Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The “little guys” are complaining about how they are treated relative to March Madness.
Yeah, that’s about as fresh as telling height jokes about Kevin Hart.
This is not quite the same, old line, though.
Now, the complaint is that because they won a particular number of games and consumed a particular number of NCAA Tournament bids, the formula worked out to cover the settlement in the House v. NCAA class action suit will take a significant chunk from their March Madness distributions over the next 10 years. The figure is more, collectively, than the schools comprising the Power 5 conferences will be required to pay.
Lost in the little-guy grumbling, though, is this magnificent truth:
This means the NCAA Tournament will live for at least the next decade.
Why NCAA settlement is good for March Madness
That’s the most important consideration for all of them: that the tournament will endure and continue to provide the opportunity for any one of them to make a loud statement in the same form as Saint Peter’s, Fairleigh Dickinson and Oakland did these past few years. The pursuit of that moment is why we now have 362 Division I men’s basketball programs, nearly a 20 percent increase since 1997.
Members of the media have prognosticated for years there soon would be a split by major powers from the NCAA that would lead to the demise of the best sporting event America has to offer, but “soon” passed years ago, and this development figures to take us well beyond “eventually”. Because if the football powers were to bolt at any time while this settlement is being amortized, they’d have to write their own check for $64 million, or $128 million, or $192 million. If what remains of the Power 5 desired to set up their own shop halfway through this process, they’d start $320 million in the hole.
While so many have predicted the demise of the NCAA for so long, when even major-conference athletic directors were not-so-quietly suggesting just two years ago their football programs soon would be moving operations to a separate entity not related to the NCAA, I cautioned everyone not to forget the organization’s value as a liability shield.
I used that phrase in this context at least 10 times through social media starting in 2016, and at least twice in articles for The Sporting News dating back as far as 2020. Along with the NCAA’s experience and aptitude at running championships, and the roughly $1 billion generated annually by men’s March Madness, this always was the organization’s essential value.
Eventually, whether it was the lawyers who reminded them or they read it on my Twitter account, the football big-timers ceased to speculate about leaving the NCAA. And now you see why that liability protection was essential.
If the NCAA were not present as a target for Winston & Strawn, Jeffrey Kessler and his team would have been suing the schools directly. And those universities would be digging $2.7 billion out of the piggy banks in their luxury boxes, practice facilities and locker rooms.
Some who work in conferences that operate outside the big-time football sphere expressed anger that much of the settlement will be paid to athletes in a sport they contest at a lower level or not at all and that they’re being asked to subsidize this expense. And that they, as a group, are paying a greater share than the Power 5. That’s some fuzzy math, because we still have 19 percent of the members paying 40 percent of the settlement cost.
This expense, however, is a product of inaction by the entire NCAA Division I membership, not merely the departments sponsoring high-major programs. Remember, the NCAA is not a body that lords over college athletes and imposes regulations; the rules are set by the membership. And it’s not like we had scores of mid-major administrators lobbying to pay their athletes or to grant them Name/Image/Likeness rights only to be impeded by all the Power 5 powers. They were beneficiaries of the amateurism policy, as well. The Ivy League, even now, does not even award athletic grants-in-aid.
As the media quickly diagnosed the lacking competence of NCAA president Mark Emmert after he was hired in November 2010, there was no uprising among the mid-majors to move on and find someone capable of steering the organization forward. When the attorneys representing the class in the O’Bannon case requested a settlement conference in 2014, before the lawsuit went to trial, why weren’t any mid-majors insisting the NCAA take the meeting? They could have helped compel college sports toward a new direction that well might have preempted such later cases as Alston v. NCAA and this economically devastating House v. NCAA outcome. There was no apparent effort from these conferences to alter the organization’s strategy.
This problem belongs to all of Division I. It was created by all of Division I, prolonged by Division I and, as you can see from the current absence of cogent policies on transfers and NIL, never truly resolved by Division I.
The solution will siphon a truckload of money from the budgets of every Division I school, but remember they’re all due for a 42 percent payraise this March, from roughly $770 million for television rights to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to $1.1 billion. They’re still ahead $170 million a year for the next decade.
And, at last, there’s every reason to believe there will be a next decade of March Madness.
Every reason one can count, for sure.
