The May 2024 settlement in House v. NCAA was the most recent significant step towards an employee model for collegiate athletes. Reactions to the settlement varied widely across sports and stakeholders. One feature that is particularly worrying within smaller sports is the settlement’s elimination of scholarship limits and establishment of roster limits. If the House settlement is adopted, schools will have complete discretion over how they allocate and award athletic scholarships. A school with the resources and will could put their entire 105-man football team on full rides and ignore, say, women’s lacrosse altogether.
So-called non-revenue sports should opt out altogether and lead the separation of school and sport.Less extreme versions of that scenario—wherein schools put the lion’s share of their money into marquee sports and divvy up the scraps amongst the other programs—are the chief concern of the niche sports. In August, eight collegiate coaches’ associations, under the banner of the Intercollegiate Coach Association Coalition (ICAC), issued a statement that called on Congress to “protect collegiate Olympic sports” such as swimming and wrestling on the grounds that the changes afoot “have the potential to reduce academic opportunity for athletes, destroy our Olympic pipeline, and diminish our nation’s excellence on the world stage.” Despite that nod to the academic side of collegiate sports, the statement heavily focuses on the NCAA’s role as the de facto talent identification and development pipeline for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and Team USA.
This strategy is flawed. Rather than try to impede the ultimate outcome of House v. NCAA or buy themselves an indefinite amount of time to get some ducks in a row before acquiescing, so-called non-revenue sports should opt out altogether and lead the separation of school and sport.
“Non-revenue sports” is a misnomer. From 2018 through 2022, only one sport at one university generated no revenue. “Unprofitable sports” would be more accurate but even less informative, as nearly three-quarters of sports programs over those years broke even or were in the red. It is also the case that even football and men’s basketball are not reliable profit centers. Roughly two-thirds of football and men’s basketball programs did not turn a profit during the years in question. Of the 511 schools with profitable football or basketball, only 89 (17 percent) netted over $1,000,000. Meanwhile, 16 sports—men’s and women’s—from 28 institutions had at least one program generate over $1,000,000 profit.
ICAC appears to have come together during the wave of program cuts in the first year of the Covid crisis. Sportswriter Jason Bryant maintained a tracker of canceled programs, which tallied 427 between March 11, 2020, and December 8, 2021. Of those, 50 were later reinstated. Seventeen schools accounted for those reinstatements, with 11 coming from Stanford University and seven from the College of William & Mary.
Only one of the programs that Stanford cut had an endowed coaching position: men’s rowing. Conversely, 18 of the 23 surviving Cardinal programs had at least one endowed coach, and gymnastics was the only unendowed men’s sport to escape the axe.
In the 10 months between cancelation and reinstatement, Stanford Athletics’ alumni and development formed the 36 Sports Strong group, which raised $40 million in six months. Today, seven of the 11 programs that Stanford cut have at least one endowed coach. 36 Sports Strong’s stated intention to Stanford administrators was to raise enough money for all sports to be fully endowed. Only five remain unendowed.
William & Mary’s programs, by contrast, spent a fraction of that time in purgatory. The Tribe reinstated their seven cut programs in under two months. The Virginia Pilot reported, “men’s swimming and track and field … [b]oth generated more than $1 million in donation pledges in an effort to display their financial sustainability in the weeks after their planned elimination was announced. Swimming added $2.5 million to that in a little more than 24 hours last weekend.” Five months later, William & Mary announced a multi-year $55 million fundraising drive. In January of 2024, Tribe Athletics announced that they had exceeded that goal, finishing at $57.2 million.
Motivated and organized alumni will put money behind sports that are dismissed as non-monetizable.Bowling Green’s baseball program executed an even quicker resurrection, with alumni raising $1.5 million in two weeks in spring 2020—the nadir of Covid-related financial and social uncertainty—to keep the program going.
Fundraising blitzes were the positive motivation for reinstating programs. The negative motivation was avoiding Title IX lawsuits. William & Mary, Brown University, Clemson University, and the University of Minnesota all determined that reinstating some of their programs would cost the school less than litigating—and potentially losing—lawsuits alleging Title IX violations on the grounds of sex or race. While alumni mobilized within their schools to raise money, lawyers and activists mobilized between schools to threaten lawfare and adverse public relations.
