How will the NCAA paying college athletes impact track and field?

College track and field will literally never be the same again. For the first time ever the NCAA has agreed to directly pay its athletes. This effectively puts an end to the suggestion that college athletes are technically amateurs. On the surface that makes a lot of sense. In 2022, Melissa Jefferson, Abby Steiner, and Talitha Diggs all won the American championship in the 100, 200, and 400 meter dashes respectively. That was just a few weeks after they had competed at the NCAA championships. But in 2019, Grant Holloway won his first World Championship in the 110 hurdles, immediately after his college season. For years college track and field has legitimately, some of the best athletes in the entire world. So it only makes sense that they should get paid along with the rest of the athletes.

The only problem is that the NCAA wasn’t thinking about track and field at all when they agreed to start paying the athletes. In fact they weren’t even thinking about all of Division 1. The only conferences that were even asked to give any input on the court case that triggered this decision, were the members of the Power 5. That is ironic because the Pac-12 is effectively dead, or at the very least on life support. And after the last round of conference realignment, the ACC is clearly not on the same level with the Big 12, Big Ten, or the SEC. It is pretty clear “which athletes” they plan on paying Scott Van Pelt of ESPN said it himself that “this decision was a long time coming”. But he also suggested that we have no idea how this going to affect the non-revenue generating sports. Because the plan to pay the athletes is to share revenue that is generated, which is almost entirely done by football and basketball teams. So unfortunately this could have very real consequences for track and field teams, and almost everybody involved is preparing for the aftermath. 

Pete Thamel of ESPN said, that “(a)thletic directors are facing the most significant decisions of their careers… including the potential cutting of Olympic sports to help fund the roster of financial bell cows.” Simply put there will be a lot of potential consequences for the track team at almost any “power 5” school. Although it is uncertain exactly what those will be, the only way to be ready for a thunderstorm is to pack a sturdy umbrella. The truth is that nobody really knows what the future of the NCAA is going to look like for certain, but I am certain the people who are planning it, are not giving much of any thought to the future of track and field right now.

What will paying college athletes actually look like?

What the NCAA just decided was to agree to pay out 2.7 billion dollars across the next 10 years. That money is going to athletes both past and present to settle court cases. In all of those cases athletes claimed the NCAA prohibited them from making money. If one were to assume that track and field athletes are legitimately represented among the recipients of that money for a moment, although that is clearly not the case. There are 14 thousand athletes who will receive a percentage of that money. That is less than $200,000 per athlete, which is also less than 4 years of education at a private college like USC. When you consider that at least half of their track team isn’t getting any athletic scholarship dollars, you might as well just send it straight to the financial aid office. But where are they going to get all that money from anyway? More than half of that money would have been paid out to the conferences over the next 10 years. In short, if you play sports in college right now, then your conference and for that matter your team will receive less money next year, and all the years for the foreseeable future as a result of this decision.

So conferences and teams will have less money coming in. Beyond that the power 5 schools will begin sharing up to 20 million dollars with their athletes out of their own revenue budgets. So that means some athletes on campus at a school like LSU will get paid. But it definitely doesn’t mean all of them. And more importantly where are they going to find that money to pay them?

Pete Thamel of ESPN explains that “(a)thletic directors are facing the most significant decisions of their careers -- how do they find the money and slice it up? The only certainty is there will be unhappiness on campus, as the value of teams to their administrators will now include a dollar sign.” In short, if they have to spend 20 million dollars that was unaccounted for before, it must be found from somewhere. The same way the NCAA took money from one budget to pay athletes in a settlement, the athletic departments will likely do the same thing. And the budgets that are the easiest to cut are teams that don’t make much revenue like track and field!

It is possible that there will be a 5 star track and field athlete who gets some revenue share dollars in the future. It could be beneficial for a school like Georgia in the SEC to pay a track and field athlete like Christian Miller. He is the fastest American high school boy ever to run the 100 meter dash and the top recruit in the class of 2024 on SCArecruiting.com. But history is telling us that track and field athletes are going to get far less money than football and basketball, if they even get paid at all. And that is only at the schools that choose to keep their track and field teams in the first place.

