HIGH VELOCITY is the name of the game in our sport — in every event. Strength, technique, endurance all play roles, but rapid movement is of the essence. At this time of year with meets that matter rushing past like a Noah Lyles 100 finish, even time flies. Didn’t we just wrap the indoor season? Nope. As I write the NCAA Championships will commence in just four days. I can’t wait.
But something else landed with lightning rapidity on the second evening of the NCAA Regionals (Preliminary Round), a bolt out of the blue for those of us who aren’t NCAA or major conference executives or attorneys.
The NCAA and five major conferences reached a $2.8 billion settlement of a class-action antitrust lawsuit affecting all Div. I athletes back to 2016. If approved by a U.S. district judge, to quote a New York Times distillation of the agreement’s upshot, “Div. I schools could set aside as much as about $20 million each to pay their athletes as soon as the 2025 football season.”
Or as the NYT headline put it, “Decades in the Making, a New Era Dawns for the NCAA: Paying Athletes Directly.”
Illinois law professor Michael H. Leroy told the Times, “The idea that schools are paying millions of dollars to the people who are selling the TV contracts and filling the seats — that’s good. But it closes one Pandora’s box and opens four or five others.”
By now if you’ve followed the story, you’ve seen or read sportswriters and legal experts hauling up their slacks and throwing up their hands with only one certain conclusion: nobody knows how this will play out and momentous decisions, with as yet unforeseeable cascading consequences, are about to be made over a very short period of time. High velocity has never before defined the rate of change within the $1 billion-plus annual revenue “amateur sports” institution that is the NCAA.
Most of the general public cares most about the implications for football and basketball, and for gender equity.
You and I, of course, wonder what this will mean for track & field. We’ll be querying coaches and others over the next few weeks and hope to have more to report in the July T&FN. I can guess with near certainty even the most wired-in movers and shakers in the collegiate sport, like the rest of us, have more questions than answers right now.
I hope what they develop, and develop quickly, is a strategy. Personally, I fear there’s a greater than zero chance collegiate track & field, or at least some programs, could get steamrolled in the chaos. Schools, it would appear, will have wide latitude and autonomy to craft individual action plans.
Couple this with football/hoops-driven realignment of conferences, including the extinction of the venerable Pac-12, the landscape has turned upside down — with, don’t you agree, the further loss of reasons for track fans to care?
Yesterday, off the record, I spoke with a leader in the coaching fraternity, and the one comment I feel at liberty to share is a cliché yet apt: “We can hang together or we can hang alone.”
Brilliant solutions? At this stage I got nuthin’. But the coincidence of the settlement announcement and the Regionals hit me square on. Can Regionals survive in a world of schools shelling out big bucks to athletes? As it goes now, schools lay out the transportation, hotel and per diem expenses to bring together 1920 athletes at the two First Round sites. Power programs with rafts of qualifiers spend a lot, schools sending an athlete or two a lot less.
The meets crown no champions, in fact stage no “finals” of any kind, and with weather delays common in late May often take 12, or more, hours to stage on each of four days.
It’s nice on the one hand that results at the Regionals matter. At so many collegiate meets they hardly do. On the other hand, who can work up any enthusiasm as a spectator for 2-, 3- or 4-flight field event contests? Or make heads or tails out of 48-runner 10,000 fields.
Is it time for a rethink on the post-season? Will the immoveable budgeting realities force one? Oh, how I wish the exhilarating stakes-escalation of the high school prelims-sectional-regionals-State sequence (the meet names may vary where you live but you know what I’m talking about) could be transferred up to the collegiate sport.
I love the NCAA Champs. Less enthused about the getting there part.
