The Future of College Athletics

oger Ward, GRD’09, has long viewed college athletics as a vehicle to help student-athletes maximize their educational opportunities. The provost and executive vice president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) coached his two daughters as they traversed the competitive hoops circuit (his youngest eventually transitioned to volleyball), and he continues coaching the sport, now with former NBA player Carmelo Anthony’s Amateur Athletic Union Team Melo in Baltimore. So, he tries to help his players and other parents as they navigate college recruitment, where promises of five- and six-figure financial commitments are part of a new landscape.

“We’re a sporting family to be sure, but it’s always been the case where sports have been a means to an end,” said Ward. “None of my kids wanted to play pro, so it was always about the academics for us.”

College sports are drastically different now, thanks to a nearly $3 billion legal settlement that was formally approved in June. The House v. NCAA settlement, which marked the end of three different antitrust lawsuits that each claimed the NCAA was illegally limiting the earning power of student-athletes, now allows schools to begin paying their athletes. Many of the most prominent Division I teams in the country were already run like professional organizations, but now they need general managers to manage their team’s payroll. They have to decide which sports and athletes to spend their money on to see if they can remain competitive in a market where dollar values are eye-popping for fans.

“This is a major change in terms of how athletes receive athletic scholarships that began August 1, 2025,” said Karen Weaver, GRD’09, a national expert on the intersection of college sports and higher education who runs Penn GSE’s Collegiate Athletics for Senior Campus Leaders certificate program. “It has affected every sport, not just football. If schools ‘opt-in,’ their costs potentially go up dramatically if they want to remain competitive.”

For example, the value of a talented, returning All Conference women’s basketball player coming from one of the “Power Four” conferences that are rich in television revenue contracts—the Southeastern Conference (SEC), Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), or Big 12—is estimated to be between $300,000 and $600,000. These figures often increase for returning college football players, with some of the best quarterbacks in the country reportedly making seven figures. Agents represent college athletes and help them navigate and negotiate their compensation. Athletes often sign nondisclosure agreements and are encouraged by their coaches to not tell their teammates or the media how much money they’re making. The trickle-down effect of these hefty paydays is being felt at every level of college sports.

Athletes are getting paid because of new revenue-sharing agreements made possible by the House settlement. These lofty financial promises are meant to help entice the best athletes to the Power Four conference schools, where athletic departments will have to dig deep into their own pockets to pay the athletes from their school’s revenue-sharing money. Also relatively new to collegiate athletics are name, image, and likeness (NIL) agreements, which allow athletes to profit from businesses outside their school by participating in events like camps, clinics, autograph signings, jersey sales, commercial shoots, and other opportunities.

“If the NCAA hadn’t fought so hard against the Ed O’Bannon decision, I don’t think we’d be where we are today,” said Weaver. O’Bannon is a former UCLA basketball player and part of the Bruins’ 1995 NCAA championship team. In 2014, he argued that athletes should be entitled to financial compensation for use of their NIL from videogames that featured their images. “Both sides got entrenched in their arguments and the values of preserving amateurism just accelerated the lawsuits and the challenges. Now, you’re drinking out of a firehose.”

This boom time for the top college athletes, however, will not impact everyone equally. The Ivy League opted out of the House vs. NCAA settlement, meaning those schools will not participate in revenue sharing, though their athletes are allowed to pursue NIL opportunities. And certain colleges and universities—namely those in the NCAA’s Division III, which have never provided athletics scholarships—will be even further left behind now that potential student-athletes can earn not just a free ride, but also a lucrative paycheck from other schools. (Division II and Division III schools won’t be participating in revenue sharing, unless they are uniquely positioned with a Division I team in a certain sport, such as Johns Hopkins University’s lacrosse and fencing or St. Cloud State University’s men’s and women’s hockey.)

Revenue sharing has changed what college head coaches talk about when they’re recruiting prospective student-athletes. The promise of a free education is often seen as an add-in rather than the main selling point.

“For years, it was the 40-year trajectory of the Penn alumni network, the Dartmouth alumni network, the Ivy League circle of people. And that was the deal on the table that you put down. You said, ‘Nobody can top this,’” said Weaver. “Now, you have life-changing money for maybe 100 athletes. How do you turn that down? To add to the complexity, there are many Division I schools that can’t offer any revenue share, because their athletic budgets are paid for by tuition and student fees from all students. What to do then? Should fellow students pay the athletes?”

UMB’s Ward found out first-hand last spring just how complex the NCAA transfer portal—the database that facilitates student-athletes’ transfer between schools—can be. His older daughter, Destini, played basketball at Saint Francis University. Last March, the Red Flash announced they would transition from NCAA Division I to Division III. The move was the result of mounting financial pressure to try and keep pace in an era where NIL and revenue sharing are directly competing with various financial needs of every academic institution and athletic department.

The financial crunch is felt throughout college sports. More Division I schools could opt to transition to Division III in the coming years to avoid having to try and keep pace with the Power Four programs and widespread geographical conferences that will stretch travel budgets.