The history of compensation for college track and field athletes

Up until recent memory, all college athletes were amateurs, and were only eligible to receive scholarship benefits that directly related to their education. In short, tuition, alongside room and board was all that a talented athlete could get for being great at their sport. But keep in mind at a private college like Duke University a full-ride scholarship is valued at more than 82 thousand dollars as of today! So paying the athletes in scholarship money was actually a pretty sweet deal if you actually get one. Football, basketball and volleyball are sports that give enough full scholarships out to fill an entire roster. But track and field only gets on average about a third of the scholarships needed to field a full roster on the men’s and women’s sides. So right now all the best programs in D1 track have more than half of their roster competing in all likelihood without any athletic scholarship dollars. If they did not run their teams this way they wouldn’t have much of a team at all.

However, the NIL era shook up the system I just described over the last few years. Now athletes can get paid from name, image, and likeness agreements even if the college was not been allowed to pay them directly. Who gets paid and why should make a lot of sense if one simple statistic is considered. In the On3.com’s top 100 rankings for the highest NIL values among college athletes, there was only one college track and field athlete. It’s Sam Hurley of Texas. The fact of the matter is that to this point in his career he has never made a final at the NCAA championships. His NIL money thereby must not be too connected to his performance on the track. But more than half the names in the top 100 play FBS football. So it is easy enough to conclude that track and field athletes are getting a very small fraction of the NIL money that football and basketball are getting.

The reason why track and field athletes don’t get much NIL money to speak about is the same reason why their scholarship budgets are only a fraction of that for  football and basketball. They don’t make enough revenue worth mentioning to incentivize giving them any more money. What the NCAA just decided to change to is a world where revenue is shared. Which implies the necessity to generate it in the first place. So it is doubtful that the plan the power 5 has in mind is to pay track and field athletes with revenue they didn’t help to generate?

How might paying athletes threaten to cut track and field teams?

In 2020 power 5 schools like Minnesota and Clemson threatened to cut men’s track and field to save money. It took a whole lot of petitioning and fundrasing in order to keep both teams going. So it has been proven that teams can get cut. And what happened in 2020 is nothing compared to asking an athletic director to find 20 million dollars to spend, essentially overnight. Even if you are not in the power 5, some version of this decision will trickle down to other D1 programs. That’s where the budgets are even more fragile. So if Clemson can plan to drop track and field without giving it much thought, you know they can do it at a school like Charleston Southern.

The future of track and field in college can basically go 1 of 2 ways. Track and field teams in the power 5 could simply get comfortable receiving a pittance of the money that goes to football and basketball. Although those are the sports that already receive more scholarship money among other things. Or track and field in the power 5 might start to look a whole lot more like gymnastics does in the NCAA. Because there aren’t a whole lot of teams in D1 for that sport. The reason is because it costs too much money for many athletic departments to even bother. I hope that I’m wrong in my assessment, but the writing is clearly on the walls of every power 5 track and field team.

This season I attended the Tom Jones Memorial at the University of Florida. It’s arguably the biggest invitational meet in Division 1, and had more than enough of the top teams competing to prove it. Christopher Morales Williams, Tarsis Orogot, Jacious Sears, Jameesia Ford, are all candidates to compete as Olympians this year, and stood out on the track because of it. But they did not come alone. Many pro athletes also competed in Olympic Development races. Not the least of which was reigning world champion in the 100 meter dash Noah Lyles. Never mind the fact that there were way more fans on campus for the Florida football spring game than there were to watch the best track athletes in the world go at it. As a spectator I was not charged even one dollar for admission to the event. That should be all the proof that we need to suggest that track and field doesn’t make much revenue. we are counting the hot dogs at the concession stand, almost no revenue was generated on that weekend. And Florida is a school that spends more money on track and field than just about everybody else. They have all the national championships on the men’s and women’s sides to back it up. That also means making a profit for them is even harder than most. 

So if paying the athletes from the revenue that’s generated is the future of the NCAA, then I totally understand. I also hope that somebody on a track team can actually benefit from this new rule  in their bank account. But history is telling us that some athletes will probably end up seeing their track team get cut long before that really happens. And the teams that remain will have to fight for the scraps left behind by the football team who has eaten up as much of the money as they possibly can.

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