The restored programs demonstrate that motivated and organized alumni will put money behind the sports that are dismissed as non-revenue-generating or otherwise non-monetizable. That should shift the onus to the people and institutions in those sports—such as coaching associations—to make those sports self-sustaining, not only passively via endowments but actively in the non-college-sports marketplace. In other words, the moment for a major college-sports evolution is now.
This starts with reframing the conversations and fundraising pitches using the language of investors and properties rather than patrons and supplicants. While it may be difficult for career athletics administrators to imagine niche sports succeeding outside of the university cocoon, such an evolution would open new opportunities for sports-business professionals, starting with sport-management students. Every college athletics department has the potential to be a nest of new business incubators.
There are numerous examples to learn from and even draft behind. Minor leagues, women’s sports, and niche sports are increasingly the targets of venture-capital and private-equity funding. Volleyball and track & field will see the debut of three well-funded startup leagues in 2025. The International Swimming League ran for three years, ending only because Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 (the league’s primary backer was Ukrainian). Women’s hockey and soccer continue to grow at the professional and semi-pro levels.
The greatest example in recent years of a niche sport going commercial, professional, and nearly mainstream is one that’s never existed within the NCAA: pickleball. Pickleball exploded during Covid out of a geographically narrow scene to become a sport with major media deals and celebrity investor groups. It even attracts some of the top tennis players graduating from Division I schools.
Similarly, the United States is one of the few countries in which cricket is a niche sport. Even so, independent cricket leagues and facilities are going up around the U.S. As I was writing this article, I received a notice announcing the launch of the Collegiate Cricket League, which will feature teams from colleges across our nation.
Pickleball and cricket are demonstrating that being part of the collegiate-sport system is not necessary for commercial growth. Conversely, the non-revenue sports have shown for decades that being an integral part of the collegiate and Olympic sport system is not sufficient to survive so much as a budget cut.
At some level, ICAC members know that private funding is the way. Each of the eight sports that comprise ICAC were reinstated between Stanford, William & Mary, and Bowling Green. Moreover, about 10 years ago, one of the signatories told me that he was advising coaches in his sport that if they were not moving their programs down the path to being fully endowed, they were playing fast and loose with their program’s future as well as their own.
The current model worked only until outside money was allowed to penetrate the college-sport cartel.While an endowed program is not the ideal financial model in today’s sports marketplace, it at least provides self-sufficiency. There is no self-sufficiency on the horizon, though, when petitioning the USOPC and the U.S. Congress. That approach merely shifts non-revenue sports’ dependency from the current non-governmental structure to a government-backed one, and maybe to the federal government itself. The current model, whereby the collegiate system is the de facto Olympic training pipeline, worked only until outside money was allowed to penetrate the college-sport cartel. That system also built the self-perpetuating culture and administration that dismisses niche sports as “non-revenue.”
The non-revenue sports (such as they are) are facing a management crisis, not a financial one. They’ve never had to make more than a feel-good case for their programs to exist, whether that meant tapping the memories and heartstrings of alumni donors or citing equity and opportunity to avoid Title IX sanctions. These may continue to be sufficient in the post-House era if the same alumni who rallied to save these programs in 2020-21—or who have been funding endowed chairs—are content to go on being donors indefinitely. But if those donors look around, see their peers enjoying the benefits of actual investing, and wonder why not them, the non-revenue sports truly will be at the end of their line.
Separating school from sport will allow donors to get something for their money. While it will no doubt result in some teams folding and some jobs disappearing, that might happen anyway in the post-House era of collegiate sport. The best hope these sports and their stakeholders have for a positive future is growing beyond the limits of campus and the strictures of higher education.
George M. Perry is a sports performance coach, sports businessman, and writer. Before going into the sports industry, he was a submarine warfare officer in the United States Navy and briefly attended law school.
This article was originally published at www.jamesgmartin.center
