WASHINGTON — The University of Texas will spend nearly $6 million a year to comply with a string of recent legal rulings requiring colleges to be more generous to their scholarship athletes.
That won’t break the bank, Athletic Director Steve Patterson said Tuesday at a forum on the fast-changing business of college sports. But even rich programs like UT’s will be forced to make tough choices in the future if momentum in the courts continues to push colleges to treat their players like employees or semi-pros, he said.
Chris Plonsky, director for women’s sports at Texas, said the school already employs 350 workers to coach and care for the students who play in Austin. The money for all of those jobs, she said, comes from just two sports, football and men’s basketball.
“If we begin to [further] remunerate the participants, that’s going to break that model,” Plonsky said.
Patterson said UT won’t have problems paying the extra $6 million to its players. That money will break down to about $10,000 for each player. The money will cover college expenses that aren’t covered by a traditional full scholarship and give each player $5,000 in compensation for the university’s use of his image.
Colleges will soon be asked to do even more, and they ought to prepare for that, some on the panels argued. Former U.S. Rep. Tom McMillen of Maryland said colleges should brace for profound challenges to their business models in the near future.
“We’re in for a period of dynamic change,” said McMillen, an All-America basketball player for the University of Maryland who also played for the United States in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. “The system has to change. The money needs to be handled differently.”
Other panelists argued that so much is changing in college sports that a stronger governing hand is needed.
“Everybody is in charge and nobody is,” said Lisa Love, former Athletic Director at Arizona State.
McMillen added: “What I’m looking for is a benevolent dictator for college sports.”
USA Today sportswriter Steve Berkowitz said he worries that the price of keeping a program in contention for championships is driving some schools to spend too much. That can put students and taxpayers on the hook for debt or higher fees, all in a gamble that teams will be successful.
Chris Del Conte, Athletic Director at Texas Christian University, didn’t disagree with that. But he and Patterson both said schools should set their own priorities. Those that invest in top-flight athletics should be rewarded, they said.
Del Conte said TCU decided it would make the investments necessary to compete nationally, and ultimately joined a major conference, the Big 12.
“We invested, even back when we didn’t know the future of that investment,” he said. “We decided, and our alumni had decided, that we were going to compete.”
It wasn’t cheap. To renovate its 45,000-seat football stadium, TCU raised $15 million each from five wealthy donors, he said, and added that they had “nickel-and-dimed our way to the rest [of the $164 million bill], with a million here and $5 million there.”
The payoff? Applications to TCU surged to 20,000 a year for its 1,600 spots.
On Twitter: @lindenberger
