Cedar Rapids, Iowa Correspondent

The cap is set at twenty-two percent of the average shared revenue of the power conferences, and I want to begin with that formula because it is the whole answer to the question and nobody outside an athletic department’s business office has read it. A cap that is a percentage of the average is a cap that is affordable to the schools above the average and crushing to the schools below it, and the settlement set it that way because the schools above the average wrote the settlement. Ohio State takes in a quarter of a billion dollars a year; more than half the schools in the Group of Five take in under forty million; and both are permitted to pay their athletes up to the same twenty-one million. For Ohio State that is eight percent of revenue. For a school at forty million it is more than half, and for a school at the level below, in the subdivision that pays fourteen percent of the back damages and cannot approach the cap at all, it is a number on a page. I kept the books for a plant for thirty years, and a formula that sets a cost as a percentage of the largest competitors’ income and applies it to everyone is a formula designed to consolidate an industry, and it is consolidating this one, and the people who designed it knew it would.

So let me take the question’s two halves as an accountant does, by crediting what improved and then entering what it cost. What improved is real and I will not shortchange it. The athletes at the top are paid, in the open, on contracts, with buyouts that the Duke dispute this year showed can be enforced or at least litigated, and the players who used to be paid in secret or not at all are paid in the light, and the payments are large, and the labor that generated the revenue is finally receiving a share of it. That is an improvement for the athletes who receive it, and it is an improvement in honesty for everyone, and I entered it in the book in June of last year and have not reversed it. The standardized contracts are an improvement too, because a contract is a thing a player can read and a lawyer can enforce, and the old arrangement was a handshake with a booster. Three hundred and nineteen schools opted in, eighty-two percent of the division, which tells you that even the schools that could not afford it decided they could not afford to be left out, which is the sound a consolidation makes.

Now the cost column. The twenty-one million has to come from somewhere, and nothing in the settlement says how a school must split it, and most have split it the way revenue is split, which is to football and men’s basketball, and the money for it has come from the sports that do not produce revenue, which are the women’s sports and the Olympic sports and the ones that produce the swimmers and the wrestlers and the rowers the country sends to the Games. Thirty-two programs were counted cut by the middle of last year and more since; seven tennis programs in a year; a nationally successful men’s volleyball team at a school that opted in anyway. The roster limits that replaced the scholarship caps cut walk-ons by the hundreds before the settlement was even approved, and the settlement had to be amended to let the cut athletes finish. The Senate heard testimony in June that schools were dropping scholarships and women’s programs to keep pace, and the senators’ answer is a bill that would double the cap, which is to say double the cost the testimony was about. An accountant reads that as a legislature that has been told the formula is the problem and has proposed a larger formula.

The Iowa picture, because it is mine and it answers the question in three schools. The university in Iowa City and the one in Ames are in the top conferences and pay to the cap, and both lost players in January to schools with more outside money and gained players from schools with less, and both have cut staff and raised ticket prices and are watching their non-revenue sports with a calculator. The university in Cedar Falls, in the subdivision below, paid its share of the back damages through reduced distributions, cannot approach the cap, lost its best players in January to the two schools up the road and to others, and is deciding, as every school at that level is deciding, whether to keep pretending it plays the same sport. The retention data from the January window shows the talent gap between the top conferences and the rest widening, which is what a cap set as a percentage of the rich schools’ average does: it is a ceiling for the rich and a cliff for everyone else, and the cliff is where Cedar Falls is standing.

On the transfer dynamics, the ledger’s view. A player may now leave every January and be paid by the highest bidder, which is what a labor market without a cartel looks like and is what the courts required, and the effect on a program’s investment is the effect on any investment with a one-year horizon: nobody develops a player a rich school will buy, and the small schools have become a farm system that raises talent for sale, and the sale price goes to the player, which is right, and the development cost stays with the school that did the developing, which is the thing the formula does not reimburse. In my industry we called that a supplier who trains the workers and watches the customer hire them, and the supplier does not stay in business long, and the small programs are the supplier.

So my answer is that professionalization has improved outcomes for the athletes at the top, honestly and substantially, and for the honesty of the whole enterprise, and that it has amplified the inequalities between programs by a formula designed to do so, written by the schools it favors, applied to schools it crushes, and funded by the sports and the athletes who do not generate revenue and were the thing a university athletic department used to point to when asked what it was for. Write both columns. Do not net them. The athletes at the top are paid, and the rowers are gone, and the school in Cedar Falls is a farm, and the cap is twenty-two percent of a number that Cedar Falls will never see, and the Senate wants to double it. I vote like someone who has watched a payroll disappear, and this payroll did not disappear; it was moved, from the swimmers to the quarterbacks and from the small schools to the large, by a settlement that called it fairness, and the book says it was a consolidation, and the book is right.

