Golden age of Big Ten football? House settlement gives the conference a structural advantage in talent acquisition
The Friday news dump to end all Friday news dumps came last week at roughly 6:15 p.m., when U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken approved the settlement terms of the landmark House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuit that begins a new era for major college sports.
The ensuing hours brought a series of statements and responses from various conferences, schools and industry stakeholders.
At 9:05 p.m., Washington chimed in.
The Huskies unveiled Dawgs Unleashed, described by athletic director Pat Chun as “an internal business unit” designed “to assist our student-athletes with maximizing their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) opportunities.
“The potential number of valid business-purpose NIL opportunities for our student athletes, both locally and globally,” Chun added, “will be unmatched.”
Chun was referring to his school, which shares a metropolitan area with Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon. But he could have easily been speaking to the collective might of Washington’s institutional brethren in the Big Ten.
No conference is better positioned for the era of revenue sharing and legitimate NIL. That includes the SEC, which used its fan passion and proximity to talent to dominate the sport for years. But the creation of the transfer portal and the rise of booster-run NIL collectives this decade have reshaped the roster construction process.
Since that point, the playing field has leveled out. The Big Ten won the national championship in 2023 (Michigan) and 2024 (Ohio State) and bolstered its success at the top with quality depth. The conference went 5-1 against the SEC in bowl games last season, with two playoff victories (both courtesy of Ohio State).
The post-settlement world could supercharge the recalibration of the competitive landscape and herald a golden age for Big Ten football.
“And it’s not happenstance,” a conference source noted.
Every major strategic move made by the conference for the past 20 years — from the creation of the Big Ten Network to the bicoastal expansion — has positioned the Big Ten for the post-House world.
Two pillars of the settlement are rooted in real-time economics:
— Schools are allowed to share up to $20.5 million with athletes in the upcoming fiscal year, with the number expected to climb over time as revenues increase.
Most athletic departments in the Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big 12 will devote approximately $15 million to football. The schools with the largest revenue streams (media rights revenue, ticket and merchandise revenue, philanthropic revenue) are best equipped to absorb that massive expense without rolling back key resources like recruiting budgets and coaching staff salaries. The Big Ten’s TV deal, worth about $1 billion annually, is the largest in the country.
— The power conferences created the College Sports Commission to enforce “valid business-purpose NIL opportunities” (Chun’s phrasing) and eliminate the pay-for-play deals negotiated by booster-run collectives. Any agreement of $600 or more must be reported to NIL Go, a technology platform designed by Deloitte that will determine whether deals fall within a reasonable range for the service performed.
Legitimate NIL deals offer a means for schools to surpass the $15 million in revenue-sharing allocated to football rosters. To exceed the cap, in other words.
How far above the cap could they go? Some schools might use their in-house NIL units — their versions of Dawgs Unleashed — to broker $3 million or $4 million in valid NIL opportunities for football players; others might arrange for deals worth a total of $10 million.
The outcome hinges, to a large extent, on the local and regional business communities that will serve as the source of NIL opportunities.
And therein lies the Big Ten’s structural advantages: the depth and scope of its alumni base, the wealth of its communities and the size of its media markets.
In all regards, it seemingly owns a decisive advantage over its rival:
— The Big Ten’s 14-state footprint (and Washington, D.C.) features 235 companies listed in the Fortune 500. The SEC footprint has 130.
(Notably, publicly-traded companies are not subject to the reasonable compensation provision in the settlement, although their status can be changed if the College Sports Commission determines they are an associated entity of the school.)
— The Big Ten footprint features 12 of the top 25 media markets in the country, including four of the top five (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia). The SEC footprint features five of the top 25.
— Big Ten schools have a combined current enrollment of approximately 825,000 undergraduates compared to the SEC’s 600,000, an indication of the comparative size of the alumni bases.
— And perhaps most tellingly, the gross domestic product of the Big Ten states was $12.5 trillion last year, while the GDP of the SEC states totalled $8.4 trillion.
(We did not include the state of New York when calculating the GDP of the Big Ten footprint or Fortune 500 companies. However, we included New York City as a media market for the conference because the Big Ten Network is available on a basic, in-market tier on the cable systems. If you add New York’s GDP, the total for the Big Ten footprint jumps to $14.8 trillion. Adding Fortune 500 companies in New York would increase the Big Ten’s total to 287.)
On the foundation of roster construction in the post-House world, a source noted: “The last environment was about billionaires writing checks. This era will be about business opportunities.”
In theory, at least.
Legal experts question the validity of the NIL Go system used to determine whether deals fall within what the College Sports Commission (CSC) calls “a reasonable range of compensation.”
That description is code for fair market value, which many believe can only be defined by the market itself — not by a technology platform created by a client (Deloitte) to assist an entity (the CSC) that’s working for the schools.
Legal challenges to NIL Go assessments seem inevitable. If successful, they could derail oversight and return the player procurement process to the current landscape, which ACC commissioner Jim Phillips described on Monday as “an unregulated environment with no rules and no enforcement.”
Even if NIL Go withstands legal challenges and roots out illegitimate NIL deals, thus giving the Big Ten an apparent advantage, there is a potential recourse:
The return of under-the-table cheating.
The CSC’s chief executive is Bryan Seeley, a former lead investigator for Major League Baseball. Eventually, Seeley will hire a staff and create a penalty matrix, but he won’t have subpoena power.
How will the CSC police boosters in every college town (and big city) in the country?
Donor-funded NIL collectives won’t dominate the marketplace, but they will retain some influence. And if donors are determined enough, they can pull out the rules circumvention playbook that has existed for decades.
The return of under-the-table cheating could mitigate the Big Ten’s advantage in legal, legitimate NIL.
But for a conference that spent more than a decade watching the SEC celebrate one title after another, the structural advantage in talent acquisition created by the House settlement constitutes a major upgrade in the competitive balance.
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