“If you’re talking about having to recruit student-athletes, share revenues, invest in athletic facilities, travel, and you don’t have a revenue share from a Power Four conference, you’re taking university assets, and they’re on a collision course with other important priorities for the university,” said Lawrence Ward, GRD’11, (no relation to Roger) president of University of Hartford. Hartford completed the multiyear transition from Division I to Division III in September.

What university presidents, athletic directors, and coaches know is that the best athletes will command six- and seven-figure financial commitments at Power Four institutions. Those top programs will commit the full allotment of the permitted $20.5 million per year in revenue sharing to their athletes. That revenue cap figure will increase in the coming years. That money, much of it coming from television contracts for football and basketball, can be dispersed among each school’s sports teams however those universities see fit. However, football and basketball are the main beneficiaries.

What does that mean for nonrevenue or Olympic sports? Will there be fewer opportunities for these sports—or women’s sports—because schools could elect to save the money spent on those sports and instead put it toward further bolstering football and basketball? A recent Washington Post story followed two brothers who were recruited to dive at Division I programs only to lose their roster spot (at North Carolina State) and have their team shuttered (at the University of Virginia) amid changes brought on by the House settlement.

“We’ve been enormously successful in the Olympics because of our college-sports feeder system,” said Weaver, who was herself Olympics-bound as a field hockey player in 1980, though the U.S. boycotted the Moscow games. “We have a handful of sports that have development programs outside of college, but for the most part, we’re playing a dozen or more Olympic sports on college campuses every day. So that’s important, and that problem has to be fixed, because the United States likes to win in the Olympics, right?

“We also have to figure out what does Title IX mean in this new era?” Weaver continued, speaking about the 1972 law that was supposed to create equal athletic opportunity for women and girls. “All of the gains that we’ve seen women make, still to this day, do not put us in compliance with what the law intended.”

If Power Four schools don’t commit to the full allotment of revenue-sharing dollars per year ($20.5 million), their competitors will. If a school chooses to give one or two sports a larger piece of the revenue-sharing pie than another, that too could cause challenges.

The locker room dynamic that so many coaches fret over is now difficult to preserve when the starting quarterback might be earning thousands of dollars more than his running back or wide receivers. Weaver said rather than preserving the locker room dynamic, coaches should worry about the “parking lot dynamic.”

“On some Power Four campuses, you’re seeing Lamborghinis, Bentleys. There’s no hiding it,” Weaver said. “The wealth is there for some athletes.”

It’s also above board for these athletes to have this kind of money.

“Getting the genie back in the bottle now is going to be incredibly difficult,” said Michael Sorrell, GRD’15, president of Paul Quinn College. “I don’t know how you get the money piece back in the bottle. . . . I think we’ve entered into a space that’s just going to be really hard for people to address and regulate and navigate.”

Though the major financial gains are clustered at one small end of the NCAA spectrum, their effects will trickle down. Athletes who are developed at Division II and Division III programs can leave via the NCAA’s transfer portal, allowing them to find potentially more lucrative financial opportunities at Power Four programs.

For Roger Ward, when Destini entered the transfer portal last spring, she set up meetings with numerous basketball programs. She was in a five-year occupational therapy program at Saint Francis University. Before meeting with each coach, she stressed to them that her top priority was making sure her credits would transfer. Yes, she needed to know how she’d fit into the basketball team, but she also was concerned about how she’d fit into their academic program.

Her parents were floored by how these conversations unfolded.

“I don’t think a single college came onto that call prepared to have the academic conversation,” Roger Ward said. “They all came on well prepared to have the conversation around NIL, NIL money, and why she should come there and how much it might benefit her. . . . It was really striking to us, and particularly to me, being a university provost, how much it appeared that some of these institutions were not interested in the academic interests of their would-be athletic recruit.”

Destini transferred to Georgia Southern University, a school that, within an hour of receiving her transcript, called back and had a full academic review prepared—complete with suggestions for what program would work best. In an era where some athletes are transferring two and three times in a four- or five-year span, Roger Ward wonders what the long-term impact is on their academics.

“I worry that quite a few of them will end up running out of eligibility without having earned a degree,” he said. “As we learned through the process, unless you manage your transfer well, you end up losing credits or they transfer as electives and you’re not making progress toward a specific degree.”

Where all the money is coming from for revenue sharing that’s being promised to athletes is yet another detail every university is working to figure out. Donors were previously asked to give to each school’s collective, where money was pooled together to try and buy rosters. Now, they’re being asked to donate in other ways.

Under the revenue-sharing model, some schools will upcharge things like parking and ticket prices, earmarking a portion of each to go to a “talent tax” used to pay the athletes.

“The timing of this sort of athletics revolution I don’t think is ideal, in light of everything else that college presidents are facing,” said Alanna Wren, C’96, GED’99, GRD’15, Penn’s athletic director. “But for a lot of campuses, this is an incredibly large and significant decision-making situation. I think there are so many institutions that are hoping to leverage athletics and the popularity and success of programs to elevate their profile, and I think that’s just a challenging dream to chase.”

