Congress Deciding the Big 12’s Fate?

The barrage of college sports stories based around lawsuits can get really overwhelming, so let me simplify the latest from Yahoo!’s Ross Dellenger. 

The NCAA is out, and there’s a new sheriff in town. 

With the revenue-sharing era of college athletics upon us, the NCAA won’t have the power to police the distribution of the money and any NIL deals that exceed the revenue share cap. That power belongs to the conferences, which Dellenger reports are working to create a new entity that will enforce the revenue cap, vet NIL deals to ensure they are “fair market value,” and investigate tampering. 

A committee that includes representatives from Arizona and Cincinnati has been secretly meeting for months to put this all together before the final approval hearing for the House Settlement on April 7th. 

If the settlement is approved, revenue sharing will be officially here to stay. 

For the sake of Big 12 fans, a key phrase in all of this is “fair market value.” 

As it stands right now, any money going to players beyond the $20.5 million per year that schools give the athletes directly will have to be an actual NIL deal with an outside business. 

Fair market value means it can’t just be a donor handing out a pile of cash in a pay-for-play manner. This needs to be an advertising deal, for instance. Do a couple of commercials, sign some autographs, etc. 

This new enforcement agency will decide if a business's proposed deal meets the criteria of fair market value. That should severely limit the ability of the wealthiest schools to money-whip players into coming to their school. 

You would have a system where everybody is operating under one salary cap, like the NFL or NBA, with a little bit of extra money sprinkled on top from legitimate NIL deals. If Big 12 schools can find the $20.5 million every year, and most are planning on it, they could theoretically be on equal footing with teams in the SEC and Big Ten. 

If schools try to force through cash-grab deals that aren’t fair market value, a player could be deemed ineligible, coaches and administrators could be suspended, and the school’s revenue sharing cap could be lowered. 

As you might imagine, there’s pushback to this idea. NIL collectives hate it, and The Collective Association has spent time lobbying federal lawmakers to join them in questioning the legality of the fair market value limitations. 

I’m all for the players making as much money as possible–speaking of fair market value. But in professional sports leagues like the NFL and NBA, they collectively bargained a salary cap for a reason. It promotes parity and keeps things relatively fair. 

For the Big 12’s sake, I’m hoping that’s what wins out here. Only time will tell what happens. 

There are plenty of legal challenges to the House Settlement, including Title IX concerns, so it’s anybody’s guess how this will all play out. 

But Dellenger’s article shows we are creeping closer toward a world that might keep the Big 12 more competitive nationally than you would have expected. 

I’ll leave you with one last bit of encouraging news. There’s talk of structuring revenue-sharing payments to incentivize athletes to stay at one school for multiple years. Basically, you would be allowed to pay a senior who has been at your school all four years more than a senior transfer.  

It’s similar to what the NBA does with supermax contracts, which allow a team that drafted a superstar to pay them significantly more than any other team in the league is allowed to pay.  

Check out this explanation from Josh Pate, one of the country's most well-sourced college football voices. 

What You Need to Know

• Arizona kept pace with Houston atop the Big 12 standings on Saturday with an 82-73 win over fellow contender Texas Tech. The Wildcats and Cougars are starting to distance themselves from the rest of the field. They’re both two games clear of the Red Raiders and 3+ games ahead of everyone else. The Big 12 game of the year is set for Saturday when Houston travels to Tucson. 

• But first, Arizona has a tricky road trip to K-State tonight that is far more difficult than it appears on paper. The Wildcats are only 12-11, but they might be the hottest team in the country. K-State has won five straight by an average of 14 points per game, including wins over Kansas, West Virginia, and Iowa State. Bart Torvik, a popular college basketball analytics site, lists K-State as the #1 team in the country over the last three weeks (yes, really). 

• Head coach Kelvin Sampson has Houston humming right now, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about every aspect of life in the Big 12. He ripped both the Big 12 and the NCAA with these comments about the current schedule that Houston is dealing with. It’s hard to disagree with anything he said. 

• We’re used to Big 12 coaches being mentioned for every major college football job that comes open, and now the same is happening in hoops. Four Big 12 coaches made the Indianapolis Star’s list of candidates to replace retiring head coach Mike Woodson–including a first-year Big 12 head coach. Virginia is also reportedly interested in Iowa State’s T.J. Otzelberger.

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