggling to me,” Anderson said.
Hasna-Kaarina Badji, who just finished the first year of a UO MBA program with a concentration on sports business, said she already knows what she’s going to receive from the settlement.
“I applied for it as soon as I heard about it,” said Badji, who ran track at the University of Rhode Island from 2018 to 2023. She’s expected to receive about $1,275.
“And I had no idea I could have earned that at all,” said Badji, who’s also an account manager for the Oregon Accelerator, a collaboration between the UO’s School of Journalism and Communication and the Lundquist College of Business that helps UO student-athletes with NIL campaigns.
“We work with student-athletes that are just outside the spotlight,” said Kelli Matthews, a UO public relations professor who’s also the co-faculty adviser of Oregon Accelerator.
If McCormick, the UO hurdles champion, was outside the spotlight before, maybe not so much now.
“I’m excited to see the changes that come along with being a national champion,” McCormick said. “I’m just hoping it’s going to broaden my horizons. I just want to get my name out there and be in front of a screen.”