Phoenix, Arizona Correspondent

Grand Canyon University is a mile from one of our hospitals, and last year it cut a men’s volleyball program that had been one of the best in the country, and it did so in the same breath as announcing that it would opt into the settlement that lets it pay its basketball players, and I want to begin there because the question asks whether professionalization has improved outcomes for athletes and the honest answer from Phoenix is that it depends entirely on which athlete, and the volleyball players were athletes too. I run hospital operations and I think about outcomes the way a hospital does, which is by asking what happened to the person and not to the institution, and the person in this case was a nineteen-year-old who was recruited to play a sport at a school that then decided his sport was a cost it could not carry alongside the new payroll. He was not paid. He was not transferred. He was eliminated, which is an outcome, and it has happened to the athletes in thirty-two programs by the middle of last year and more since, and the question’s phrase about improving outcomes for athletes should be read with those athletes in the sentence, because the coverage leaves them out.

So let me take the two halves of the question from the intake desk. For the athletes who receive the money, outcomes have improved in the one way that is unambiguous, which is that they are paid, openly, on contracts, for work that generates revenue, and a woman who schedules a hospital’s contractors knows what it means to be paid for work and will not pretend the old arrangement was better. The standardized contracts are an improvement too, because a contract has terms a player can read, and the buyout provisions that the Duke dispute tested this year mean that a player and a school both know what leaving costs, which is more than either knew under the handshake. For the athletes who do not receive the money, which is most of them, outcomes have gotten worse, and worse in a specific way that a hospital recognizes: the roster limits that replaced the scholarship caps cut walk-ons by the hundreds, the non-revenue programs have been cut to fund the revenue-sharing pool, and the athletes in the sports that survive are receiving, by the reporting, a few thousand dollars or nothing from a pool that the schools may split however they like and have split toward football. Title IX, which is supposed to require that women’s athletics be treated equally, has not been applied to the payments, and nobody knows whether it will be, and the women’s programs are the ones being cut in the meantime. That is not an outcome for athletes. It is an outcome for some athletes, purchased from others.

Now the inequality between programs, which the question asks about and which Arizona illustrates in a single valley. Arizona State is in a top conference and pays to the cap; Grand Canyon opted in and cut volleyball to afford it; Northern Arizona, in the subdivision below, cannot approach the cap, paid its share of the back damages through reduced distributions, and loses its best players every January to schools that can. The cap is twenty-two percent of the average revenue of the richest conferences, which is a formula that a hospital administrator recognizes as a reimbursement rate set to the cost structure of the largest systems and applied to the rural clinics: affordable for the systems, ruinous for the clinics, and the clinics close. Three hundred and nineteen schools opted in because the alternative was to be left out of the sport, and a good many of them cannot afford what they opted into, and the thing they will cut to afford it is the thing a university used to say athletics was for.

On the transfer dynamics, the operations view. A player may leave every January for the highest bidder, which the courts required and which is what a labor market looks like, and more than six thousand did, and the retention data shows the gap between the top conferences and the rest widening, which it would, because the small programs develop players the large programs buy. In a hospital we call that a residency program whose graduates all leave for the system across town, and the program that trained them cannot keep a staff, and eventually it stops training. The small programs are the residency, and they are being told that the market is fair because the resident gets paid, and the resident does get paid, and the program that trained him gets a roster spot to fill with someone else’s resident, and the cycle runs until the program is a feeder and nothing else.

I want to say the thing about outcomes that a hospital cannot avoid and the settlement does not address, which is what happens to the athlete after. A football player paid half a million dollars at twenty is a young man with money and a body that the sport has used, and the contract covers the season and not the knee, and the health coverage ends with eligibility, and the degree, which was the thing the old system claimed to provide, is now an afterthought for a player who is at his third school in three years. The old system lied about the degree. The new one does not lie about it; it ignores it, and the outcome for a player who has no degree and no second contract and a knee is an outcome that arrives in a waiting room, five years later, and the settlement’s pool does not cover it, and neither does the bill the Senate is considering, which would double the pool and says nothing about the knee.

So my answer is that professionalization has improved outcomes for the athletes who generate revenue, in the single dimension of being paid, and has worsened them for the athletes who do not, who have been cut, capped, or unfunded to pay for the first group; that it has amplified the inequalities between programs by a formula set to the rich schools’ revenue and applied to everyone; and that the outcome that matters most to a hospital, what becomes of the person after, has not been addressed by anyone. The waiting room does not care about the cap. It cares who comes through the door, and the volleyball player who was cut will come through it as a young man without a team, and the quarterback who was paid will come through it later with a knee, and neither of them is in the settlement, and the settlement was for athletes, and that is the finding, and it is not a comfortable one for a valley that has one school paying to the cap and another cutting a championship team to afford it.

