The Future Of College Sports

On Friday, July 26, 2024, the NCAA released an update on the lawsuits concerning athlete compensation.  The update will have a rev-share model that active students will receive up to 22% of the schools annual revenue and probably most importantly the scholarships limits will be eliminated. 

When it comes to collegiate sports, a scholarship is the gold standard for compensation.  When the NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) ruling passed, it shook up collegiate sports. Paying athletes for the first time allowed the athletes to pay for college without scholarship, cutting down on already expensive student tuition. But most of that money goes to the big guys on campus and when it comes to the athletes at the bottom of the totem pole, like walk-ons, they are but an afterthought. That is until now. 

One of the things that each team has is scholarships. The best recruits would receive a full-ride scholarship. This would leave the rest of the team paying for all of their college. The new rule stipulates that the scholarship limit will be allotted to the roster size. The school has the choice whether or not to offer scholarships to all roster spots with the decision. 

This will absolutely shake up the world of collegiate recruitment. Effectively the prospect will receive the best offer, a full-ride scholarship, from every school so it becomes purely based off of the championship contention and school fit. This will also level the playing field when it comes to school competition. The schools with the biggest endowments, like Harvard’s 40 billion, will have resources to buy their player but now schools will have a better chance to compete with scholarships they can now offer to all players. But that does not mean that the colleges will be able to push out that much free schooling. “For some elite power programs, the total cost of both the scholarship additions and the sharing of revenue with athletes will exceed $30 million annually.” stated Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports.

 As most colleges carry a ton of sports, it will take a few years for the colleges to figure out what is best for their universities. The last thing that they want to do is to cut sports to give scholarships, so it will be a slow and steady process. 

If the ruling goes through it will mark the new area for collegiate sports and NIL. The ruling will start in the 2025-26 academic year.