If you watched a minute of college football this fall, you saw the ads. A voice-over darkly warns that, without congressional action, college sports face an existential crisis. NIL is forcing schools to cut women’s sports and Olympic programs. The very fabric of amateur athletics is unraveling. The solution, viewers are told, is the SCORE Act. It would solve the crisis, though it’s not really explained how.
There are three proposals in front of Congress, will any of them progress and would they even help maintain the NCAA’s relevance?
E60’s Jeremy Schaap unpacks the seismic shift that has transformed college athletics from an amateur ideal into a high-stakes marketplace.
“The SCORE Act (college sports) is well-intended but falls short and is not ready for prime time. I will vote no,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
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Roughly 41 Olympic sports programs have been cut across NCAA Division I, affecting at least 1,000 student-athletes after the settlement was announced by the NCAA in May 2024, said Sam Seemes, CEO of the US Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association.
Olympic and non-revenue sports are facing an uncertain — and in many cases, grim — future.
“We are concerned that the new financial obligations placed on schools will force administrators to divert their attention and resources away from non-football and non-basketball sports – the programs where the majority of NCAA student-athletes participate,” the coaching associations for volleyball, wrestling, track and field, and swimming and diving wrote in a joint statement after the settlement was approved. “This is no hypothetical. Budget cuts and program eliminations have already taken place in anticipation of today’s outcome, and more are likely to follow.”
Over the past three months, a growing number of universities have added or dropped entire sports programs on the eve of dramatic changes coming to college athletics under the $2.8 billion NCAA settlement.
Sonoma State University remains dead set on discontinuing its athletics department despite backlash from students and the community. Sonoma State interim president Emily Cutrer sent a campuswide email Jan. 22 to students, faculty and coaches affiliated with the university, according to CBS News. The email notified recipients of a discontinuation of 22 academic programs, six departments and the university’s athletics department.