Billings, Montana Correspondent

I am going to say something that will sound strange from a man in a state with two programs at the level the settlement forgot, which is that the professionalization of college sports has been good for Montana, and that the inequality the question asks about was always there and has now been made honest, and that honesty is the thing a small program needed more than money. For as long as I have written the civic column, the Grizzlies and the Bobcats have competed in a sport whose rules were written for schools with a hundred times their revenue, under a pretense that the rules were the same for everyone, and the pretense cost them: it meant that a kid from Miles City who could play was recruited by a school in the Southeast with a promise of exposure and a bag of money that nobody admitted existed, and Montana could not match the bag because Montana was following the rules, and the kid left, and the schools that bought him were never punished because the enforcement was as fictional as the amateurism. Now the bag is a contract. The contract is public. The kid still leaves, but the people in Bozeman can see the number he left for and can decide, as grown men and women, whether to try to match it or to stop pretending they are in the same business. They have decided the second, mostly, and I think they are right, and I think the deciding is the improvement.

Let me say what the numbers look like from here, because the enthusiasts and the mourners both skip them. The cap is twenty-two percent of the average revenue of the richest conferences, about twenty-one million dollars, and the two Montana programs could not reach a tenth of it, and they were asked to pay their share of the back damages anyway, through reduced distributions, because the subdivision they play in was assessed fourteen percent of the settlement for a wrong done mostly by schools that were not in it. That is unjust and I will say so. Three hundred and nineteen schools opted into revenue sharing, which is eighty-two percent of the division, and the schools at Montana’s level that opted in did so with pools that would not pay one quarterback at a power school, and the schools that opted out kept the old scholarship limits and watched their best players leave in January anyway, because a player may leave for the highest bidder whether or not his school is in the system. The retention data from the January window shows the gap between the top conferences and the rest widening. From Bozeman that is not news. It is the gap that was always there, measured.

Now why I call it an improvement, because it is the unpopular part. For fifty years the small programs were told they were in the same championship as Alabama, and they were not, and the pretense kept them spending as if they were: on facilities, on coaches’ salaries, on recruiting budgets, in a race they could not win and were told they could. The settlement ended the pretense. The contracts are standardized and public, so a Montana athletic director knows exactly what he cannot afford, which is a thing he could only guess before. The transfer market is open, so a Montana coach knows that his best player will be bought and can plan a roster that develops players for two years and sells them, which is a business a small school can run, and some are running it well. The Olympic sports, which the large schools are cutting to fund their football payrolls, are the sports Montana can keep, because Montana’s football payroll is small and its wrestlers and skiers and runners cost what they always cost, and a school that cannot buy a quarterback can still be the best place in the country to run cross-country, and I would rather the Bobcats be that than be the forty-eighth best football program in a league of fifty.

On the athletes, the adjuster’s view, because the question asks about their outcomes and I have talked to the ones who came back. The ones who were bought by larger schools were paid, in the open, which is right, and some of them were paid a great deal and some of them were cut the following January when a better buy came along, and the contract, which had a buyout, protected the school more than the player, which is what the Duke dispute showed. The ones who stayed were paid a little or nothing, kept their scholarships, finished their degrees at a rate the large schools no longer like to talk about, and are working in Billings and Missoula and Great Falls, which is the outcome the old system claimed to produce and now produces at the small schools only, because the large ones have stopped pretending to. The inequality the question asks about is real and it runs in both directions: the rich schools have the money and the small schools have the degrees, and the players are sorting themselves accordingly, and a player who wants to be paid goes south and a player who wants to finish stays here, and that is a choice that did not exist when the bag was secret and the degree was the only thing anyone was allowed to promise.

I want to say the thing about the Senate’s bill, which would roughly double the cap and which the small schools have watched with the particular interest of people who will be assessed for it. A cap of forty million dollars is a cap for twenty schools, and the other two hundred and forty will be told, again, that they are in the same championship, and some will believe it and spend accordingly and cut their wrestling to do so, and the ones that do not believe it will be fine. The bill is for the twenty. It was negotiated with the two richest conferences, and it says so in its terms. Montana’s senators will vote on it, and I hope they ask who pays the share of a settlement written by schools that have never been to Bozeman, and I expect they will not, because nobody asked last time.

So my answer is that professionalization has improved outcomes for the athletes who are paid and for the honesty of the whole enterprise, that it has made the inequality between programs visible rather than created it, and that the visibility is an improvement for a small school because a small school can plan around a number and could not plan around a lie. The Grizzlies and the Bobcats will play in November in front of the largest crowd in the state, with rosters that are half new, in a sport they can afford, with wrestlers and runners the large schools have cut, and with degrees the large schools have stopped mentioning. I fix fences badly, and the thing about a fence is that it tells you where your pasture ends. For fifty years Montana was told the pasture went all the way to Tuscaloosa. It does not. It ends at the river, and the river is a fine place to raise stock, and the stock will be sold south in January, and the price will be public, and that is a business, and it was never a lie, and I will take it.