At Penn, Wren said the biggest challenge is making sure the teams that are consistently vying for national championships continue to stay competitive. Thriving in all 33 of Penn’s sports is what the Ivy League athletic landscape is about. March Madness opportunities are thrilling, even if they present a showcase for other teams to then try and pluck Penn’s players.

“I think we’ve always been a bit of a unique choice and that’s probably even truer now, but I think it’s a great unique choice,” Wren said. “I’m not overly concerned. It’s not always fun to see some of our better players transition to Power Four schools, but we want our students to seize opportunities.

“When people talk about the loss of amateurism and this concern about professionalism, I wonder sometimes, is it just more people are upset that student-athletes are making money, or are people more upset that sort of we’re moving further away from an educational model?” Wren continued. “I’m thankful that I’m in the Ivy League and at the University of Pennsylvania, because we’ll never lose sight of the fact that we’re an educational institution, first and foremost.”

Watching any athlete that a coach recruited and developed head elsewhere as their collegiate career should be taking off is a stressor for the Ivy Leagues and Division II and Division III programs. Even the top Division I programs in the country aren’t exempt from needing to re-recruit their roster every year, as athletes can move freely from one school to the other without being bound by a contract. The transfer portal was, in some ways, a response to the fact that in the “before times,” coaches could change schools while athletes were required to “sit out” a year.

“I have faith in the market of college athletics that eventually the storm will settle down,” said Jeff Doggett, GRD’18, president of Wagner College. “Eventually, I think we are going to see institutions figure out how revenue share, NIL, and supporting student-athletes all come together in a way that they feel supported and invested in. Once we get there, I think it’s not unfair to have an expectation that student-athletes will stick around longer. We used to have a system where students stayed when they felt supported at the college they chose. I think we can get there again.”

While top-tier athletes can make decisions about where they’re going to go to school based on what’s going to help them maximize their return on investment, they also can set themselves up with a six- and seven-figure nest egg by the time they graduate, exhaust their eligibility, or turn pro. Sorrell, Paul Quinn College’s president, continues explaining that detail to his wife as they begin to work through their 15-year-old son’s college basketball recruitment, which looks much different than when Sorrell played college basketball at Oberlin College.

“When my parents introduced me to sports, it was to teach me to be unselfish, to teach me the value of being on a team and to work together,” he said. “And I don’t know if those lessons are as popular now as they used to be, right? And now I think people are like, ‘You know, I have to do what’s best for me.’ Yeah, OK, but everything can’t just be about you.”

While college athletics are often referred to as “the front porch” of the university because they provide the first impression into the institution, what’s the value of being a smaller Division I program in this current landscape? It’s a question Doggett, president of Wagner College, has been asked a lot.

Forty percent of the undergraduate student population at Wagner consists of student-athletes. Their men’s basketball team made the NCAA Tournament in 2024, and the football team played the University of Kansas to open the 2025 season. The energy and excitement of having those sports teams on campus are part of the student experience, Doggett said.

“As a Division I program, we have an enormous amount of pride that we are able to participate and compete with some of those big-brand institutions,” Doggett said. “I think it’s a differentiator for us. We attract students from outside of our region as a result of it, which makes our student body more diverse. It produces a lot more student pride. It produces alumni pride.”

As much as the landscape of college athletics is changing, the people making the decisions are likely far removed from the student experience. Every decision will be weighed differently for the athlete.

“I point to ‘rev share’ as a milestone just like I’ve used Title IX as a milestone,” Weaver said. “It’s fundamentally changed not only for the top schools, but there’s a whole lot of schools— 360-plus Division I schools—who also think of themselves as top. How they’re adjusting to this is even more interesting than how the $20.5 million will be accrued.”

In fact, Weaver has written an entire book for college presidents about this changing world of athletics. Due out in 2026, Understanding College Athletics: What Campus Leaders Need to Know About College Sports (John Hopkins University Press) addresses the impact these changes will have on every college campus. Is it too extreme to think that we could be in an era where an elite, top-tier athlete transfers multiple times to maximize his or her value, leaves college with roughly $600,000 or more from revenue sharing and NIL, but in the process exhausts eligibility and is left without a degree? Some might say that’s worth it; that the athlete earned money for their work on the court or field, and they can always go back to school later. But as the popular NCAA commercials say, many will go pro in areas other than sports, and what are universities’ responsibilities to those student-athletes?

It’s something Roger Ward thinks about often as he plays devil’s advocate and wonders who is responsible for helping the athletes map out their financial plans with the money they’ve earned, money that the institution has given them. That, too, is another gray area in this new era.

“Is it on the institution to provide these kids with financial planning advisors, or do we leave that to the family, the coaches like myself to help guide them, or the agents?” he said. “Whose responsibility is that?”