I’m Milton Kent and this is Sports at Large.
That was some wind that blew through over the weekend, one that augurs profound change for years to come.
Oh, you thought we were speaking of the gusts that brought on chilly conditions late Saturday and Sunday?
The cold will disappear soon enough, but the breeze that swept in over the past few days promises to alter American sports for decades.
As of March 1, colleges and universities will be authorized to pay their athletes for their services as well as providing scholarships, room and board.
After years of fighting what seems only natural and commonsense, schools will begin compensating young people for what are, in most cases, the equivalent of part or full-time jobs.
The payment process will actually begin July 1, but schools are already planning how to distribute the revenue.
For instance, at the University of Georgia, the athletic department will reportedly allot 75 percent of the total compensation pool of $20.5 million to football players, who have won two of the last four college football playoffs.
Fifteen percent of the Bulldogs’ booty will go to the men’s basketball team with five percent going to the women’s basketball team. The remaining five percent will be divided among the rest of the school’s athletes.
The allocation formula is likely to vary from school to school, but the athletes who play the sports that generate the most revenue, meaning men who are football and basketball players are almost certain to get the most money.
As we told you recently, officials in former President Biden’s Education Department had advised that payments from schools might be subject to Title IX regulations.
Those require educational institutions that receive federal funding to commit money and opportunities in proportion to enrollment by gender. That would mean a much more equally divided distribution between men’s and women’s teams.
However, not long after taking office, the Trump administration has reversed that advisement, essentially giving schools permission to do what Georgia is doing, namely give male athletes the lion’s share of revenue.
Oddly enough, while scholarships are likely to increase at most schools, the actual number of athletes who are on the individual teams will decrease. Georgia, for instance, will add 100 scholarship athletes, while cutting the overall number of athletes by 75.
Undoubtedly, there will be those who will rail about the propriety of paying college athletes. They’ll say that bastions of higher learning should be just that, and that the sanctity of amateurism must be preserved.
For years, those people had a champion in Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA, who ruled the college athletics governing body with an iron fist for 37 years.
Under Byers, the NCAA coined the term student-athlete as a means to defend the concept of amateurism in college sports.
Eventually, however, Byers came to see the flaw in his logic, that colleges and universities, which collect billions in revenues on the backs of athletes, couldn’t continue to deny them some of that largesse.
Byers eventually felt the winds of change and, as of July 1, everyone else associated with college sports will too.
And that’s how I see it for this week. You can reach us via email with your questions and comments at Sports at Large at gmail.com. And follow me on Threads, BlueSky and X at Sports at Large.
Until next week, for all of us here and for producer Lisa Morgan, I’m Milton Kent. Thanks for listening and enjoy the games.