As another year of exhilarating college sports commences, the 2025 academic year brings in a new landscape with the implication of revenue sharing. As of July 1, schools are allowed to directly pay their athletes a share of revenue stemming from ticket sales, sponsorships and media rights thanks to The House v. NCAA settlement. The cap is set to $20.5 million to be distributed among all of a college’s athletic program. This has caused some to question the allocation of these funds and the amount’s merit.  

With this new addition of paying student athletes directly, it is important to know that this does not interfere with any NIL deals, scholarships and other educational benefits they are obliged to by a third-party, even when arranged by the institution. This fact allows some college sports to supplement the dilution of funds that head towards the primary televised games, which are football and basketball. The NCAA estimates that 90% of the revenue will be directed to those two sports. 

This unfortunately cripples the desirability to play the sport someone wants when they might be better off following a more lucrative avenue. This scenario rings true for schools that hold football as their marquee sport, but could play out completely differently for a school that’s prized-program isn’t football, like Coastal Carolina University with baseball or Gonzaga University with men’s basketball. The good news is that if schools are just focused on getting our athletes paid, there are other avenues of income that can be set up that do not go against the cap. Local sponsorships as well as an increase in institutional scholarships are still available. No one will know how this plays out until it does. It is a new chapter in the evolution of college athletics.

With a lot more money involved in college athletics, the stakes are raised. At some point, the game boils down to resources because while these institutions have to operate under that $20.5 million cap, the ability to provide can extend outside of just monetary value. Not every school can market the way The University of Texas at Austin does, so it expands the game outside of just writing a bigger check. The penalty for going over the cap and spending too much is that it bleeds into the following year. While this can seem like a crippling punishment, the real return on investment to these institutions is to win a championship — a very digestible setback when the goal was already met. With this new era, it seems like some schools can take big swings without fear of anything drastic happening, and it simply seems the penalty needs to be updated to something a little more drastic to deter others from such. 

The discrepancy in the allocation in funds sparks concerns regarding Title IX. It is going to be interesting how they argue the allocation with football and basketball being the lion share of its total revenue. While these are concurrent scenarios, there is much left to play out in the new world that is the revenue sharing chapter in college athletics. The NCAA can only anticipate so much that is not on their behalf, one just has to hope they can correct the ship if and when it veers off course.