MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING? Or is it the end of NCAA track & field as we know it? The coming changes the sport is facing as a result of the pending settlement of the House vs. NCAA lawsuit are likely to fall in between those two extremes. The likelihood that we face is that the landscape of collegiate track & field will look starkly different in the next few years.
The sport has already been evolving quickly, ever since the NCAA (and really, the courts) gave athletes the freedom to make money through NIL (name-image-likeness) deals. In the background, however, loomed an even more momentous change agent.
It started with Arizona State swimmer Grant House and TCU basketballer Sedona Prince. Together in 2020 they filed suit in a U.S. District Court, looking for the right to profit from their NILs and also wanting to force the NCAA and the Conferences to start sharing revenue from their broadcast rights. No small potatoes there — in ’23, the NCAA earned $945 million from broadcast rights, the vast majority of it football- and basketball-related revenue.
The case was assigned to Claudia Wilken, the same judge who had ruled in ’14 that the NCAA’s grip on athletes’ NIL rights was a federal antitrust violation. She also ruled in a related follow-up case that shot down the NCAA’s restrictions on compensating athletes for academic purposes, one that the Supreme Court eventually backed (NCAA vs. Alston, 2021).
Justice moves slowly, and in the fall of ’23, Wilken ruled that the NCAA had to start sharing revenue with its athletes big time. The ruling covered D1 athletes as far back as 2016 — they were due back pay. Rather than fight this one to the Supreme Court as it had the others, the NCAA settled for $2.58 billion and also agreed to a revenue-sharing plan with schools to distribute up to $20 billion to athletes. The settlement could be finalized as early as April, but 18 legal objections were filed before the January 31 due date, any one of which could cause delays. However, the NCAA’s lead counsel said, “We don’t think there’s anything in the objections that will give the judge reason to change her mind.”
The ripple effect has already begun. NCAA leaders — with their lawyers’ input — have decided that any limits on their spending on athletes would encourage future antitrust lawsuits. Scholarship limits needed to go away.
Enter roster caps. With no scholarship limits, would the wealthy schools be able to hoard all of the talent? A cap on the rosters of each sport would help hold that in check. For 19 of the 43 NCAA sports, the new caps will be smaller than what average roster sizes have previously been. Track will be set at 45 spots, cross country at 17 for most D1 programs. The most powerful of all track conferences, the SEC, has set even stricter limits, 35 and 10.
While 45 (or 35) scholarships seems like a lot — and it’s certainly a big boost from the old days — not all schools will be able to fund that many. The wealthy schools will still dominate. “To me, that’s where the big story is,” says Chris Bucknam of Arkansas. “How many scholarships will one school in a conference have compared to another?”
Meanwhile, track coaches at poorer schools will struggle to hold onto their budgets while ADs try to fund scholarships for 105 football players. “Track is lower-tier,” says one mid-major coach. “In our conference we don’t have a mandate to reach a minimum number of scholarships. Some will have less than us, and our numbers aren’t that high. As costs go up, our budgets aren’t. We do as much as we can with as little as we have.”
Unanswered Questions
The devil, as they say, is in the details. Most coaches at this point don’t have clear answers on a number of funding issues that could come into play. While there is plenty of legalese fine print surrounding the House Settlement, myriad are the questions as yet unanswered.
Sam Seemes, who heads the USTFCCCA, points out some of the unknowns remaining about roster caps: “When do you have to establish that roster limit? Is it the first day of school? Is it the first day of practice? Is it the first day of season? Those sorts of questions haven’t been 100% answered yet. If I have a full roster during the year and I remove four people from the team, can I add four more in?”
Another unanswered question revolves around the Alston awards that resulted from the ’21 Supreme Court decision. In 2020–21, NCAA schools began paying athletes up to $5980 in education-related awards beyond their scholarships. The athletic scholarships that D1 schools give can now count toward payments that the House Settlement requires. Alston awards, it seems, don’t. “There may be some schools that are retaining that, but I haven’t heard of one,” says Seemes. “Some places that were giving Alston money have switched that to scholarship money. The bottom line is I think the heavy majority of coaches don’t still know the dollars and cents they’re dealing with in a scholarship manner.”
While some programs have a good idea of what their financial limitations are next year, many are still in limbo, awaiting decisions from their athletic directors. One coach told us that his is apparently the only team in his conference that knows what they’re dealing with, and he is already cutting scholarships for next year. His conference peers are treading water, waiting. Meanwhile, a Big 10 coach told us of having to sit down with athletes and tell them their team spots are going away.
How Smaller Rosters Play Out
For the most powerful programs, a tightening of the rosters means a fundamental change in the way they do business. Says Georgia head Caryl Smith Gilbert, who has coached two national championship squads and a plethora of contenders, “If you have 35 roster spots, you need 35 of the best.”
