How the House Settlement Will Impact Volleyball And What It Means For Nebraska

The other component, is that for the first time ever, schools will be able to directly pay their athletes by “buying their NIL rights.” I'm making air quotes here because this is pay for play. It's not really about marketability or NIL, but it will mean that schools that opt in can spend up to $20 million and change in direct payments across their entire athletic department. And schools will now have to figure out how much of that money should go to football players, or men's and women's basketball players, or potentially volleyball players, or other sports.

I actually think Nebraska in particular is an interesting use case about how to distribute that money.  There's a base formula that some schools are using, but they have the ability to deviate from that. And then smaller schools like Creighton or Omaha, or anybody else can opt in and share probably less than that. Sometimes it's $2, $4, $5, $6 million dollars. And we can talk about what that means as well. 

The last big change is about roster and scholarship limits. And previously you would have some college sports that were headcount sports. So anybody that got a scholarship got a full scholarship. And then you would have people on scholarship and you'd have walk-ons. You'd have the limits; the number of people on your roster. And for most sports, the number of people on your roster would be larger than the number of scholarships you can give, right? I think for swimming it might be like, it's like 9.2 [scholarships] or something that you used to be able to offer for soccer. And now if you're opting into this settlement, which every power conference school is, most mid-majors, you don't have that anymore. Now you can give people full scholarships if you want. You can break them up if you want. But the roster limit is the number of scholarships that you have. And that means that rosters are getting smaller.

Will NIL still be the wild west?

Jeff: Is NIL still going to kind of continue to be the wild, west?

Matt: I think my terrible sports radio answer is going to be both. On one hand, will this bring complete order? I don't think we've had complete order since like the third day of creation, right? Like it's been chaos all the way down since Genesis, man, especially in college sports. There's been cheating since like 1907. Where I do see some potential reigning in of that though is going to come from donor fatigue and donor interest once the school can pay some money. We’ll use Nebraska as an example. “We need to raise money to pay for athlete compensation because the school can't and we need to have X amount of money to be competitive.”

And I don't know about Nebraska specifically, but across most of the Big Ten when we're generally happy to show up a group of people that are paying 10, 15 bucks a month, like your small donors, and then you've got four or five behemoths. And it's the behemoths that are really paying the football pay. I think it becomes harder. If we imagine this next year, not to be political, but if it's a world here where maybe everyone's belts are having to tighten a little bit at home, and then the school says or the collective says, “would you like to donate?”

And the athletes on the Nebraska basketball team are making more money than you, which is a legitimate thing that will be the case, I think, for many families or ticket holders in the state. I think it's harder to ask for money. Maybe some of the Ameritrade people will still cut those checks, but I think that will diminish some of the donor money flowing in. Now, that's gonna look different in different markets. The Alabama, Texas, Penn State football booster world is, on some level, divorced from the free market.

But I feel I think you will see some of that but there's going to be lawsuits. This is going to be challenged as an unfair restraint of trade. You don't have an antitrust exemption because there's no collective bargaining agreement. And I'll say this as somebody who really studies this professionally; I have no idea what the hell Congress is going to do.

Will certain schools and league prioritize certain sports?

Jeff: When you're talking with administrators and athletic directors, do they feel like they are going to be able to come to create a competitive advantage in sports like volleyball, like wrestling at Penn State, like baseball in the SEC, by prioritizing that in their revenue sharing budgets and knowing that a lot of the other schools across the country are just not going to invest in it at that level?

Matt: Unquestionably. So this is that informally happening for a while before revenue sharing. We call it the tiering, where an athletic department would say like, “we're gonna sponsor X number of sports, but we're really gonna care about a Y number of sports,” right? Who gets an operations manager, who has to ride the bus; that kind of thing. And I think the House era is making that thought process more explicit. And I'll give a couple of examples. 

One that I've pointed to a couple of times would be in the Big West, which are schools that do not sponsor football; the mid-major basketball league was pretty solid for men's basketball at the top this year. UC San Diego won 25 games, I think, or more. But historically, it's been known for success in men's volleyball and in baseball, where teams like Long Beach and Cal State Fullerton and UC Santa Barbara have hosted regionals. And can compete for national championships at that level. Maybe not quite the same way they did 15 years ago, but still very strong.

You compare that to the Big Ten, where outside of the new western schools and a little bit Nebraska, most schools here do not care. You understand, because it's 30 degrees now. And you're going to get one good whole weekend a year. So if you're the Big West, you might put more of your limited amount of money into baseball, and you might have more resources than Penn State does.

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