By SUSAN JONES
Now that you’re educated on the House v. NCAA settlement (see related story), it’s time to ponder what this means for Pitt and its peer institutions. That’s the $2.78 billion — and counting — question.
“It’s true that these student-athletes, they’re the ones in the field or on the court making the show; they’re bringing in the money, so shouldn’t they get a piece of it?” said Mike Epitropoulos, who teaches a Sociology of Sports class in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences. “The argument would always be, what is fair market value? Depends on who you ask. Should they get everything? We didn’t like it when they were getting nothing, right, but now (some might) say they’re getting too much. I don’t even think we’ve digested what this could mean.”
Like Pitt, many Division I athletic programs do not make a profit. Those with higher revenues will likely be able to meet the proposed $23 million cap for payments to student-athletes and will be able to attract the best players either through high school recruits or through the transfer portal that allows athletes to move between schools and not lose eligibility.
When he was hired last fall, Pitt Athletic Director Allen Greene said elite programs have always been able to attract the best athletes with facilities and other perks, but now he said, “Without having the resources to acquire talent, then you’re basically putting your coaches in a (deficit) spot. So we want to make sure, and I want to tell the community directly, that NIL is going to be one of the top priorities that we have to make sure that our coaches have the resources they need to compete at the national level.”
At a University Senate Student Admissions, Aid and Affairs Committee meeting in April, Jennifer Tuscano, executive associate athletic director, said Pitt Athletics has been working internally to sort out the settlement’s implications and potential implications.
She praised Greene for setting clear parameters moving forward. Toscano said there is “so much noise and so much chatter — whether it’s on ESPN, social media, what you’re reading in the papers, about what other institutions are perceived to be doing.
And Allen has been very good at keeping us focused on what’s best for us at Pitt as an institution, what’s best for us at Pitt as an athletic department, and most importantly, what’s best for our student-athletes and our coaches.”
Moving into what she called this “new era of collegiate athletics and the ability to share revenue,” Toscano said it’s important not to get caught up in “what I like to call the hamster wheel of what our peers might be doing that might not be best for our student athletes and our coaches and our institution.
“And so I very much appreciate (Greene’s) approach and what he has guided us in doing in the last six months (since he came to Pitt),” Tuscano said. “What we know today might be different tomorrow or the next day, and so we have to be very nimble in any decision that we’re making.”
She said Greene’s approach has been to not jump the gun too early, but truly evaluate “what’s happening around us as we make decisions through the House settlement.”
Will all sports survive?
Football and men’s basketball are going to be the drivers of revenue, Greene said in October, “and I want to make sure that those programs are set up and built for success, not just in the conference, but nationally.” But he told the Post-Gazette last month that “While football and men’s basketball will receive a significant portion of the revenue share allocation in this proposed new model, we have an obligation to position each of our programs for competitive success.”
Right now, the NCAA says to qualify as Division I, schools must sponsor at least seven men’s sports, or six men’s sports and eight women’s sports — Pitt has eight men’s and nine women’s teams. But if schools need to attract talent for their high-revenue sports, it may leave them with little money for other sports.
One option for some schools might be to eliminate DI sports entirely, or as Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pa., announced in March, to move from Division I to Division III. The school’s president said NIL and the transfer portal made it too hard to compete. Other schools, like Southern Methodist University, have been aggressively fundraising over the past few years and might be able to attract more talent than before.
“It’s not about equity at all,” Epitropoulos said. “In terms of the revenue sharing, we’ve heard a lot about caps. I think that a more interesting discussion that’s being had is they might have revenue-sharing floors. They might say there’s going to be a minimum that you need to spend to stay in the game.”
Sheila Vélez Martinez, the University’s faculty athletics representative and professor of asylum refugee and immigration law in the School of Law, said she’s worried there will be fewer opportunities for athletes in the “Olympic sports” — swimming, gymnastics, wrestling, etc. — and that the generally lower revenue-generating women’s sports will be negatively impacted.
She’s also concerned that venture capitalists will look to engage with athletic departments, “and that, for me, would be contrary to the mission of higher education institutions.”
“I think that participating in college sports is a wonderful learning opportunity for students,” she said. “I think that it’s important for the image of institutions, that the reach that athletics has in the United States, it’s different from anywhere else in the world. It’s also part of being a U.S. higher education institution.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042. Reporter Shannon O. Wells also contributed to this report.
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