An Interesting Thought for the NCAA
May 8th, 2009 - byYesterday I wrote about the widening competitive gap between schools in the Power-Six conferences and the rest of the NCAA. Costs continue to escalate and many schools are finding it quite difficult to tap new revenue sources. College Football Talk floated an interesting idea that has the blog-o-sphere buzzing.
This is starting to feel a lot like the Major League Baseball of the early nineties, where teams like the Yankees had such an incredible economic advantage that small market teams had no chance to win. If the NCAA wants to truly promote student athletes and athletics, it might want to start thinking about outside-the-box solutions like revenue sharing.
Rivals.com also weighed in with a great opinion on the subject.
I don’t want to advocate a revenue-sharing/salary cap model — realistically, as a hypothetical idea, it is an infinitely longer shot than, say, playoffs — but as part of the debate over the inequality gap, it’s an idea whose time has come.
The topic is extremely new, but in my opinion not too far fetched. Conferences already share revenue. BCS schools share revenue. The NCAA shares revenue. Why not a Division as a whole? One thing is certain, this topic will continue to be discussed as the financial gap widens.
