Hartford Business Journal

12 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | JULY 8, 2024 UConn Athletics Director David Benedict celebrates the men's basketball team's 2024 national championship. Amid the changing landscape of college sports, he expects the NCAA to move toward a revenue-sharing model that allows schools to pay athletes. PHOTO | UCONN ATHLETICS Evolving Landscape With revenue sharing and direct payments to athletes looming, college sports won't be the same "Regardless of where this settle- ment goes, regardless of any new NCAA guidelines, regardless of any federal legislation, the Supreme Court was adamant that endorsement deals are going to exist," Thomas said. 'Boosters' go pro As permanent as the endorsement side of NIL may be, the future role of collectives like Bleeding Blue for Good is far less clear. Dan Murphy, a staff writer for Bris- tol-based sports media giant ESPN who covers NIL for the network, says the old booster clubs — groups of alums and business people who donated cash to support college athletic teams — have been replaced by collectives. "It used to be that a booster club would pass the hat around so you could stick a whole bag full of cash in a player's locker," Murphy said. "That sort of operation is now run by people with a ton of experience in fundraising and the sports industry, and in a much more formal and organized way." In the NIL era, he said, "upwards of 80% of the dollars that go to athletes come from these collec- tives, as opposed to more traditional endorsement deals." Within the first few months of NIL, Murphy said, boosters figured out they could use collectives as a way to pay athletes, "so they could recruit the best talent and retain the best talent" for their schools. Now, though, many schools are concerned that they have lost control over "which players were showing up at their schools," he said. "The collec- tive was the one who had the money and was paying the payroll." In fact, NCAA rules initially prohib- ited schools from interacting with collectives, "which didn't make sense," Murphy said, "so that's changing." He agrees that NIL endorsement deals are here to stay, but says "the By David Krechevsky davidk@hartfordbusiness.com C ollege athletes have been allowed to benefit financially from their names, images and likenesses only since July 2021. Yet in the three years since the National Collegiate Athletic Asso- ciation (NCAA) approved its initial NIL policy, it has grown into an industry valued at an estimated $1 billion annually. A change on the horizon, though, is expected to significantly alter the landscape — for both NIL and college athletics. The shift is likely to be a direct result of a $2.8 billion settlement agreement the NCAA reached in May with former college athletes who had filed an antitrust class action lawsuit demanding compensation that had been denied to them. A condition of the agreement, which still must be approved by a judge, would allow school athletic departments to directly share with athletes the revenue from ticket sales and TV contracts. It sets the amount to be shared at 22% of that revenue to start, or roughly more than $20 million per school per year. While NIL allows businesses and organizations to pay athletes for promotional purposes, and for athletes to sell branded and auto- graphed merchandise, the settlement agreement, if approved, would set the stage for colleges and universities to directly pay what amounts to a salary to their athletes. If that happens, experts say, it would be a paradigm shift resulting in collegiate sports looking nothing like what exists now. And that could have major ramifica- tions for UConn, which has Connecti- cut's most high-profile college athletic programs, as well as small universities in the state. 'Right of publicity' Jared Guy Thomas is execu- tive director of Bleeding Blue for Good, the nonprofit NIL collective that raises money for UConn athletes. Thomas, a former Army officer and lawyer, helped create and then ran the NIL collective at Purdue University for 14 months. He was then hired by UConn to run its NIL collective shortly after the men's basketball team won the 2023 national title. "When the national champs call, you answer and you come running," Thomas said. Utilizing his legal and college athletics background, Thomas produces his own predictive analyses of the likely outcomes for collegiate athletics and NIL, and he sees one certainty. "I believe very firmly that the one component of NIL that will never go back into the box completely … is the idea of corporate endorsement deals," he said. When the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2021 unanimously ruled against the NCAA in its lawsuit versus former West Virginia football player Shawne Alston over "education-related bene- fits" — the decision that opened the door for NIL — the justices identified a fundamental right for college athletes, Thomas said. "In law school we called it the 'right of publicity' — the right for a player to profit off of their own face," he said. "If Gatorade comes to a player at UConn and offers them an endorse- ment deal, the Supreme Court essentially said it is their right to take that deal." Which makes sense, he added, in an era when so many college students are social media influencers with millions of followers. Dan Murphy Jared Guy Thomas BIG DEAL for the Big East A s UConn continues to navigate the NIL era, its conference recently signed a deal to bring in more money. On June 27, the 11-school Big East Conference announced a new media-rights agreement that is esti- mated to nearly double its annual rights payments. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the sports business website Sportico said the confer- ence's existing 12-year deal, which ends after the 2024-25 season, was worth $41.7 million per year. The new, six-year agreement, which begins with the 2025-26 season, is estimated to nearly double that, with annual rights payments in the range of $75 million to $80 million per year. While the current contract places games with FOX and CBS, the new contract includes coverage on FOX Sports (FOX, FS1, FS2), as well as on NBC Sports (NBC, Peacock) and TNT Sports (TNT, TBS, truTV and Max). The agreement provides for major national broadcast, cable and direct- to-consumer streaming coverage of Big East men's and women's basketball games and Olympic sport championship contests. — David Krechevsky

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