INDIANAPOLIS — In his stylish checkered suit jacket and red tie, a cleanly cropped hairline and perfectly trimmed beard, Ryan Day strides across Lucas Oil Stadium and through Big Ten media days Tuesday like a CEO occupying the halls of a Fortune 500 company.
In many ways, he is CEO of a Fortune 500 company: Ohio State Football, Inc.
Last year, Ohio State produced the country’s largest athletic budget, $275 million, much of it from football-generated revenue. And soon the school, like all others, will be permitted to distribute that wealth directly to players.
In fact, the university is rich enough that its donor-led collective and brand affiliates disbursed to Buckeyes football players “around $20 million” this past year, said Ross Bjork, the Ohio State athletic director. In all likelihood, that figure ranks first in America.
But as college sports enters a new revenue-sharing model, a question looms for all schools, most notably the nation’s richest.
Will those numbers continue?
“It’s too early to predict,” Bjork said. “How is it going to be broken down from a Title IX standpoint? The challenge is, we’re up against the clock. We’re signing athletes in football in December. We need some clarity sometime this fall.”
On Day 1 of the three-day media gathering in downtown Indianapolis, the Big Ten’s behemoth took center stage. This season looms as most important for Day, the 45-year-old entering his sixth full season in charge, having lost three straight years to rival Michigan and not yet winning a national title.
While he’s won 56 games and lost eight, the expectation level in Columbus is quite lofty, this season especially. With such extravagant resources — perhaps the biggest football roster budget in all of college football — the goal is clear: win it all.
“We all know there is a lot of noise and hype around this team,” Day said Tuesday.
Off the field, the future remains murky.
The NCAA and power conferences are expected to file on Friday the long-form agreement in the landmark settlement of three antitrust cases — a 70-plus page document that outlines particulars around the two-part deal: the $2.77 billion in back pay to former athletes and the new model permitting schools to share upward of $20-plus million with athletes starting next fall.
How to distribute the revenue to athletes while balancing the federal Title IX law remains a vexing issue that the country’s richest athletic department continues to examine. Like many college leaders across the country, Bjork believes the formula used to distribute the back pay — as much as 90% may go to power conference men’s athletes — will serve as a “road map” for determining how schools will distribute revenue in the new system.
Plaintiff attorneys are expected to distribute the back pay — language that will be included in the long-form agreement — to mostly power conference football and men’s basketball players, they’ve said.
“We all are going to follow Title IX,” said Bjork. “It applies to our athletic programs, universities, all of those things. But this is a new pocket of financial aid or compensation, a new bucket that was not contemplated when only financial aid and just grant-in-aids were talked about in the original Title IX legislation. We need a lot of analysis. What does the legal analysis say around this newfound bucket of money?”
Ohio State is “modeling, analyzing and testing” different ways to distribute revenue against “legal analysis,” he said. Many other departments are conducting the same modeling. Can 80% of the annual revenue go to men and 20% to women? How about 70-30? Or does it need to be closer to a 50-50 split?
It remains a hazy issue, but both Bjork and his coach believe that any ratio should be the same or similar across the country.
“I think coming together and having some uniformity is the most important thing here,” Day told Yahoo Sports on Tuesday. “In terms of what that number is, that’s over my head. I know we need to be Title IX compliant at the same time. I think some uniformity is not unreasonable.”
Most provisions in the settlement give schools flexibility on various issues as localized decisions, a way for college leaders to remove the NCAA and conference from antitrust challenges. But perhaps an unwritten and loosely termed conference-wide mandate is possible.
“The question is, can it be some uniform standard across the country without getting ourselves into another legal entanglement?” asked Bjork.
This continues to be a topic of discussion in each power league, with administrators meeting weekly to deliberate on possibilities of distribution and Title IX’s influence. Big Ten conference commissioner Tony Petitti said the settlement’s expansion of scholarships gives schools “all kinds of opportunities,” which possibly includes additional women scholarships to balance out Title IX.
As part of the agreement, scholarship restrictions are being replaced by roster limits. Under the new model, schools can offer scholarships to each member of a roster. Football, with a current scholarship restriction of 85, will now have a roster limit of around 105. Baseball, with a scholarship restriction of 11.7 now, is expected to have a roster limit in the “mid-30s,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last week.
Another key change to the…
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