Joel Klatt calls for a separate governing body for revenue, non-revenue sports

Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt wants a separate governing body between revenue and non-revenue sports in college athletics.

With revenue sharing coming and seemingly the slow end of the NCAA, college sports could look drastically different. Football and men’s and women’s basketball run the college athletics landscape in terms of revenue.

But for the remainder of the sports, there are a lot of questions if you’re an Olympic sport, so Klatt had a suggestion.

“Revenue sports … need a totally different governing body and non revenue sports need to operate just like we operate basically the Olympic model,” Klatt said on his podcast. “Yeah you can still have NIL, you can have all sorts of things. But the only way that they are around, to be quite honest with you, is if they are pulled out of this revenue share, because if you’ve got to pay the men’s rower and the women’s Lacrosse captain the same as your quarterback, this is totally unsustainable as far as a rev share.”

If you’re not a revenue producing sport, there is naturally some worry as Klatt said. Especially when schools rely on one or two sports to bring in the bulk of the case.

“So the separation is incredibly important, incredibly important,” Klatt said. “If you start looking at the structure once you separate out revenue sports from non revenue sports, you basically have three revenue sports at this point. You have college football as a whole (bringing) in about 70 to 75 percent of the revenue in intercollegiate athletics or for any athletic department across the country. 

“And then you have men’s basketball, namely the NCAA tournament on the men’s side. And now women’s basketball because of the growth in women’s basketball and more specifically the NCAA tournament on the women’s side. Those are really the only three things that make money in intercollegiate athletics: women’s basketball tournament, men’s basketball tournament and college football.” 

To avoid any sport of lawsuits when weighing revenue and non revenue sports, Klatt suggested a proper governing body to keep collegiate athletics healthy in each case.

“So those need to be stripped out and taken away from all the others and we need some sort of entity that is over college football and over basketball and governs them in a very different way than we govern all the other sports,” Klatt said. “And trying to govern them the same way is only going to get us in the same position where we will be in a lawsuit. That’s exactly what the enterprise is trying to avoid. So that’s why the separation is, I think, increasingly important.”