Dayton, Ohio Correspondent

The University of Dayton does not play football at the level the settlement was written for, and it plays basketball at a level that fills a thirteen-thousand-seat arena every night and has for forty years, and I want to begin there because the question asks about inequality between rich and less-resourced schools and the usual framing, power football against everyone else, misses the schools that are rich in one sport and poor in the structure. Dayton and the other basketball schools in the non-football conferences were assessed twelve percent of the back damages through reduced distributions for a wrong done mostly by football programs, and they are permitted to share revenue up to a cap set at twenty-two percent of the average income of the football conferences, which is a number Dayton’s basketball revenue cannot approach, and they compete for the same players against schools that can pay to the cap and then add third-party money on top. A process engineer looks at that and sees a specification written for one product line applied to a plant that runs a different one, and the result is what it always is, which is that the second line is measured against tolerances it was never designed to meet and reported as failing.

So let me assess the question as a process, by asking what improved for whom and what the variances are. The athletes who are paid: improved, unambiguously, in the one dimension of being paid, on contracts that are standardized and public, with buyout terms that the Duke dispute this year showed are at least enforceable enough to settle. That is a real output and I entered it as one. The programs at the top: improved in the sense that they can now do openly what they did covertly, and worsened in the sense that the open market has no floor and their roster costs have run past the cap through outside deals, which is a cost increase they chose. The programs in the middle, which is where Dayton sits: worse, because the cap is a target they cannot hit, the market is one they cannot win, and the one sport they are good at is the one the rich schools are now funding at a level that treats a mid-major’s entire athletic budget as a basketball payroll. The programs at the bottom: worse, in the way the subdivision below has described, assessed for damages, unable to pay, farmed for talent. The variance is not between rich and poor. It is between the schools that wrote the specification and every other school that has to run to it.

Now the thing a man who coaches robotics on weekends wants to say about outcomes for athletes, because the question uses the word and the word is doing a great deal of work. An outcome is a thing that happens to a person over time, and the settlement’s outcomes have been measured, so far, in dollars at signing, which is a measure of an input. The outcomes that will matter are the ones the old system claimed and the new one ignores: whether the player finishes a degree, whether he leaves with a body that works, whether the thing he learned at the third school in three years is transferable to a life that does not involve a ball. The standardized contracts are the one real structural improvement, because a contract is a document a player can be taught to read, and the technical-education side of me would say that the next improvement is to teach them, which nobody is doing, and the robotics kids I coach, who are old enough now to have teammates on rosters, know more about reading a contract from a weekend with me than most of the players know from a season with an agent. The transfer market is an improvement for the player who is bought and a cost for the one who is cut to make room, and the retention data shows the gap between the top conferences and the rest widening, which is what a market with one-year contracts and no development incentive does.

On the non-revenue sports, which Dayton has kept and the large schools have cut, the plant floor’s reading. The settlement replaced scholarship caps with roster limits, which cut walk-ons before the thing was even approved; nothing in it says how a school must split its pool, and most split toward football; thirty-two Olympic programs were counted cut by the middle of last year and more since; the Senate heard in June that women’s programs and scholarships are being dropped to keep pace. A mid-major that does not pay to the cap keeps its wrestlers and its rowers because it never had the football payroll that is eating them elsewhere, and so the inequality the question asks about has a strange inversion in it: the rich schools are becoming two-sport professional franchises with a university attached, and the schools that cannot afford to play that game are becoming the only places left where a student can row. That is an outcome for athletes, and it favors the poor schools, and nobody is counting it because it does not show up as a dollar at signing.

I want to say what the fix looks like from a process standpoint, because the question asks whether the system has improved or amplified and the honest answer is that it has done both and will keep doing both until the specification is rewritten for the plants that actually exist. The fix is tiers: a top tier of the schools that can pay to the cap and want to, run as the professional league it is, with its own rules and its own enforcement and its own damages; a second tier of everyone else, with a cap set to the second tier’s revenue and not the first’s, and a transfer system that compensates development the way the professional leagues compensate it. The Senate bill does the opposite: it doubles the cap, keeps one tier, and applies the larger number to everyone, which is a specification revised to make the top line’s tolerances wider and the bottom line’s failure more certain. The announced policy was fairness to athletes. What reached the shop floor was a payroll for twenty schools and an assessment for three hundred.

So my answer is that professionalization has improved outcomes for the athletes who are paid, in the dimension of pay, and has amplified the inequalities between programs by applying one specification to plants of entirely different scale, with the middle and the bottom paying for a wrong the top committed and competing at a cap set to the top’s revenue; that the real structural improvement is the contract and the real structural failure is the single tier; and that the one outcome nobody is measuring, the rower who can still row at a school too poor to cut her, is the one that says the most about what the enterprise was for. Weekends I try to keep an old house from falling apart, and the lesson of an old house is that you do not fix the foundation by adding a floor. The settlement added a floor. The Senate wants to add another. The foundation is a cap set to someone else’s income, and the arena in Dayton will be full in November, in a sport the specification does not describe, with players the specification prices against a payroll the arena cannot generate, and that is the inequality, and it is structural, and it was designed.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent

Stephen F. Austin is an hour south of here in Nacogdoches, and it plays football in the subdivision that was assessed fourteen percent of the back damages in the settlement and cannot approach the cap, and its best players leave every January for schools in Lubbock and College Station and Austin that can pay to the cap and then add oil money on top, and I want to begin there because the question asks whether professionalization has improved outcomes or amplified inequality and I have been asking the only question I ever ask, which is who pays, and the answer in East Texas has a name and a zip code. The Lumberjacks pay. They paid their share of a settlement for a wrong committed mostly by the schools that now buy their players, they pay the development cost of a roster that is sold south at a public price, and they pay it with a budget that is a rounding error against the one in Lubbock, and nobody who wrote the settlement has been to Nacogdoches or intends to go. I run an insurance book and I know what it looks like when a pool is written so that the large accounts set the rate and the small ones pay it, and the settlement is that pool, and the rate is twenty-two percent of the large accounts’ average, and the small accounts cannot leave the pool without leaving the sport.

