Today’s guest columnist is Joe Moglia, chair of athletics and executive advisor to the president at Coastal Carolina University.
The gold rush of deals that followed last summer’s Supreme Court decision on NIL was the single most significant thing to happen to college sports in decades, but the NCAA punted on the chance to enact real change. NIL was in the works for years, and yet NCAA leadership was totally absent.
NCAA president Mark Emmert recently announced he would be stepping down in the middle of his term. Emmert has been getting paid—and will continue to be paid—for having abdicated his leadership responsibility. Right now in the real world, student athletes are being courted by high-roller boosters and businesses offering the kinds of incentives the NCAA always objected to. Making matters worse, the NCAA’s choice to abandon the transfer rule has been catastrophic, allowing athletes to essentially be free agents—without contracts—from day one. This cat’s not going back in the bag.
Where does college athletics go from here?
Presidents, commissioners and athletics directors know how real the money is with regard to NIL. What they need to understand is that they now must run their athletics organizations as true businesses by taking real responsibility for what’s going on, and living with the consequences of their actions, or lack thereof. Aggressive, radical change needs to take place, but academia doesn’t do radical change. Regardless, they’re now running a business, whether they like it or not.
The NCAA had its chance and failed. If college athletics wants to be a successful business, it’s now time for college athletics to govern itself and create its own organization. How about potentially calling it the Collegiate Sports Federation (CSF) or the American Collegiate Association of Competitive Athletics (ACACA)?
This competitor organization will need an empowered, independent executive committee that has true autonomy and authority to make decisions. The committee cannot be affiliated with any team, school or league. Its members must be impartial, and all of the teams, schools and leagues will need to agree to abide by their decisions. These executives must have an understanding of strategy and how to execute it. Most important, they need to possess the absolute courage to do what they believe is in the best interest of college athletics. It requires organizational ability, communication and diplomacy, but college athletics has these in abundance.
Such an organization would bring new leadership in college sports and new leverage in how TV rights are negotiated, how players commit, and how they are paid.
For starters, the Power Five could consider negotiating TV rights in tiers, with the top 20–25 tier-one schools negotiating their own deal. Under such an arrangement, tier-one schools could easily see their TV revenue jump dramatically, well beyond numbers currently being contemplated.
At the same time, the transfer rule must be restored. Student athletes need to make real commitments to schools, just as those schools need to make commitments to them, with scholarships and support in accessing NIL opportunities. When students sign a letter of intent and receive a scholarship, they should be committed to playing at that school for a year. This wouldn’t mean students couldn’t transfer, but they would need to do so at the cost of a season of play. Is it unreasonable to treat an NIL athlete, who receives money above and beyond what the typical athlete on scholarship gets, more like a professional athlete? Professional athletes have contracts. The vast majority of senior executives have contracts. Is it then unreasonable for the NIL athlete to also have a contract? No professional sport can be functional for long where everyone is a free agent and can auction themselves at any time to the highest bidder.
The same theory should apply to coaches; if they’ve made a commitment to a program, their contracts should be binding, and they should serve out the duration of those contracts. Likewise, when schools engage a coach, they need to understand those contracts and abide by them. Schools can still fire a coach, but if they’ve made an obligation to a coach for five years and fire him after three, then they still need to pay him out. But there should be no time where a coach can just pack up and leave. Today, the only penalty when a coach breaks a contract is a relatively minuscule buyout. Buyouts should be eliminated. No well-run business would write such a contract.
It’s easy to imagine a world where a new organization takes on the role of organizing college sports, while the NCAA continues to exist and serves a new role: It could offer educational resources and legal advice, and monitor market conditions, serving as more of a trade organization for athletics departments. Competition is good; it’s the whole point of sports. So why don’t we employ competition much the same way we organize collegiate sports?
If schools and athletics departments wake up to the fact that—like it or not—their sports programs are businesses, they can still do the right thing. NIL is taking off; in three years, I expect there to be at least 100 players making extraordinary money in endorsement deals. Do we really believe the NCAA has a plan for how to handle players earning millions of dollars a year? Or that the organization knows how to help schools leverage the best deals they can get? Do we in college athletics leadership know how to do this?
Commitment Matters
On a final note, something that has bothered me since I returned to football is that we seem to have lost the understanding that “commitment” is sacred. We teach our children that commitment means you don’t break your word, you mean what you say, and you give it your best. But right now, under the current NCAA rules, when athletes are being recruited and decide to commit to a school, they can simply change their mind. And by the way, the college making the scholarship offer can also change its mind, rescinding scholarships after any given year, for any reason. Commitment doesn’t seem to matter much during recruitment, but then when a young athlete shows up on campus, the coaches remind them once again that they must be truly committed to their team and program. The principle of commitment we hold so dear when we raise our children and which coaches encourage in their teams is irrelevant in the current system.
It’s not too late to fix this. When a school makes an offer to an athlete and that person says yes, he or she should have 48 hours to sign the national letter of intent. And at that point, both the student athlete and the college are committed. Period!
Is it too much for that scholarship to come with the understanding that the athlete is expected to stay with the school that they just committed to for at least one year?
I’ve always respected the NCAA. But I couldn’t be more disappointed in its lack of leadership. I couldn’t be prouder to be a small part of college athletics. But we are facing an incredibly serious situation, and we are already dangerously behind. College athletics can’t run things the way they always have. If there’s ever been a time for university leadership to step up, it’s now.
Moglia is the former CEO and chairman of TD Ameritrade, and chairman of Fundamental Global Investors and Capital Wealth Advisors. In 2012, he became Coastal Carolina’s head football coach, leading the team to four conference championships and an overall record of 56-22. You can find him on his website, on his LinkedIn page and on Twitter.
