How money is changing the landscape of college sports

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• Amna Nawaz:

  College football will have a new national champion tonight after Michigan takes on Washington in Houston. Both are undefeated and aiming to win their first national title since the 1990s.

  But, as Stephanie Sy explains, this championship game is the end of an era for college football with major changes coming next year.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Starting next year, the college football playoffs will expand substantially, allowing a dozen teams to compete for the title.

  And that's just one of the dramatic changes affecting what has become an American pastime. Just before the bowl season began, NCAA President Charlie Baker unveiled a new proposal that would impact all college sports. It would allow Division I schools to pay athletes directly for the first time.

  Colleges that participated would have to set aside a minimum of $30,000 per athlete for at least half of all its athletes. Schools also could have direct agreements with athletes over their name, image, and likeness.

  Pat Forde is covering all of this. He's a senior writer for "Sports Illustrated" and joins me from Houston.

  Pat, I'm reminded about something Deion Sanders said recently about the conference realignments in college football. He said, all this is about money. It's about a bag. And everyone's chasing that bag.

  How does this new proposal by Charlie Baker affect the chase for the money bag?

  Pat Forde, "Sports Illustrated": Well, I think it's an acknowledgement, Stephanie, that the bag is the game, that that is what's going on.

  And that if the NCAA is going to stay ahead of the lawsuits that are hounding them and trying to basically force an employee-employer relationship, if they want to maintain any kind of antitrust exemption, if they want to get Congress to help maintain college sports as even remotely what we're used to, I think they see this as a necessary step, that they have to give some of the proceeds directly to the athletes and can't cloak it in other means or fashions, but just literally hand them the money.

• Stephanie Sy:

  And for all the reasons you just described, this is just a beginning. It's very complex.

  If schools, though, were allowed eventually to directly pay athletes, would the cash flow only to the athletes who play large revenue-generating sports like football, or does it actually increase opportunities for good athletes that might not get the big endorsement money?

• Pat Forde:

  Well, that still remains to be seen to a degree, but there are certainly concerns about where the money would go.

  And we will start to learn more at the NCAA convention here in the coming days, where we're going to get maybe a little bit more detail on proposals or counterproposals that have been made in this area. But we're talking about a minimum of $30,000 for half of the school's athletes. Who is that half? Who gets that?

  We can rest assured the football players are going to get theirs. The men's basketball players are almost assuredly going to get theirs. There will be a Title IX component to this, where women athletes also would get theirs, some of them. But then who doesn't? Where is that line drawn?

  And I think, if you're in an Olympic sport, and probably in a men's Olympic sport, you probably are thinking that you're going to have a hard time getting a hold of that money. And the other thing there, the other piece of this is, we're talking about a minimum of $30,000 for half of your athletes.

  A lot of them are going to pay a lot more than that. So we're talking $6 million, $8 million, $12 million maybe per year which maybe schools would have to budget for. And that's going to weed some of the schools out of competition for the biggest prizes in the sports too.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Nick Saban, Alabama's head coach, has described college football as heading in a semipro direction already. Saban's had a lot to say about all of this, of course.

  But does Charlie Baker's proposal show that college sports are bound to become a completely free market enterprise?

• Pat Forde:

  Well, I mean, it's another step that direction. And then the question is, the NCAA, as they often do with rules here, they're hoping to thread a needle, which keeps it from being flat-out professional sports, that keeps it from athletes being employees, that keeps the NCAA's antitrust status.

  I don't know whether they're going to be able to pull this off. I mean, there are lawsuits right now pending that could result in billions of dollars in damages against NCAA schools. And so they're kind of backed into a corner here, and they're trying to figure out a way to keep college sports as part of campus and part of higher education.

  But it gets harder and harder with each kind of erosion of the NCAA's stance in a lot of these things. So this is the next step, and it's a strategic retreat, I guess you would say, towards something that may be sustainable.

  But, again, they're going to need help from Congress. They're going to need to win some battles probably in court or to get people to drop some lawsuits.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Does the proposal have legs?

• Pat Forde:

  Yes, it does, absolutely.

  Now, what we're going to find out, again, in the NCAA convention here, that we're going to hear counter proposals and people that will probably try to poke some holes in this thing, and at least to say, let's find a little bit better way.

  Charlie Baker's proposal, while certainly bold and a big step forward and something that I think needed to happen, it's very light on details. And the devil has always been in the details of trying to work out something for hundreds, if not thousands of colleges at multiple different levels.

  And one key part of this proposal is potentially a super division of schools that maybe is just 50, 60, 80 schools, and they can be further deregulated in what they can give to athletes, in terms of what they can afford. Now, the problem there is that it further widens the gulf in something that people, I think, like to see all comers, so to speak, a 120-school division of college — major college football, a 350-school division of major college basketball that makes the NCAA Tournament so much fun when the underdogs win those games.

  Do we eventually move the big dogs so far away that there is no relation with those other schools? That's kind of where they're trying to find the line there.

• Stephanie Sy:

  And speaking of college football, I can't let a senior "Sports Illustrated" writer go without getting his take on the championship game coming up in Houston.

  Pat, what will you be looking out for in this matchup between Washington and Michigan?

• Pat Forde:

  Yes, should be a great matchup. Really looking forward to it, the passing ability of Washington with Michael Penix quarterback and the receivers, a lot of first round NFL talent there, against really the brute force and blunt force of Michigan in the way of their style of play.

  And Michigan's been under the microscope with some controversies about NCAA rules this year. They have handled it. They have answered all questions. We have got two 14-0 teams playing each other. We're going to have a very worthy champion one way or the other.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Pat Forde with "Sports Illustrated."

  Thanks so much for joining us, Pat.

• Pat Forde:

  Thank you, Stephanie.

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