Another View: NCAA football, basketball should be separate from other college sports

Now that the Pac-12 conference is dissolving, it’s time we have a serious and long-overdue discussion about what to do about NCAA Division I athletics. College sports are changing, and the current model is coming undone. Recent rule changes granting more latitude to student-athletes have had an enormously challenging effect on the NCAA and its ability to govern collegiate athletics.

It’s time for universities to decouple their revenue sports like football and basketball from the nonrevenue sports, the so-called “Olympic” sports like women’s and men’s soccer, golf and track and field. If universities that play Division I football and basketball want market-based rewards, they need to be subjected to market-based pressures.

The name, image and likeness (NIL) legislation has allowed student-athletes to profit individually and has brought yet another level of professionalization to all college sports. Last year, schools voted to allow players to transfer one time without penalty and be available to play immediately — this is essentially bringing free agency to college athletics. These moves have also created a professionalization that universities, conferences and the NCAA are ill-equipped to handle. Over the past month, NCAA and college athletic administrators have pleaded with Congress to intervene but that’s unlikely.

Modern Division I athletic departments are really two separate entities. Prior to entering academia, I worked for years in Major League Baseball and the National Football League, so I’m familiar with the professional revenue-generating sport model. When I served as the faculty athletic representative at the University of Tulsa, I saw Olympic sport athletes achieve academic success at the highest level in the current model.

Football and basketball serve a professionalized function. This function is now fully commercial but still benefits universities, many located in rural areas, by getting students on campus and keeping alumni engaged. It’s best to view these sports as visibility strategies that universities use to market their institutions.

But the so-called Olympic sports serve a function that is more in line with the university’s core mission. These sports can play a more regional schedule, thus reducing expensive travel costs. They can be funded under existing auxiliary budgets, like campus radio stations and newspapers and be governed at least in part by the national governing bodies of those sports. As an example, USA Gymnastics can oversee college gymnastics and possibly offset some of the costs.

Under this new “decoupling” model, football and basketball teams would lose their not-for-profit status. The favorable nonprofit tax status Division I college athletics programs enjoy is related to their supposed “educational nexus.” But in football and basketball that tie is tenuous at best. Reasonable college athletic staff compensation should be defined, with excessive compensation treated as nondeductible, and subject to federal income tax.

To be sure, there will be opponents of this plan. High-profile boosters, coaches, athletic and campus administrators and many others who make money off the current system will not want it changed. These people get to play kingmaker when it comes to athletic-department decisions, but all too often it’s the university that underwrites the athletic-department losses. In essence, they are privatizing the gains and socializing the losses. Media companies that served a dual function of covering college sports on one hand and owning the media rights on the other are quite comfortable with the current model.

“Decoupling” football and basketball from the Olympic sports can also be used to mitigate institutional risk. With attendance and viewing patterns among younger adults changing, concussion lawsuits looming and academic integrity on the line, this move will offset the risk that football and basketball pose to universities. Let’s get the risk vs. reward right and come up with a proposition that better aligns with academic values.

If universities want to be in the business of operating professional sports teams, and paying coaches and athletic personnel astronomical salaries, then they need to find a way to do so that is in line with university missions, priorities and budgets. The “decoupling” model will separate college athletics into two separate entities. One can allow athletes to train in their sport while focusing on the academic aspect of college and the other can test themselves against market forces the way every other business in this country must.

Adrien Bouchet is the eminent scholar, endowed chair and director of the DeVos Sport Business Management program at the University of Central Florida and director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.