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Ohio State University president Ted Carter portended a bleak future for non-revenue sports at his university and likely across the country in a recent interview with The Columbus Dispatch.
Carter spoke with Dispatch reporter Sheridan Hendrix about several topics, including paying student-athletes and what it will mean for sports other than football and basketball.
His comments were far from reassuring for fans of those other sports.
“We’ll still have scholarships, we’ll still have programs,” Carter said. “Some of those sports may start to look and act a little bit more like a club sport, but yet compete at the Division I level and still travel and still compete.”
Carter’s comments come after a settlement that awarded $2.8 billion in back pay to former college athletes. The settlement also established a future revenue-sharing model that will see universities that opt-in directly compensate their athletes for their services for the first time in history.
Therein lies the problem.
The argument that universities should compensate players who directly generate significant amounts of revenue for them is easy to make.
But it also comes with a catch.
That means the universities must also either A) create additional revenue streams or B) cut costs.
Now, some schools have already begun to do the former, even going so far as to seek out private equity to invest their athletic programs.
But what is likely to be as, if not more common, is the latter.
If universities begin to athletic programs as nothing more than financial assets or liabilities, the logical next step is for them to reduce those liabilities.
Whether that happens by way of downsizing or cutting the programs altogether remains to be seen. But neither choice is particularly appealing to those programs.
There was likely no real way of avoiding this outcome. But it suggests the next 10 years or so of college athletics could be a bloodbath for non-revenue athletic programs across the country.