Ohio State to pay athletes maximum allowed following NCAA settlement

Ohio State is preparing to begin revenue sharing with its athletes next year, provided a landmark legal settlement of three antitrust cases against the NCAA is approved by a federal judge, the new director said Sportsman Ross Bjork at The Dispatch.

“Absolutely,” Björk said. “What we’re working on right now is what that plan looks like.”

Under proposed terms of a settlement that is poised to further alter the college sports landscape, schools will be allowed to share millions of dollars in revenue from their media rights deals, sponsorships and ticket sales. It does not require schools to participate in the new compensation model.

Direct payments to athletes, expected to begin in the fall of 2025, would be capped at 22% of the average primary revenue of large conference schools, resulting in a figure that would reach about $22 million annually and increase by percentage points over the following years.

Bjork, who will replace Gene Smith as head of Ohio State’s athletic department on July 1, said the Buckeyes will pay athletes the maximum total.

“We know the percentage,” Björk said. “We know the rough calculation. We know there are escalators. That’s about all we know at the moment.

Questions remain about how the money will be distributed to the more than 1,000 athletes competing in 36 varsity sports at Ohio State, which is tied with Stanford for most schools competing in major conferences in the Division I.

Title IX, the federal law that oversees gender equality in college sports, is perhaps the most important variable.

Based on the latest legal guidance presented to the athletic department, Björk anticipates that the amounts paid to male and female athletes will need to be proportional to their enrollment at the university, an arrangement that mirrors the allocation of scholarships under the law.

Ohio State’s enrollment for the final academic year was 52 percent female and 48 percent male, meaning payouts could be roughly equal between the sexes.

“We are committed to Title IX,” Björk said. “We have to be. This is the good thing. But it’s also a federal law.”

How payments are split between men’s and women’s sports teams remains unknown.

Björk said he did not expect payments to be split evenly among athletes, a scenario likely to result in some sports receiving greater financial resources.

“There are going to be some tough decisions,” Björk said, “because it’s a recalibration of the model.”

One of the most pressing dilemmas is how much of the division should be given to football and men’s basketball, the sports that generate the most revenue for athletic departments and are likely to require the most funding in order to attract high school recruits and transfers in an increasingly broad context. competitive market for talent.

“This is the equation that everyone needs to understand,” Björk said. “If you have $11 million for men’s sports, how much goes to football? We have many programs loaded with basketball tradition in the Big Ten. There are basketball powers that don’t have football. They could spend the entire $11 million on basketball.

“But if we also have to do football here at Ohio State, which we will, what does that leave for basketball? These are all the challenges we face.

More:Ohio State football coach Ryan Day supports proposed revenue-sharing deal

An attempt to fill any potential gap should be made through compensation from booster-backed collectives or other commercial entities that enter into name, image and likeness agreements with athletes.

The state of Ohio has two major NIL collectives operating between the 1870 Society and the Foundation, contributing to an infrastructure that Bjork describes as “really aggressive.”

“Revenue sharing is great,” Bjork said, “but NIL is not going to go away, and we would be naive to think that $22 million is going to be the market, and it’s going to increase, but it’s not going to be the market. It will be that, plus NIL, and the programs that determine the NIL infrastructure will thrive.

The antitrust settlement, which also calls for the NCAA to pay former athletes nearly $2.8 billion in back damages, is not the first example in recent years where the outcome of a court led to schools paying their athletes.

A unanimous decision by the United States Supreme Court in 2021 removed college athletic association limits on education-related compensation.

The case resulted in a review of NCAA rules that allowed schools to pay athletes up to $5,980 in a school year.

In fall 2022, Ohio State began offering academic achievement awards to athletes who performed well academically, completed minimum credit hours, met NCAA requirements to advance in their degrees and achieved all available academic progression rate points.

According to information provided to The Dispatch through a public records request, the school distributed $2.58 million in academic bonuses during the program’s first semester.

Officials said at the time that the athletic department budgeted about $6 million a year to cover the payments.

The burden on the department, while one of the richest in the country, will be even greater with revenue sharing, an expense apparently on track to account for nearly 10 percent of its annual operating budget.

In Ohio State’s latest financial statement provided to the NCAA, the organization reported athletic operating revenues totaling $279.5 million for the 2023 fiscal year.

Revenue sharing payments totaling $22 million would be one of the department’s highest expenditures.

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