Paul Brueske at South Alabama notes, “For a smaller D1 school like South Alabama, we’ve always prided ourselves on taking diamonds in the rough and kids that are developmental and giving them a couple years to develop. And we’ve had a lot of kids that have really shined because they were given that opportunity. And now it’s going to be we’re going to be limited in who we take.”
Arkansas’s Chris Bucknam takes another tack: “I’m still in a wait-and-see kind of attitude. I had 16 guys on my cross country team. I have 52 guys on my track team. And until everything gets settled, I guess, in April or whenever that hits, you never know what’s going to happen. So I’m just playing it like things are normal until I’m absolutely given the word that things are going to change.”
Florida’s Mike Holloway, for one, doesn’t think the changes will be dramatic at the top level. “If they were reducing scholarships, I think that the sport would look a lot different, but you’re reducing roster sizes, which obviously is problematic for the lower level, the walk-on or developmental kid, but there’s still a great space for the better athletes, right? So I think what’ll happen is, like you’ve noticed in football and I think we’re about to see it in basketball when their season comes to an end, there’s going to be a lot of kids in the transfer portal. But I think at the top end, the SEC is going to be what the SEC has always been. I don’t think that changes at all.”
New Mexico’s Darren Gauson feels the changes will benefit the women’s side of the sport, thanks to the leveraging of Title IX. “I really think it’s a super positive thing as it relates to women’s track & field and the funding there. It seems like a lot of schools are either getting more scholarships on the women’s side or staying the same. So I think that’s great that we can provide more funding in that regard.”
Brueske says there will be more specialized teams as a result of the caps: “I think you’re going to see more programs kind of focus on a few events and not try to field a well-rounded team, which I think is a negative for our sport.” With 19 events on the NCAA Championship schedule outdoors, and 45 or 35 scholarships, the math of fielding a “complete” team seems daunting indeed.
Will Talent Trickle Down?
Will the House settlement cause top programs to offer fewer opportunities to non-blue chip athletes? “Absolutely,” says Smith Gilbert. “I took a lot of pride as a coach throughout my career in developing my student athletes. I’d have an 11.89/23.75 kid and take them to 10.96/22.46, Aurieyall Scott at UCF [Central Florida], right?
“I took a lot of pride in that kind of thing and building kids and not pressuring them and letting them be who they were and grow. Well, those kind of things at some levels are going to be gone.”
Bucknam joins Smith Gilbert in decrying the opportunities that are going to be lost to developmental athletes. “My relay team ran 2:58 last year and I had a guy leading off from Cedar Falls, Iowa. He’s a first team All-American. But I don’t know [under the coming rule changes] if I could have recruited that guy.” (TJ Tomlyanovich ran 47.54 as a prep.)
“I’m an old school kind of coach. We love to develop athletes. We take a lot of pride in the fact that our kids get better and that we can take elite high school kids and make them better. And that we can also take some 3-star guys and develop them into a 5-star guy… Those are the things that we’re going to miss out on.”
Smith Gilbert notes that some of the smaller schools might see a recruiting boom, as athletes that would have gone to the big schools in the past might have to go mid-majors or D2/D3/NAIA just to get a roster spot. “Maybe it’s a good thing,” she says.
“There’s a lot of good coaches at a lot of the smaller schools,” says Holloway. “And if they will hustle, that’s going to give them a chance to plug into and lock into some of those developmental athletes.”
Says Bucknam, “There’s still a lot of good coaches out there. There’s still a lot of good programs. There’s still places for kids to go that do a great job of developing kids… There’s a lot of good people. But, you know, kids might have to change their mindset… and find a place where they can compete.”
Again, Gauson sees a plus here. “I think there’s too many young high schoolers that think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go to fill-in-the-blank school, And it’s not the best spot for them or their long-term development. So I think it’s going to be good that some of the mid-majors and the other Div. I programs are going to get more of some of these athletes. They’re going to do an amazing job of developing them and allow them access to conference championships and regional championships.”
So far, though, that “gain” for the mid-majors is in the wait-and-see column. Andy Sythe of Long Beach State last year tried recruiting 18 athletes who were forced into the portal when two major programs trimmed their rosters. “Not one of them was interested in coming to us. There could be 20 reasons — because we don’t have their major, because they hate the beach and good weather and they want to run at altitude. I don’t know. But at the end of the day, I haven’t seen it where people are knocking on our door hard because they don’t have a place to go.
“Logic tells me that it’s going to get better and help programs like ours. But I haven’t seen it yet.”
It seems clear that the powerhouses will be unable to save precious roster spots for developing talent. Said one coach who is already steering away recruits he would have jumped at in earlier seasons: “Roster spots are gold.”
“It’s going to be very difficult for hardly any high school kids to come out and be competitive in those leagues,” says Brueske.
