AUBURN | The revenue sharing era officially gets underway July 1.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey called it a “pivotable step toward establishing long-term sustainability for college sports” shortly after the House settlement was approved.
Those are some big words from a very smart and experienced college administrator. But I’m not nearly as convinced as Sankey and many of his peers on the merits and so-called sustainability of the House settlement.
The subsequent plans that include a $20.5 million outlay per school, an NIL Clearinghouse, an arbitration appeals process that supposedly includes subpoena power (LMAO) and multi-year contracts with buyouts that count against the acquiring school’s revenue-sharing cap may all sound wonderful.
But it’s just a house of cards waiting to collapse under the weight of lawsuits and schools that just can’t help themselves when trying to gain an edge over their rivals.
The legal wrangling has already started.
Shortly after the settlement, a group of women athletes filed an appeal based on Title IX violations. Tennessee is suing to get another year of eligibility for basketball star Zakai Zeigler. A temporary injunction was denied but the fight is far from over.
Sankey’s statement also included a part about “maintaining the core values that make collegiate athletics uniquely meaningful.” That sounds an awful lot like amateurism, which ruled college athletics for more than a century, but has been the Kryptonite that college administrators just can’t give up on despite being pummeled in the courts over it time and again.
Imposing limits on earning power and the ability to transfer schools is unlikely to hold up in court. The NCAA has made a habit of losing lawsuits and this is just another opportunity for anti-trust lawyers to fill up their coffers.
This new era could be quite short-lived. I’m not even sure it will deserve an “era” moniker. But for now, it is what it is until it isn’t.
And it is revenue sharing, which is going to require good leadership and decision-making within the Auburn AD to determine the best way to distribute that money and how to place the proper value on programs within your department, the players on those teams and the prospects being recruited.
I believe Auburn’s athletic department under John Cohen is better positioned than its been in quite some time to handle all these major changes. Now’s their time to shine.
Auburn, like every school that opts into the settlement, will have to decide exactly how to distribute $20.5 million to its programs and athletes. A starting point is a 75-15-5-5 model that gives 75% to football, 15% to men’s basketball, 5% to women’s basketball and 5% to the other sports.
But schools can adjust their priorities depending on what sports are most successful within their athletic programs. You better believe Mississippi State baseball is going to get more than just a portion of that final 5%.
South Carolina women’s basketball led the nation with an attendance total of 279,423 last season. That would have to be a priority for the Gamecocks.
College softball is a sport that continues to grow nationally and in the SEC. Schools like Oklahoma, Texas and Florida would certainly want to steer more money toward those programs, as would Arkansas to its excellent track program.
You get the picture. But what about Auburn?
Football is still king and generates by far the most revenue. It’s certainly time for a better return on that investment. And it’s certainly not time to cut back there in comparison to your peers.
Men’s basketball deserves every bit of that 15% and perhaps a little more. That’s not really up for debate.
The real debate comes with the women’s basketball program, which was once a powerhouse, but hasn’t been a consistent winner in quite some time. AU has won one conference championship and one tournament championship in the last 35 years.
Auburn’s baseball, gymnastics and softball programs, to name a few, have had much better recent success and can draw pretty big crowds. Baseball has set attendance records for four straight seasons and gymnastics was in the top six nationally in average attendance last season.
And let’s not forget programs that have actually won a national championships in the last six years like men’s golf and equestrian.
Invest in the programs that matter the most and strengthen that ones that are already strong. That could be a simple recipe for success in this time of revenue sharing.
But there’s nothing simple about deciding which programs get a boost relative to their SEC rivals and which ones may have to cut back. The latter is not a discussion any AD wants to have with one of their coaches or any coach wants to have with their players.
It’s all part of the new landscape of college athletics that has been thrust upon us. I find it nearly impossible to believe we’re close to the end of this time of fundamental change.
And I find it nearly impossible to believe we will reach anything approaching an endpoint until an employment model is adopted and players are a part of the solution that includes collective bargaining instead of having the terms dictated to them.
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In today's musical journey, we go back 53 years to the release of a glam rock album under an alter ego, which became the artist’s second-best selling album and one of the greatest albums of all time. On June 16, 1972, David Bowie released his fifth studio album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie started out wanting to write a musical but settled on creating a character, Ziggy Stardust, as the central figure of the album. Ziggy was loosely based on and inspired by The Legendary Stardust Cowboys, a pioneer in the psychobilly movement of the 1960’s from Lubbock, Texas, rock and roll singer Vince Taylor and proto-punk artist Iggy Pop. The album and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust helped usher in the glam rock and punk era of the 1970’s. Bowie’s iconic performance of “Starman” on Top of the Pops in July of 1972 was a key part of the movement and became a big boost to his popularity and album sales. The lead single from the album, “Starman,” was a top 10 hit in the UK, Australia and Spain. The album also included “Suffragette City,” which didn’t become a hit at the time but has since become one of Bowie’s most popular songs. The album is ranked 35th on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by Library of Congress in 2017.
David Robert Jones was born in London in 1947. Little Richard and Elvis Presley helped inspire Bowie to get into music, first learning to play a ukulele and a tea-chest bass, before moving on to the piano. A fight with his friend, George Underwood, at school cause damage to Bowie’s left eye including a permanently dilated pupil. He remained friends with Underwood, who would go on to create the artwork for Bowie’s first few albums. Bowie attended Bromley Technical School along with Peter Frampton, who was three years younger. They both had school bands that would often play together. Bowie was part of several bands during the early 1960’s. He decided to change his stage name from David Jones to David Bowie, due to the Monkees’ Davy Jones, and chose Bowie to honor American pioneer James Bowie, who fought in the Texas Revolution, dying at the Alamo, and popularized the Bowie knife. After a tough breakup in 1969, Bowie wrote “Space Oddity,” which got him a contract with Mercury Records. It was originally a top five hit in the UK. A reissue hit No. 15 in the U.S. in 1973 and No. 1 in the UK in 1975. Bowie went on to release 27 albums and have a number of hit songs including 1975’s “Fame” and 1983’s “Let’s Dance,” which both became No. 1 hits on the Billboard 100. Other hit singles include 1972’s “Changes,” 1975’s “Golden Years” and “Young Americans,” 1983’s “China Girl,” 1984’s “Blue Jean” and 1985’s “Dancing in the Street.” He also appeared in nearly 40 films including 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1983’s The Hunger, 1986’s Labyrinth and 2006’s The Prestige. Bowie sold more than 100 million records worldwide, won six Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. He was married to the model Iman from 1992 until his death from liver cancer in 2016 at the age of 69.
