Title IX remains a 'burning question' following House settlement, per Pete Thamel
The NCAA Board of Governors voted last week to accept the settlement with plaintiffs in the history-making House v. NCAA antitrust case.
The NCAA and all 32 of its Division I conferences are expected to pay thousands of athletes $2.8 billion in retroactive NIL payments and broadcast revenue over a 10-year period. This opens the door for universities to share as much as $22 million per year for its athletes.
However, given that some sports generate greater revenue than others — questions surrounding how Title IX falls into the conversation have risen since the settlement was accepted. ESPN’s Pete Thamel attempted to explain how school’s could evenly disperse this money across all programs within their athletic department.
“I would think the biggest burning question that really matters more than the walk-ons and the roster caps, to be honest, is Title IX and how you how you look at it,” Thamel told Paul Finebaum. “Let’s use 20 million as the rough number. There is no instruction right now whether 10 million of that goes to women’s sports and 10 million goes to men’s sports. Or Arkansas — just to use an alphabetical order school, Alabama — they could take 18 and a half million and put it towards football, and then chop up the rest. Are you going to have to start from a point of half, Paul? Or are you going to have full autonomy over how to use your share of the revenue share? And I don’t think that answer is coming.
“Scott Stricklin, the Florida athletic director, was just asked about it and he was basically like, ‘Look, we’d like some guidance.’ Because if it becomes a school-by-school risk issue, that becomes thorny. I mean, that’s gonna be really hard for presidents to say, ‘You know what? We’re going to risk some Title IX implications here and we’re going to put all our chips behind football.’ But I would think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on these presidents do that.”
Thamel noted that if there’s one thing that presidents don’t like to do is make decisive decisions that will eventually be criticized. Giving a football program a larger share of the pie than any other sport certainly falls into that category, but Thamel believes presidents would be going out on a limb regardless of their decision.
“[Lawyer] Jeffrey Kessler has been widely quoted saying, ‘I think somebody’s going to have to sue and then a judge is going to decide how this happens.’ Which gets us a little bit back to where we were in the first place before the settlement,” Thamel continued.
The prevailing hope of the settlement was to get out of court have a judge decide the ultimate fate of the case — but the issue of Title IX looms over the case.
Thamel provided a potential solution for sourcing money into the football program as well, noting that NIL collectives could take on the burden of handling a large portion football side of things financially while the other money is dispersed equally throughout the rest of each school’s athletic department.
That is just Thamel’s theory, however. If one thing is for sure in this case, the questions appear to be far from answered.