CRAWFORD CONVERSATION | Louisville's Heird on the NCAA's new $20 million question
Somewhere, schools will have to find a way to carve out a $20-$22 million piece of the pie for their athletes.
Heird tries to answer some difficult questions regarding the new direction in college atheltics ... Link above ... here's a bit of the article to get started ...
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Here, in brief, is the challenge facing University of Louisville (and every other Power 5) athletic department starting in the 2025-26 season: Find $22 million with which to pay players, the details and guidelines of which will be added in the coming months.
This is the House v. NCAA settlement in a nutshell. The NCAA is tired of losing in court. It is afraid of losing a major class-action case in court. And it is seeking a framework that will allow itself to stabilize as it converts fully to the new reality of athletes not only being able to make their own money off their Names, Images and Likenesses, but of being due a share of actual media rights revenues earned by their schools and conferences.
Add in an additional $2.5 billion or so in damages – essentially back payments -- to athletes who were denied a right to earn in the past, and you have a picture of the liability the NCAA and its schools are facing over the next 10 years (the length of the deal).
The timing of the settlement could be better for U of L. Record-low basketball attendance has presented a revenue challenge for the school, though improving football fortunes and a hoped-for basketball revival could help turn the picture around fairly quickly. (Having only six home football games next season, though, won’t help.)
Regardless, the money has to come from somewhere. Athletic director Josh Heird acknowledged in a recent interview, “We don’t have $20 million sitting around, I can promise you that.”
So, Louisville, like everyone else, will have to find the money, whether it’s in new revenue, reduced spending, cuts or reallocations. It’s the new normal – for now. Somewhere, schools will have to find a way to carve out a $20-$22 million piece of the pie for their athletes.
How? Nobody is quite sure.
“I don't think there's a better example of building an airplane while you're flying it than what we're going through right now,” Heird said.
For schools in the SEC or Big Ten, that may be less of a burden. The SEC is set to begin its first season of a 10-year, $3 billion rights deal with ESPN. The Big Ten announced a seven-year, $8 billion deal with NBC, CBS and FOX last year. Those leagues are sending major cash infusions to their members to help offset costs. But even for schools at the top end of the revenue spectrum, adding a $20 million line item is no small thing.
The ACC distributed an average of $44.8 million to its football playing members in 2024, but that number won’t grow significantly, while the Big Ten and SEC widen the revenue gap.
All of which creates a challenging landscape for Louisville, which has begun to prepare a strategy for meeting the new revenue-sharing challenge without really yet having a playbook.
Recently, Heird spent some time with WDRB to talk about the school’s approach. The following Q&A with WDRB’s Eric Crawford tackles some of the basic questions, knowing that answers sometimes are simply not available without more specifics of the rules that the settlement lays out, such as whether the payments are subject to Title IX law.
The following are some edited excerpts from that conversation.
CRAWFORD: The House settlement is being talked about everywhere. What are your initial thoughts and some of the challenges as Louisville starts to put together an approach to this?
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