So let me go through who pays, because the question’s two halves are the same question asked from two sides. The athletes who are paid do not pay; they collect, in the open, on standardized contracts, with buyouts that the Duke matter showed will be litigated, and I will say again that I would rather the money go to the players than to the uncles, and that the honesty is worth something, and that the kids in Lubbock who are getting it have earned it. The athletes who are not paid pay, and they pay in the currency of the sport they came to play: thirty-two Olympic programs counted cut by the middle of last year and more since, walk-ons cut by the hundreds when the roster limits replaced the scholarship caps, women’s programs and scholarships dropped, by the Senate’s own June testimony, to fund a pool that nothing in the settlement requires a school to share with anyone but the football team. The small programs pay, in damages and in development and in the slow conversion of a university’s athletic department into a farm. The non-revenue athletes at the small programs are, oddly, the ones who do not pay, because their schools cannot afford the football payroll that is eating the swimmers everywhere else, and so the wrestling program at a school that cannot reach the cap is safer than the one at a school that can, which is the kind of inequality the question did not anticipate and the pool produced.

Now the ratepayer, because this is Texas and the public universities are public. The cap has to be funded, and the funding at the public schools in this state has come from ticket prices, from donors who used to give to collectives and now give to the department with a better tax receipt, from media money borrowed against, and from the general budget of universities whose regents are political appointees and know what the people who appointed them expect on Saturdays. A man who sat on a planning commission recognizes when a public institution’s capital is being redirected to a thing that was supposed to pay for itself, and the thing that was supposed to pay for itself, which was college football, is now paying its players with money that was supposed to pay for engineering buildings, and the regents have decided that is fine, and the students who pay the fees have not been asked. Growth and capacity are not the same word. The payrolls in Lubbock and College Station are growth. The capacity is a state budget, and the state has decided it has the capacity, and I have watched a lot of states decide that about a lot of things.

On the transfer dynamics, the underwriter’s view, because a transfer market is a market in moral hazard. A player may leave every January for the highest bidder, which the courts required and which is right as a matter of labor law, and the consequence is that no school with a budget below the cap has any reason to develop a player, because the player will be bought, and the schools above the cap have no reason to develop one either, because they can buy him developed. Development is the thing that produces the outcome the question asks about, the player who is better at twenty-two than at eighteen, and a market with one-year contracts and no development compensation does not produce it, and the retention data from January, which shows the gap between the top conferences and the rest widening, is the market telling you that it has stopped developing and started sorting. The professional leagues solved that problem decades ago with drafts and compensation for departing players, and college football, which is now a professional league in every respect but the ones that would protect the small programs, has adopted the market and not the compensation, because the compensation would have been paid by the schools that wrote the settlement.

I want to say the thing about the Senate’s bill, since it came out of this state’s senior senator’s office and I have read it. It would roughly double the cap. That is the answer of a legislature that has been told the pool is unaffordable for most of its members and has concluded that the pool should be larger, and a man who writes insurance knows what happens to a pool when the rate is doubled and the small accounts cannot leave: they go broke, quietly, one wrestling program at a time, and the large accounts absorb what is left. The bill was negotiated with the two richest conferences. Stephen F. Austin was not in the room. Neither was the ratepayer in Tyler whose fees fund a university whose regents have decided the football comes first.

So my answer is that professionalization has improved outcomes for the athletes who collect and amplified the inequality between the programs that pay, that the amplification was designed by the schools it favors through a cap set to their own revenue, and that the people who pay for it are the non-revenue athletes at the rich schools, the small programs everywhere, and the taxpayers and students of public universities that have decided their football is worth an engineering building. Who pays? The Lumberjacks, the swimmers, the walk-ons, the regents’ students, and the uncles, who at least are out of business. Who collects? The players at the top, which is right, and the schools at the top, which wrote it that way, and the senators who will say they fixed it by doubling it. I will stay with this question until somebody names who pays, and I have named them, and they are an hour south of here, in Nacogdoches, playing a sport they were assessed for and cannot afford, and nobody from Austin or Washington has driven down to explain why.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent

Jacksonville University dropped football in 2019, before any of this, because a small private school in a city with an NFL team could not justify the cost, and the University of North Florida never had it, and so this city has two Division I athletic departments that watched the settlement arrive with the particular interest of schools that had already made the decision the settlement is now forcing on everyone else. I want to begin there because the question asks whether professionalization has amplified inequality between rich and less-resourced schools, and from Jacksonville the answer is that the less-resourced schools that got out of the arms race before it became a payroll are the ones in the best shape, and that the inequality the question describes is mostly suffered by the schools in the middle that are still pretending. The two schools here play basketball and baseball and run and swim and row, they were assessed twelve percent of the back damages through reduced distributions as non-football schools, they cannot approach a cap set to the football conferences’ revenue, and they have kept every sport they had, because they never had the football payroll that is eating the swimmers at the schools with one. That is an outcome for athletes, and it is a good one, and it belongs in this question.

