NCAA House Settlement Questions; Bruins Must Pay Calimony; Tara Speaks; 34 for 45

Lots of important questions have arisen in the wake of last week's landmark "House vs. NCAA" settlement, in which the NCAA and Power Five Conferences agreed to cough up $2.77 billion in retroactive NIL damages to former players, as well as allowing schools to pay athletes roughly $20 million per year in revenue shares going forward.

There are several hoops to jump through before the agreement is finalized, and it won't take effect until 2025 at the earliest, but schools throughout the country are already planning for Armageddon.

Here are some of the things they'll need to consider:

* Where will the money come from?

* How will NIL damages be allocated?

* Should damages be paid only to the sports that would've most likely received NIL income--football and basketball--or across the board?

* How will the revenue shares be allocated moving forward?

* Should all athletes in every sport receive revenue shares, or only those on revenue generating teams?

* What should be the split between male and female athletes?

* How will Title IX figure in?

* What expenses can be cut from our budgets? Perhaps providing food for athletes 24/7?

* Do we need all these administrators, assistant coaches and analysts? Do any of them grow our revenues?

* How committed are we to Olympic sports?

* What happens if Judge Claudia Wilken doesn't approve the settlement?

* What happens if a significant number of athletes opt out or object to the settlement?

* What happens if athletes are determined to be employees and form collective bargaining units?

* What if new antitrust lawsuits are filed contesting the share revenue cap and/or the team roster limits?

That's just for starters. Things will get much more complicated over the next few months and years.

This is what happens when greed and self-interest trump every other consideration.

Education? Never enters the conversation.

Bruins Socked with Calimony: The UC Board of Regents recently announced that Big Ten-bound UCLA must pay $10 million annually to Cal’s athletic department for the next three years.

The penalty was proposed by UC System president Michael Drake, who justified the "Calimony" by noting, “there will be an approximately $50 million difference between UCLA’s Big Ten contract and UC Berkeley’s agreement with the ACC."

So the Bruins essentially are getting penalized for being a sought-after athletic program, while the Bears are getting a rather substantial bonus for being much less desirable.

The $10 million represented the top of the range established by the UC Regents in December 2022, when they approved UCLA's move to the Big Ten conditional on a payment to compensate their sibling in Berkeley.

I think it's absurd. UCLA was attractive to the Big Ten because of its LA television market and its consistent success in NCAA team championships, second only to Stanford. 

Cal, because of its historical mediocrity, was not, and was only able to get invited into the ACC by agreeing to take a vastly-reduced share (30%) of the conference's media rights revenues for the next seven years.

One could argue, as this column has done, that UCLA has been subsidizing Cal for decades by going to bowl games and winning 11 NCAA basketball championships or advancing far into the tournament, all of which generated huge revenue for the Pac-8/10/12. Those funds were distributed to all conference schools, including Cal, a school that rarely generated comparable income for the conference.

It should also be noted that Washington and Oregon, two other ex-Pac-12 schools moving to the Big Ten, haven't been asked to compensate their in-state colleagues Washington State and Oregon State, the schools who've been left behind to an uncertain fate in the Pac-2.

The Bears were very fortunate, to say the least, that the Regents made UCLA their brother's keeper.

Tara on Retirement:  In a recent San Francisco Chronicle article about cleaning out her Stanford office after 38 years, iconic women's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer let down her guard about the impact of NIL, the transfer portal and her school's move to the ACC:

“Just the way things are right now in women’s basketball, I just knew that I didn’t have the right energy for what the job is going to take,” VanDerveer said.

She's not the only great coach to feel that way. Nick Saban, Coach K, and Jay Wright also reached the same conclusion and retired, while Jim Harbaugh headed to the NFL.

34 for 45: A number of subscribers have asked me to weigh in on last week's conviction of former President Donald Trump on 34 felony counts. 

I really didn't think there was much I could offer that hasn't been said by many others, so instead I'll just post this quote from NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, which pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter:

"A dozen Americans had finally sliced through Trump's reality distortion field and said, simply, 'you're lying and cheating and it's not right.' Even though the case was a stretch and not the strongest one against Trump, there was something refreshing about the jury doing what no one else around Trump has been able to do--not the inexplicably sycophantish Republic lawmakers, not the corrupt Supreme Court, not the slowpoke Merrick Garland.

"The jurors were not Trump's peers because Trump has no peer in mendacity. But it was great to see the 12 just say, 'no, you don't slime your way into the presidency by having your creepy gofer pay off a porn star you slept with, while your wife was home with a newborn, and call it a legal expense.'"

Amen.