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This year, Indiana football enjoyed a winning season — the winningest in program history. Behind this success, there was a perfect storm of factors, including a Supreme Court ruling in 2021 that allowed players to receive compensation from companies and organizations outside their universities. But as a new court case threatens to upend players’ compensation again, women in college sports stand to lose millions because of a single word: “benefits.”
Pending final approval by a federal judge in April, a court settlement between the NCAA and former college athletes will allow universities to begin sharing athletics revenue with players in the 2025-26 school year.
“Until now, a rule known as amateurism has meant that while schools can give scholarships, they generally cannot give money,” Jayma Meyer, a professor of sports law at IU, said in an interview.
Revenue sharing will “mark the first time that schools will directly pay student athletes,” she said.
Revenue sharing will also mark the end of an injustice that Justice Brett Kavanaugh described in his 2021 concurring opinion. As “enormous sums of money flow seemingly to everyone except the student athletes...who generate the revenues,” student athletes end up with “little or nothing,” Kavanaugh wrote. He argued “businesses like the NCAA” cannot restrict laborers’ compensation by defining them as the sort of laborers who go uncompensated — “amateurs.”
But while this injustice has been resolved, another emerged. This month, the Department of Education rescinded Biden-era guidance that said male and female athletes must be compensated equitably for universities to comply with Title IX, part of a 1972 law that prohibited sex-based discrimination in education. Title IX is just 37 words, but the legal question prompting the Department of Education to rescind the guidance hinges on one: “benefits.”. If shared revenue qualifies as a benefit akin to financial aid, Title IX mandates universities to distribute it equitably to men and women. If it does not, universities can allocate it overwhelmingly to men.
Without guidance, this is what universities will do. Recently, the NCAA published a report estimating 77.3% of shared revenue will go to football players while The New York Times reported the University of Georgia will share revenue “in proportion to how” the NCAA settlement “would disperse back pay for name, image and likeness.” Football players will receive 75% of shared revenue, men’s basketball players 15% and women’s basketball players 5%.
The first problem is that universities have a rationale for this, and the second problem is that it’s the right kind of rationale — only in the wrong kind of place. Football and men’s basketball, and by extension these sports’ athletes, generate the most revenue for athletic departments. In a free market, any good business would pay players according to the market value of their labor. But crucially, schools are not good businesses.
The primary purpose of any school that receives federal money, including private schools, is to serve the public good, not appeal to audiences’ tastes. This is because the most important product a school offers is opportunity for students, including athletic opportunities, not mass-market entertainment.
Because students have bodies and minds, the athletic opportunities schools provide are as important as the intellectual ones. So, players — all of them — must take precedence over audiences in college sports. This means investing in student athletes regardless of sex — for themselves, not what the market dictates about them. Universities must be judged by the opportunities they give and impressions they leave on students, not the profit they accrue.
When Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh authored Title IX to guarantee women equal opportunities in education, he had his wife Marvella in mind. Years earlier, the University of Virginia rejected her application with a note that read, “Women need not apply.” Later, Jay Berman, a member of Bayh’s staff, said, “He was just as concerned about women not having the opportunity to play sports as he was about not being able to get into medical school or law school.”
The Department of Education’s decision not to enforce Title IX on revenue sharing will cost women in college sports millions of dollars — in money but also opportunity. This threatens to take us back to a time like Marvella’s when universities invested in men's opportunities to the exclusion of women. In 1971, Professor Jayma Meyer, whom I interviewed for this article, was among the top ten women in the world at the butterfly stroke. But her swimming career ended at IU in 1972 before Title IX was passed because “there were no opportunities for women to swim competitively at the time.” In other words, women needed not apply.
To move forward, universities must afford all student athletes benefits that are equitable.
Eric Cannon is a freshman studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government.
