Editor’s Note: This article was originally drafted in January 2024. The frenetically changing college sports landscape most recently (May 23, 2024) saw a settlement that may allow college athletes to be paid directly for their services. It doesn’t change the fundamental issues, but certainly affects the details.
If you were a Division III intercollegiate athlete (I wasn’t, but I know a few), you likely remember long hours spent at practices and games. Perhaps onto that you added time with the trainer, or film sessions, or “voluntary” workouts with teammates in the weight room. While in-season, Linfield football and softball players often report spending five hours each day at practice or other team activities.
“For the DI heroes of our story, life is now better and worse. Conference realignment means more time away from academics for student-athletes across sports.”
If you played for Linfield or another Northwest Conference school west of the Cascade Mountains, you may remember long weekend trips to play against the “Whits” (Whitworth and Whitman universities). For sports such as basketball, soccer, softball or volleyball, these trips might see you leave campus early on a Thursday or Friday morning, only to return late on a Sunday night (or the wee hours of Monday morning). Unless all your classes met on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, you likely missed some class time. If you did make it to that 8 or 9 a.m. class on Monday, focusing might have been a challenge.
At least you had countless hours to study or sleep, as you traveled on Linfield buses to and from eastern Washington, or to the Tacoma schools (Pacific Lutheran and Puget Sound). Fortunately, some of your travels were only within an hour or so to play the other northwest Oregon schools (George Fox, Lewis & Clark, Pacific, Willamette), so missed class time was minimal. Unless maybe you had a midweek afternoon contest.
If your team made it to the postseason, things may have gotten even more intense as the pressure mounted to perform well and the travel extended further away. For fall and spring sport athletes, this postseason may have encroached on your final projects and exams. If your team failed to make the playoffs, at least you got more time during the remainder of the semester to focus on your studies. Or maybe you didn’t, as NCAA rules allow teams to continue to practice until championship events have concluded.
Now imagine you played at the Division I level, say at the University of Oregon or Washington. Your practice days would be just as full, perhaps even more so than at the DIII level. You now fly to conference competitions up and down the West Coast. Travel within the conference was still probably easier than weekends at the Whits, but preseason non-conference matchups might see you racking up frequent flier miles.
If your student-athlete experience didn’t meet expectations, at least you could transfer schools to seek better circumstances. Except that you couldn’t without sitting out a year, until the transfer portal opened in 2018 and the rules for student-athlete mobility eased.
Fast forward to today, in fall 2023, you learned as a Duck or a Husky that your future conference travel is going to take you as far as New Jersey (Rutgers) or Maryland, and throughout the Midwest. While you still have a couple of “local” conference foes (USC, UCLA), as a Big-10 Conference school you can expect to have at least seven extended weekends, where playing multiple contests on a trip means missing the bulk of an academic week. (Why so much travel? Because the Big-10, logically, has 18 schools starting fall 2024). If you study well on the road, you might do ok, assuming you have the time and energy between jet lag and playing your sport.
If you are a Beaver (Oregon State) or a Cougar (Washington State), your travel may not change as dramatically, but your dance card is now populated with lower-profile opponents. That doesn’t necessarily impact much of your life as a student-athlete, but if you’re a star in your sport, you may seek a program in a power conference poised to garner much more national attention (and now poised to pay you more).
Our Pac-12 (or Pac-10, or even Pac-8 if you’re really old like me) student-athletes of yesteryear were compensated with glory and a first-class education. Unfortunately, glory was often more assured than a good education. While these are all fine academic institutions, the demands of athletics often meant student-athletes had little time and energy left to pursue the academic portion of the “student-athlete” moniker. To keep some students athletically eligible, they were steered into easier programs and courses, including classes designed to boost GPAs. While their full-ride scholarship (which not all received) nominally provided them a “free” education, it often only provided illusory access, much as if someone gave you a free car, but you had no time to drive it and no money to fill the tank.
For the DI heroes of our story, life is now better and worse. Conference realignment means more time away from academics for student-athletes across sports. The fleeting academic integrity of DI sports has taken yet another hit. That may be the least of the worries for some DI athletes. As conferences expand membership across the country, travel costs rise. For the non-revenue-generating sports, those not earning enough to cover expenses, schools may decide it’s no longer worth it to offer these sports.
On the bright side, some DI student-athletes are seeing improvement in their financial circumstances. As of 2021, student-athletes can earn income from their name/image/likeness (NIL), allowing those that generate the most revenue for their schools to receive income more commensurate to their contributions. The May 2024 settlement with the NCAA opens that door even further. While some decry paying players and the loss of amateurism, it is a somewhat more honest solution to an age-old problem of student-athlete exploitation.
What will happen from here? There are too many dimensions to cover in this essay, but I anticipate three main outcomes:
1. The NCAA and some of its member schools will intensify lobbying of Congress to pass legislation restoring their ability to exploit student-athletes.
2. Athletes will begin signing multi-year contracts with schools, which will reduce some of the current transfer portal chaos.
3. The economic divide will widen between the schools in power conferences and those on the outside looking in. This will have repercussions both for competitive balance and admissions for those schools on the wrong side of the divide.
Between NIL, the transfer portal and now revenue sharing, athletes can take their services to the highest bidder – and many know this. This may be good for the athletes, but is it good for college sports? While many bemoan the whirlwind of changes to intercollegiate athletics over recent years, especially its professionalization, as long as there are students to play and alumni, parents and students to watch, college sports will go on.
Randy R. Grant is a professor and the chair of the Department of Economics. He has been at Linfield since 1993. His primary areas of teaching and research involve sports economics, macroeconomics and the history of economic thought. Grant is a co-author of two textbooks, “The Economics of Intercollegiate Sports,” and “The Evolution of Economic Thought,” as well as multiple journal articles. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Pacific Lutheran University and doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