Now the harder part, as a mother with a son in the youth leagues and a job that has taught me to read the gap between what a terminal promises and what a truck can do. The promise of the settlement was that athletes would be paid for the revenue they generate, and the ones who generate it are being paid, openly, on standardized contracts with buyout terms that the Duke dispute showed can be enforced, and a woman who has been a claims adjuster knows the value of a document with terms in it over a handshake with a booster, and I will not pretend the old way was better for the kids who were used. What the terminal did not promise and the truck has delivered is everything else: roster limits that cut walk-ons by the hundreds, thirty-two Olympic programs counted cut by the middle of last year and more since, women’s programs and scholarships dropped to fund a pool the schools may split however they like and have split toward football, and Title IX, which my son’s sisters-in-sport were told protected them, left unapplied to the payments while the programs it was supposed to protect are closed. The outcome for the athletes who are paid is better. The outcome for the athletes who are cut is worse, and there are more of the second than the first, and the settlement was named for a swimmer.

On the inequality between programs, I will say what the dispatch desk sees, which is that the market is sorting and the sorting is honest and brutal. The cap is twenty-two percent of the rich conferences’ average revenue, three hundred and nineteen schools opted in because the alternative was to be left out, most of them cannot afford it, and the transfer window in January moved more than six thousand players, with the data showing the gap between the top conferences and the rest widening. A dispatcher reads that as a system that has stopped pretending every load is the same size: the big carriers haul the big loads and the small ones haul what is left, and the small ones that try to haul the big loads go broke, and the small ones that know their size do fine. The schools in Jacksonville know their size. The schools in the middle, the Group of Five programs with forty million dollars trying to pay toward a twenty-one-million-dollar cap, do not, and they are the ones cutting the wrestling to pretend, and the pretense is the inequality, and it is self-inflicted, and the settlement invited it.

I want to say the thing about Florida, because the state has every tier and the tiers tell the story. The two large public universities pay to the cap and past it through outside money and have cut nothing visible, because they can afford to keep the rowers as a line item. The mid-tier public schools, in Orlando and Tampa and elsewhere, opted in and are straining, and the Olympic-sport cuts in this state have come from them. The small schools, here and in Miami’s suburbs and the Panhandle, either got out early or never got in, and they are the ones whose athletes are finishing degrees and whose non-revenue teams are intact, and the state’s own legislature, which has rewritten its athlete-pay law more than once with the big schools in mind, has not noticed that the schools it did not write the law for are the ones that have come through intact. I am not a mascot for either coast of the state, and I will say that the inequality in Florida runs the way the question says, rich against poor, and that it also runs the other way, intact against gutted, and the two maps do not line up.

On the Senate’s bill, which would roughly double the cap, the adjuster’s view. A doubled cap is a doubled claim on a pool that most of the members cannot fund, and the members who can fund it negotiated the bill, and the members who cannot will be told, again, that they are in the same championship, and the ones who believe it will cut another women’s team to prove it. The bill does not touch the formula; it enlarges it. It does not touch the split; it leaves it to the schools. It does not touch the development problem; it leaves the market with one-year contracts and no compensation. It addresses the inequality the question asks about by making it larger and calling it stability, and I have worked in a state office that called things stability, and I know the word.

So my answer is that professionalization has improved outcomes for the athletes who are paid and worsened them for the athletes who are cut, that it has amplified the inequality between the programs that try to compete at the cap and the ones that can, and that it has also, by accident, rewarded the programs that stopped trying, whose athletes are the ones still rowing and still graduating. The terminal promised that athletes would be paid. The truck delivered that, for some, and delivered the bill to the rest, and the schools in this city that got out of the race before it became a payroll are watching the race from the river with their teams intact, which is not what the settlement intended and is the clearest outcome it has produced. My son wants to play college ball. I would like him to play somewhere that still has a team for him to play on, and this year that is more likely to be a school that cannot afford the cap than one that can, and that is the inequality, read from the bottom up, and it does not look the way the question thinks it does.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent

I am going to make the case that the professionalization has been good, that the inequality it has exposed was always there, and that the correct response to a university discovering it cannot afford a professional football team is to stop having one, and I am going to make it as a man who advises small firms and has told a hundred owners that the line of business they loved was the line that was killing them. The settlement did one thing honestly: it priced the labor. For sixty years universities ran a professional sport on an unpaid workforce and used the surplus to fund rowing and swimming and a great deal of administration, and the courts found that the arrangement was an illegal cartel, and the settlement ended it, and the price of the labor turned out to be about twenty-one million dollars a year for a top program and rising. That is the market telling every athletic director in the country what his football team actually costs, for the first time, and a consultant who has watched a lot of owners learn what a thing actually costs knows that the learning is painful and the alternative, which is not knowing, is worse. The schools that can pay the price have a professional team. The schools that cannot have a decision to make. The decision is the improvement, and the pain is the information.

