Enough to Go Around
Revenue Sharing with College Football Players Doesn't Mean Cutting Women's Sports
This is a free online newsletter for Jason Stahl, Executive Director of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA). If you are a member of the general public who would like to financially support our efforts at the CFBPA you can do that here. If you are a past, present or future college football player, I ask that you consider becoming a member of the CFBPA. For a succinct YouTube primer on the CFBPA, click here.
I very much appreciated having the opportunity to testify on the future of college athletics before the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee. You can watch the full hearing here, read my full written statement here or check out video clips at the CFBPA Tik Tok. I did a couple interviews — one in print and one in podcast — after the hearing. In these, I discussed my various reactions to the day. Given all of this, there is not much left to say that I haven’t already. However, in all of these opportunities afforded to me to stake out the positions of the CFBPA, I did not yet have a chance to respond to one of the witnesses on the panel with me. So, I wanted to use today’s newsletter to do so.
Kaley Mudge is a current softball player at Florida State University. You can read her full written testimony here and listen to her oral statement at the link above. Also, just this past weekend, Ms. Mudge wrote an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times outlining the two central arguments she forwarded in her testimony. First, Ms. Mudge argues that there needs to be a national legislative standard governing college athlete Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rights. Secondly, she argues against revenue sharing with college football and men’s basketball athletes on the grounds that this would lead to cuts to sports like hers.
My own testimony responded extensively to the first part of her argument. However, since it appears that the NCAA will be enlisting athletes like Ms. Mudge to make their case against revenue sharing with college football players, this second part of her argument deserves a full response.
I’ll be reaching out to Ms. Mudge with this newsletter as I think her position on revenue sharing and the position of the CFBPA have more in common than at first glance. I say this as it appears from her op-ed that Ms. Mudge is only arguing against certain types of revenue sharing with college football players. Specifically, she argues that “revenue-sharing models like the one currently being proposed in California” would lead to “hundreds of thousands of athletes in non-revenue-generating sports” facing “the real possibility our sports would be cut.”
Although she doesn’t clarify, I’m going to assume that Ms. Mudge is referring to the College Athlete Protection Act currently being debated in California. At the CFBPA, we’re not involved with this legislation and have taken no position on it so we’ll leave defending the proposed legislation to its supporters. However, when discussing revenue sharing with Power Five football players, at the CFBPA we definitely disagree with the idea that such efforts would or should lead to cutting “non-revenue-generating sports” like softball at Florida State University. Quite simply, as I explained many times at the Congressional hearing, there is more than enough money in college athletics for revenue sharing with Power Five college football players while maintaining all sports currently offered at these institutions.
Ms. Mudge’s Florida State University offers a good example of this. The image accompanying this newsletter is a breakdown of the revenue and expenses for Florida State Athletics for the 2021-22 cycle. I took this from the database at Sportico which offers a wealth of financial information from athletic departments around the country. As you see from the image, Florida State brought in roughly $161 million of revenue for this one year with approximately half of that wealth being generated by the labor of the Florida State football players.
Most Power Five athletics programs work hard to spend all of their revenue so they can claim to the public that they are “unprofitable.” This can be hard to accomplish for the only industry in America that doesn’t have to pay its workers. Florida State was one of the institutions that fell short of spending it all. So, for 2021-22, it “only” spent $150 million of the $161 that they took in. What this means is that, in the case of Florida State, the $11 million left over could simply be allocated to revenue sharing with the revenue-generating athletes. Softball, and every other “non-revenue-generating sport” on Florida State’s campus would see no cuts at all.
However, this doesn’t even account for all the new money soon to be coming into college athletics in the future. As I stressed in my Congressional testimony, new media rights money will soon be flowing into the coffers of Power Five athletics departments around the country. This will be from conference media rights agreements and from expanding the College Football Playoffs in 2024. This will all be new money, billions of dollars, primarily generated by football players, which needs to be shared with them.
Multiple times in my testimony I addressed this new money which could be shared with football players without disrupting existing athletic department budgets. Moreover, revenue sharing of this new media rights money need not be contingent upon classifying college athletes as employees. Instead, if the NCAA would simply lift their restriction prohibiting member institutions from compensating college athletes for appearing in televised media, revenue sharing could be accomplished. The fourth plank of the CFBPA Platform for Change addresses this.
I hope the facts I’ve presented in this newsletter encourage Ms. Mudge to reconsider being enlisted in the NCAA’s fight against revenue sharing for college football players. Quite simply, there is more than enough money to go around at the Power Five level to do a full slate of women’s and men’s sports while also getting football players the revenue sharing they deserve. I implore Ms. Mudge, and others who hold a similar stance, to not play into the NCAA’s divide-and-conquer fear-based strategy. Athletes are at their best when they’re united and empowered and there’s no reason they can’t be the issue of revenue sharing.