If you don't provide 80 football scholarships any longer because your players are being paid outside the NCAA system, you no longer have to offer 80 scholarships on the women's side, so cut the programs. Likewise, if Fresno State decides to cut football, that will eliminate 80 scholarships on the girls side too. Men's soccer will take an even bigger hit. See below...
Suddenly your $5-$10K annual payments to your soccer club is looking like a pipedream for a future payoff.
This is a good summary from the Washington Post:
Alston will change everything, slowly at first; but within three years, I fully expect a completely different American sports business landscape. Here are some of the changes I foresee:
The biggest football schools will immediately explore leaving the NCAA altogether and forming a new league that pays players. I believe these discussions have been happening for a long time, but now, they will accelerate. The NCAA FBS football (a.k.a. Division I) includes 130 schools, but the reality is that perhaps only 25 or 30 have the budget and resources to play at the absolute highest level; the rest are schedule-fillers, notwithstanding the rare upset now and then. Alabama, Auburn, Ohio State, Clemson, USC, Michigan, Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma and the like will explore a Super League similar to the effort made by Europe’s top professional soccer clubs this spring. This new Super League of College Football will explore direct salary compensation of players, but probably only if they can get other “special” legislation that no other industry gets, such as exemption from workers’ compensation liability.
Schools that don’t have major football programs will explore eliminating the sport. These schools know big programs don’t care about them, and they also know the majors are looking at programs that require more capital. Deploying a football team is enormously expensive, and the vast majority of non-majors simply shouldn’t be fielding one — if the players aren’t properly trained and equipped, it’s too dangerous. Many universities have ignored this, however, and gone ahead anyway. But
Alston is going to supercharge the recruiting wars for talent, and many schools won’t, and shouldn’t, keep up.
U.S. Olympic teams will wind up needing major support from the federal government. College football revenue has driven Olympic success for a long time. The popular U.S. women’s national soccer team? Nearly all of its players were trained by highly paid coaches at top-level facilities at major football-playing schools. Those coaches and facilities were largely paid for with money generated by the efforts of football players.
This dynamic plays out with the U.S. national volleyball team, many American track and field stars, and many other athletes in other disciplines. Football money largely pays for college coaches and top facilities, travel and resources. But if more of that cash goes to paying football players, the subsidies for Olympic sports will slow to a trickle. The federal government will have to make a choice about whether to use taxpayer dollars to fund Olympic sports, as many other countries do.
Enormous battles over Title IX will come. Over the last generation, many
men’s sports in college have been eliminated or drained of resources, and administrators often blamed Title IX compliance rules. At football-playing schools, the football team accounts for about 80 scholarships. That’s a lot for one sport. Title IX essentially mandates equal treatment and opportunity for female athletes, so many schools have founded and supported sports for women over the last generation to balance out football, while eliminating many men’s sports.
Alston could play out one of two ways with respect to Title IX.
If the major football schools opt out of the NCAA system completely, and their new model doesn’t rely on university funds or scholarships at all, they could eliminate many women’s sports because they won’t need to provide an equivalent number of women’s scholarships to match football scholarships. If non-major football schools drop their football programs, they might also drop women’s sports, for the same reason.
