Why returning senior athletes in North Carolina may have to pay their own way next spring
There was a big loophole in Monday night’s final approval by the NCAA to give spring-sports athletes another year of eligibility.
The NCAA committed weeks ago to doing this after it canceled the entire spring-sports season in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19, but after schools balked at the potential expenses of paying extra scholarships, the NCAA agreed in the end to leave whether to honor scholarships for returning seniors up to individual schools.
Normally, that wouldn’t be a huge deal. Most spring athletes are on partial scholarships and many seniors would likely choose to move along to the next phase of their lives. Schools would be able to pay the bill. But in a year where nothing is normal, neither are the finances.
Schools were already grappling with the implications for rosters, training facilities and staffing that the potential returning seniors presented. As the resumption of sports slips farther over the horizon, the financial hurdles began to grow.
This isn’t the panacea for seniors the NCAA originally had hoped.
“If on March 12 or 13 when this decision was made, if we knew where we would be where we are on March 31, would we make the same decision today that we did then when it was originally introduced? That’s tough,” N.C. State athletic director Boo Corrigan said. “Everything is changing so fast. We wanted to do something really good knowing the seasons were canceled, and good intentions aren’t always met with a great result.”
The NCAA will be distributing only $225 million to member institutions in April instead of the budgeted $600 million — the impact of the canceled men’s basketball tournament — which is already putting a multi-million dollar hole in athletic budgets. Conferences are sure to follow after losing not only their cash-cow conference tournaments but NCAA tournament revenue-sharing. The ACC distributed $29.5 million per school in the most recent, pre-ACC Network fiscal year.
But that may only be the beginning.
Football is the primary revenue driver for every major athletic department, especially for television-centric conferences like the ACC. At this point, given the coronavirus-induced lockdown of the economy, there’s no guarantee the football season will be played, even partially. It’s far too soon to assess whether normal athletic life will be able to resume, nationwide, in August.
If anything happens to football, paying for spring sports, period, becomes an issue, let alone extra scholarships.
“When your house is on fire, you are not consumed with thoughts about designing your replacement home,” Duke athletic director Kevin White said via text message. “At that particular moment you would be laser focused on putting the damn fire out. At this surreal time, that’s clearly the supreme task at hand.”
Even if football proceeds as planned, the question will be how many Division I athletic departments can shuffle enough money around to pay for extra spring scholarships while facing a multi-million dollar revenue gap.
That was the wrinkle in Monday’s decision by the Division I Council, which includes a total of 40 voting members from all 32 conferences, large and small. The ACC’s representative on the council is Pittsburgh athletic director Heather Lyke. N.C. Central athletic director Ingrid Wicker McCree is the MEAC representative.
At all levels, finances are a matter of equal concern given the circumstances. How quickly the NCAA pivoted from doing what was right to doing what was feasible only underlines just how grave.
This story was originally published March 31, 2020 at 3:20 PM.
