NCAA president Charlie Baker on Tuesday proposed the creation of a new subdivision within Division I that would allow the highest-resource schools the ability to compensate athletes directly through a trust fund and direct name, image and likeness (NIL) payments.
The groundbreaking proposal was sent out to Division I members and obtained by The Athletic on Tuesday morning, and it included the following recommendations:
- The formation of a new subdivision made up of institutions with the highest resources that can directly compensate athletes through an “enhanced educational trust fund,” which requires the schools that opt into it an investment of at least $30,000 per year per athlete for at least half of the school’s eligible athletes. Schools would have to adhere to Title IX, providing equal monetary opportunities to both female and male athletes.
- Schools in the new subdivision could create their own rules separate from the rest of D-I, and those rules would allow them the ability to address policies such as scholarship limits and roster size as well as transfers and NIL.
- Any Division I school would be able to enter into an NIL deal with its athletes directly, which is not currently permissible.
- Any Division I school would be able to distribute to any athlete funding related to educational benefits without any caps on such compensation.
These recommendations from Baker come amid mounting pressure to allow schools to directly compensate their athletes, and as the NCAA is facing significant legal challenges to its model. In the letter to D-I members, Baker called his proposal a “forward-looking framework” that “gives the educational institutions with the most visibility, the most financial resources and the biggest brands an opportunity to choose to operate with a different set of rules that more accurately reflect their scale and their operating model.”
Schools in both Division I subdivisions would compete against one another for NCAA championships, except for in FBS football, which is run and governed by the College Football Playoff. It’s clear, though Baker doesn’t spell it out, that the highest-resourced schools he is referring to throughout the letter are those in the Power 4 leagues — the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12. Commissioners of the four conferences have recently been lobbying Congress together, seeking help on issues such as NIL that affect their constituents in a far different way than their peers at lower levels of Division I. Opting into the new subdivision would be a school-by-school decision, but a conference could mandate that all of its members participate.
The new proposed model “kick-starts a long-overdue conversation among the membership that focuses on the differences that exist between schools, conferences and divisions and how to create more permissive and flexible rules across the NCAA that put student-athletes first,” Baker wrote in the letter. “Colleges and universities need to be more flexible, and the NCAA needs to be more flexible, too.”
Presumably, this would be a subdivision within the FBS, similar to the oft-discussed power-conference split.
Baker ended his letter by asking Division I members for feedback.
(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
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