NCAA Track & Field: Is The Sky Falling?

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 (link). 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…