Inevitably, that will force those coaches to look for talent that is already developed to a point where athletes can score at the conference or national level. While that means more of a reliance on international athletes and JC transfers, it probably will also mean heavier use of the portal to recruit juniors and seniors away from mid-majors and Div. II/NAIA programs.
Says Sythe, “On the negative side… you develop a kid here, and they might end up leaving to go to a bigger school because they can get a bigger reward, whether it’s a bigger scholarship or NIL deals, collectives. I mean, things weren’t fair before; now they’re really not fair… The disparity is getting larger.”
The Bigger Wave Coming
Of the long-term effects of the changes, Seemes says, “Regardless of what level you are, you need to make adjustments. I don’t know that we know yet where the biggest punch is going to hit. I think that we’ve got a lot of programs in the mid-area that are really living above their means. Their credit card is maxed out. A lot of those schools are going to continue, from an athletic department standpoint, to live above their means. And you wonder where that’s going to lead them financially down the road.
“Looking at the crystal ball, where I’m really concerned is three or four years down the road because right now everybody is just playing with numbers and trying to anticipate what’s going to happen. Three or four years from now, you’re going to know what happens at your institution financially. And that’s when people are going to be dealing with real numbers and real situations and making really hard decisions. It’s kind of like there’s a small wave coming in on shore right now, and there’s a bigger one behind it.”
Olympic Development Threatened?
The possibility of more international athletes headed to the NCAA, combined with a reduction in roster positions at the big schools for walk-on or developmental U.S. talent, has led to fears that our Olympic development program in track & field may take a hit. At last summer’s Paris Olympics, of the 37 U.S. team members who came home with medals in track & field, 33 had been developed in Div. I programs. Will that number decline in the future?
Is there any possibility that the cash-flush USOPC might help fund college track? Beyond lip service, the USOPC has not made any substantial moves to support the collegiate system that develops most of our collegiate talent. Seemes recalls a conference nearly 20 years ago where Miles Brand, then the head of the NCAA, said that he had been working with the then-USOC on a plan to work together in Olympic sports. Seemes recalls him saying, “We had an agreement that we all felt good about, and it came time for them to put up, and they walked away from the table.”
Calling the NCAA’s relationship with the USOPC “a one-way street,” Seemes says an opportunity was missed last summer. “On the Olympic coverage, the USOPC should have been working with their partner, NBC, to try to tell the story, to reach the general public, to try to get support for the Olympic movement and for collegiate athletics, and how it supports the Olympic movement. You rarely even heard anything mentioned.”
He adds, “They should be a strong contributor, and they’re close to a non-contributor.”
With recent reports suggesting that USATF is cash-strapped, Seemes doesn’t expect our sport’s federation to be the cavalry to save the day. Seemes says there have been no recent conversations about USATF working together with the USTFCCCA to address the coming challenges. “I think they’ve got their own challenges going on. I don’t know that they could be a big contributor,” he says. “And I know the USOPC gives them some money, but I don’t think it’s ever the kind of money that they should be getting from the USOPC, considering what track & field does for the medal count at the Olympic Games.”
Marketing Challenges
Seemes says the problem is compounded by our sport’s long-term marketing issues. “We just didn’t get here in track & field yesterday. We’ve been pushing ourselves into this corner for years now, and we just keep resisting doing anything about it. We just don’t seem to have the will to make the changes.
“We’re skeptical of change. And so we beat on any thought of change before you can ever spend any time trying to see what changes could do for you. And you’ve got to change. It’s not easy because it takes time, effort, and it takes a lot of will to do something different. And we just don’t seem to have the will to move forward. It’s just easier to stay where we are. And I would say that where we are is not a healthy place in today’s landscape.”
Smith Gilbert agrees that marketing the sport better might help track gain a bigger share of athletic department funding. “How can we be watched more? How can we make things more simple for viewers? I see that gymnastics and volleyball have done some things to change and they seem to be a bit more popular.
“I see volleyball playing on Sundays. Well, do we have to run cross-country on Saturday and go up against these big football games or can we run on a Friday or Sunday where we can get some real viewership? Can we allow our conferences to schedule us and we go where they tell us to like every other sport? I don’t know. What can we do as a sport to create value that will get people looking at us to where some of these millions of dollars will come our way?”
Adds Sythe, “I just don’t know what the future holds in our sport. And I’m hoping energized coaches from everywhere can band together and create something better than what we have. But it’s not going to be our sport that does it. It has to be the NCAA collectively because this is everybody. It’s all sports.”
The struggle for the future of collegiate track & field will continue, no matter what changes the House settlement brings.
Holloway will remain calm, he says. “I just don’t think that there’s anything to panic about. Whenever there’s change, everybody panics a little bit, right? But… let’s see how the new rules go, let’s see what changes they make because they’re always changing after a couple of years or so.”
“We’ve just got to get through this,” concludes Bucknam. “We’ve got to get through this rough patch and survive.”