So let me take the question’s framing and turn it over, because the framing assumes that the inequality is the problem and the inequality is the diagnosis. Ohio State takes in a quarter of a billion dollars. More than half the Group of Five takes in under forty million. Those schools were never in the same business, and the pretense that they were cost the small schools a generation of spending on facilities and coaches and recruiting in a race they could not win and were told they could. The cap, twenty-two percent of the rich schools’ average revenue, is a cruel formula, and I will grant that it was written by the schools it favors, and I will also say that a formula that tells a forty-million-dollar school it cannot compete with a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar one is a formula that tells the truth, and the small schools’ complaint is not that the formula lies but that it stopped lying. Three hundred and nineteen schools opted in because they were afraid to be left out. A consultant would have told most of them to be left out, to keep their wrestlers and their rowers and their degrees, and to let the twenty schools that can afford a professional team have one, in a league of their own, which is where this is going whether the schools admit it or not.

Now the athletes, because the question asks about their outcomes and the answer depends on which athletes and the honest answer is uncomfortable for everyone. The athletes who generate revenue are paid, openly, on standardized contracts with enforceable buyouts, and that is right and overdue and I will not qualify it. The athletes who do not generate revenue have been cut, thirty-two Olympic programs counted by the middle of last year and more since, walk-ons by the hundreds under the roster limits, women’s programs and scholarships by the Senate’s June testimony, and the people who are angry about that are angry at the settlement when they should be angry at the arrangement the settlement ended, which funded those sports with stolen wages. A rowing program paid for by an unpaid quarterback was a rowing program paid for by theft, and the theft has stopped, and the rowing has to be paid for by something else, and the something else is the university’s general fund or the rowers’ families or a club, which is how every other country on earth funds its rowers, and the fact that American universities cannot imagine rowing without a football subsidy is a failure of imagination and not a consequence of professionalization. The Olympic sports should be clubs. They were clubs before the football money arrived and they will be clubs after it leaves, and the athletes in them will be amateurs in the only honest sense, which is that nobody is paying them and nobody is being robbed to subsidize them.

On the transfer dynamics, the small-business view. A player may leave every January for the highest bidder, which the courts required, and the small programs complain that they develop players the rich programs buy, and they are right, and the solution they want, compensation for development, is the solution the professional leagues use, and the schools that wrote the settlement declined to include it because they would have paid it. That is a fair complaint and a fixable one, and the fix is a draft or a transfer fee, and the fix will come when the small schools organize to demand it, which they have not, because they are still trying to compete in a league they should leave. A consultant would tell them to leave first and negotiate second, because a party that is still pretending to compete has no leverage, and a party that has formed its own league and controls its own talent pipeline has a great deal.

I want to say the limited-government thing, because it is the Boxe’s through-line and it applies here with unusual force. The Senate is about to consider a bill, negotiated with the two richest conferences, that would roughly double the cap and give the enforcement to a body those conferences created. That is a federal government stepping in to ratify a cartel’s preferred terms and to protect the cartel from the antitrust law that broke the last one, and a man who believes in limited government should be against it on principle and against it on the facts, because the bill does nothing for the small schools except assess them for a larger pool. The right federal role in college sports is none. Let the courts enforce the antitrust law, let the schools that can afford a professional team form a league and pay for it, let the rest keep their rowers as clubs and their athletes as students, and let the market tell everyone what things cost, which it has begun to do, and which is the only improvement in this whole business that nobody designed.

So my answer is that professionalization has improved outcomes for the athletes who are paid, has exposed rather than created the inequality between programs, and has forced on the small schools a decision they should have made twenty years ago and are still refusing to make; that the Olympic-sport cuts are the end of a subsidy built on theft and should be replaced by clubs and not by a larger cap; and that the Senate’s bill is a cartel asking Washington for protection and should be refused. I moved here from upstate New York, where the small colleges have played football for a century without pretending they were Alabama, and the players finish their degrees and the rowers row and nobody is paid and nobody is robbed, and that is the model, and it was available all along, and the schools that are now complaining about inequality are the ones that spent a generation insisting they were in the other business. Evenings are a boat or a book. The book on this was written by the courts, and it says the labor must be paid, and the rest is a decision about what a university is for, and the decision is not Washington’s to make, and it never was.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent

