TCU’s athletic director opens up on NIL and a new era for college football
After countless delays and a lengthy legal battle, the House v. NCAA Settlement was finally approved June 6, marking a shift to a new era of college athletics.
The $2.8 billion, 10-year settlement will pay past players for missed name, image and likeness opportunities and allow colleges to pay players directly starting July 1.
The initial ‘salary cap’ will be around around $20.5 million. That number is expected to rise in the next few years.
In theory, all of the schools in the Power Four conferences will be working with the same cash pot, which hasn’t been the case during the NIL era.
“The great news for a program like ours, starting next year is whether you’re Kansas, Houston, Kentucky, Duke or TCU, you’re pretty much going to have the same lump of revenue share dollars,” TCU athletics director Mike Buddie said in the hours before the settlement was officially approved.
Most schools will pay their football teams around $15 million, men’s basketball will receive around $3 million with the final $2 million divided between women’s basketball, baseball and other sports.
In the past few years of the NIL era, college athletics was like international soccer or Major League Baseball with some teams just paying able to spend more than their competition.
Informal salary cap for college sports
But the new revenue sharing model with an informal salary cap will bring college athletics closer to the NBA and NFL model in which everybody has the same cash to spend.
“While some have been able to outspend us and build their roster with proven talent with transfers, starting in 2026 and beyond, everybody’s pretty much going to have a $3 million pool to build their roster,” Buddie said, referring to men’s basketball. “That means the things that used to matter will matter again. Coaching, development, facilities and TCU is a great position in all of those.”
While Buddie is optimistic about the future of college athletics, he’s not naive. The effectiveness of this new era will come down to how much entities like Deloitte and the College Sports Commission will actually be able to monitor and identify NIL deals over $600 that go against the rules.
The CSC is the new era’s enforcement arm that will have final say in doling out punishments and deciding when rules have been broken. Meanwhile, Deloitte has established a clearinghouse that will be known as NIL Go, which will be used to verify whether deals between athletes and boosters or collectives are for a valid business purpose rather than a recruiting incentive.
In this new era, NIL deals will go back to what they were supposed to be; athletes partnering with local businesses and other entities for brand deals like former TCU basketball player Eddie Lampkin’s deal with local fast food chain Chicken Express.
NIL rules enforcement
The NIL evolved into pay-for-play and historically college programs have shown that they’re more than willing to skirt the rules to get a leg up on the competition. Will the CSC and Deloitte really be able to stop cheating?
Buddie has some doubts.
“The level of confidence is not high,” Buddie said. “The encouraging thing for me is from, from Charlie Baker at the NCAA to (Big 12) Commissioner Brett Yormark, to the people who are in the room building this new structure of enforcement, all of them are saying there will be significant teeth, to those who either circumvent the cap limit or are funding NIL deals that are not approved, by all of those accounts, there will be significant penalties.”
The lack of penalties has been missing in Buddie’s mind and much of it has to do with the NCAA losing countless legal battles, which led the organization stepping away from enforcing things like improper benefits and stepping aside for the CSC to handle it.
But will it really work? Buddie believes it may take a school being made an example for all the others to fall in line.
“For years, I think the NCAA has given slaps on the wrist, with the exception of SMU,” Buddie said. “And when the SMU death penalty happened, like it got everybody’s attention, and I think what’s going to have to happen is this new enforcement agency is going to have to get people’s attention. If you circumvent the rules, there are going to be real repercussions.
“So I’m confident that that will happen, but I also am confident that there will be bad actors out there who are going to try to circumvent it. It could be back to the old days of, of putting money in a bag and sliding it under the table, but we just have to hope that we police ourselves, because usually coaches are the ones who know that that’s happening, and hopefully for the first time in a long time, when those people are caught, there will be serious consequences.”
The system won’t be perfect, but it’s the best one available and how teams from the Big 12 manage their cap will be essential in closing the gap with the Big 10 and SEC.
College Football Playoff implications
Along with the House Settlement, the college football off-season has been dominated with discussions of altering the College Football Playoff format.
Just this summer alone the CFP adjusted how it seeded teams as the playoff is going to a straight seeding model in which the top four teams receive a bye regardless if they won their conference or not. Conference champions will still receive automatic bids.
While not official, there’s also strong momentum to expand the field from 12 to 16. That expansion emboldened the SEC and Big 10 pitch formats in which they would receive four automatic bids with the Big 12 and ACC getting two each.
On one hand, getting two Big 12 teams into the playoff every year would be massive for the league. But the price of admission was too costly in the eyes of Buddie and other Big 12 athletic directors.
“We have to position ourselves as a league to try and do what we can to get as many teams as we can into the playoff,” Buddie said. “What I love that Commissioner Yormark has done is it’s kind of challenged all of us to put our money where our mouth is, and instead of guaranteeing AQ spots for for all of us, we have said, hey, every sport that the NCAA competes in, you get one AQ per conference and the rest are at-larges.
“We think that should be consistent and you should earn your way into the playoff.”
It’s a risky position to take when earning a spot in the playoff often comes down to public perception of the conferences and the schedules you play.
Think about last year’s BYU team that went 10-2 but didn’t have a chance at an at-large bid while three loss SEC teams like Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina were right on the cusp of getting into the field.
How new CFP format affects Big 12
Even though a format with five AQs and 11 at-large bids would likely put the Big 12 at a disadvantage initially, Buddie and the rest of the league still believe it was the right move to make.
“We’re betting on ourselves a little bit that the 5+11 is going to be an opportunity for us to get two, three or four teams in the CFP,” Buddie said. “The 4-4-2-2 would’ve been a concession that we are a lesser league. We’re looking at 2020-2024 and we shouldn’t punish ourselves not being as competitive through the committee’s eyes because that can change.
“If three years from now the Big 12 is the strongest conference, we’ve really put ourselves at a disadvantage.”
The NIL era already produced more parity across the sport and in theory, that should continue with teams spending roughly the same amount of revenue-share on their rosters.
“We wanted to approach it for what’s best for college football,” Buddie said. “And that may not necessarily mean that that’s the best thing for each of our individual campuses. But overall, how do we position the game to continue to grow, continue to be competitive and, and have some semblance of fair play?
“And what we believe is now that there’s revenue sharing that’s going to take over for a lot of what this previous NIL was purposed for, we think the playing field is going to be fairly level, and we expect ourselves to be extremely competitive. We weighed all the options and where we landed was that five automatic qualification spots and then the next 11 teams should be in. And if they’re all SEC schools, we can live with it, and if they’re all big 12 schools, we can live with it, and we think it’ll land somewhere in between.”
This new era of revenue sharing and an expanded playoff field will bring challenges, but it’ll also bring the possibility of finally being able to compete with Big 10 and SEC financially.
It’s on Buddie to navigate this next era and continue to elevate TCU as an athletics program and based on his track record, the Horned Frogs are in good hands as they enter the next chapter of college athletics.