The university on the hill above this city is one of the rich ones, and I want to write from inside the rich school’s shadow because the question asks about inequality between programs and the view from the winning side is less comfortable than the losing side imagines. Tennessee pays to the cap and past it, through outside deals, in a state whose attorney general sued the NCAA to make that legal before the settlement did, and the program has the general manager and the payroll and the roster that the money buys, and the rural counties that ring this city, which send the university their best athletes and their tuition and their sons, have watched the arrangement with the particular eye of people who are told they are part of something and billed for it. A county engineer who works for one of those counties will tell you what the rich school’s professionalization looks like from Monroe County or Claiborne County: the ticket prices went up to fund the cap, the kid from the county high school who would have walked on cannot because the roster limits cut the walk-ons, the kid who was good enough to be recruited was recruited and then bought away in January by a school with more outside money, and the Olympic sport that the county’s daughter swam in was not cut here, because the rich school can afford to keep it as a line item, but was cut at the regional school an hour away where she would actually have gone. The rich school won. The counties around it paid for the win, in ways the settlement’s authors did not have to think about because they do not live here.

So let me assess the question as a structural matter, which is what it is. The settlement set the cap at twenty-two percent of the average revenue of the richest conferences, which is a formula that a public-works engineer recognizes as a design load set to the heaviest truck on the road and applied to every bridge in the state, and the bridges that were built for the heavy truck carry it and the ones that were not fail, and the failure is reported as the small bridges’ fault. Three hundred and nineteen schools opted in, most of them with no realistic path to the load, because the alternative was to be struck from the map, and the subdivision that includes the regional schools in this state was assessed fourteen percent of the back damages for a wrong done mostly by programs like the one on the hill. Nothing in the settlement says how a school must split its pool, so the rich schools split toward football and keep their rowers, and the middle schools split toward football and cut their rowers, and the small schools cannot fund a pool and keep their rowers by default. The retention data from January shows the gap between the top conferences and the rest widening. That is the structure. It was designed by the heavy trucks.

Now the athletes, because the question’s first clause is about them and the rich school’s athletes are the ones the settlement was built for. They are paid, in the open, on standardized contracts, with buyout terms that the Duke dispute this year showed can be enforced, and the roster on the hill this fall is the best money could assemble, and the players on it are receiving, in some cases, more than the county engineers who built the roads they drive on, and I do not begrudge them a dollar of it, because they generate it and the old arrangement stole it. What I notice is that the outcomes the question asks about are being measured at signing, and the outcomes that a county sees are measured later: whether the player who was bought from a regional school finishes a degree at his third school in three years, whether the walk-on who was cut finds another way to pay for college, whether the swimmer at the regional school whose program was closed stays in the state. Those outcomes are not improved. They are not measured, which is a different thing, and the schools that wrote the settlement have no reason to measure them.

I want to say the thing about public consent, because it is the thing I learned at a utility and it applies here exactly. The university on the hill is a public institution, funded by the taxpayers of a state whose rural counties are poorer than almost any in the country, and the decision to turn its football program into a professional franchise with a twenty-million-dollar payroll was made by a board of trustees, an athletic director, and an attorney general’s lawsuit, and it was never put to the people who fund it. There was public comment. There was a great deal of public enthusiasm, on Saturdays. There was no public consent, in the sense of anyone asking the counties whether they wished to fund a professional team with a university attached, and the counties were not asked because the answer might have been complicated, and the people who make these decisions have learned that an unasked question has no answer. That is the inequality the question asks about, stated as a governance matter: the rich school’s professionalization was decided by the rich school, and the costs were distributed to the counties, the regional schools, the walk-ons, and the swimmers, none of whom were in the room.

On the Senate’s bill, which would roughly double the cap, the engineer’s note. A doubled design load applied to the same bridges fails more of them, and the bill was negotiated with the two conferences whose bridges can carry it, and the regional schools in this state, which were assessed for the last settlement and cannot fund this one, will be told again that they are in the same championship. They are not. They never were. The honest structure is two tiers, with the heavy trucks on their own road, and nobody in Washington will propose it because the heavy trucks wrote the bill, and nobody on the hill will propose it because the hill is winning, and the counties will fund it because the counties are not asked.

So my answer is that professionalization has improved outcomes for the athletes at the rich schools, in the dimension of being paid, and has amplified the inequality between programs by a formula set to the rich schools’ revenue and applied to everyone, with the costs distributed to the parties who were not consulted; and that from the rich school’s own shadow the win looks like a professional franchise that the surrounding counties fund without having been asked whether they wanted one. The stadium will be full tomorrow. The roster will be the best money could buy. The kid from Claiborne County who would have walked on will be in the stands, paying a price that went up to fund the cap, watching a player who was bought from the school he will attend next year, and the swimmer from Monroe County will be at a school in another state because the regional program closed, and the general manager on the hill will be on the phone with an agent before the fourth quarter. I talk when the question is real. This one is, and the honest answer from the winning side is that the win was decided without the people who are paying for it, and that is the only inequality that a county engineer is paid to notice, and it is the one the settlement was built on.