During the 1980s and ’90s, Virginia Tech and Virginia ran afoul of the NCAA. Rules were broken, sanctions levied, jobs lost. High-profile jobs held by accomplished men.
The UVA athletic director who later served as executive director of the NCAA and the United States Olympic Committee. The winningest men’s basketball coach in Tech history, the school’s football coach/AD and president.
As college sports commences revenue sharing with athletes — a federal judge in California — many of the violations that occurred in Charlottesville and Blacksburg seem downright irrelevant.
Such a revision speaks to the clarity of hindsight and the evolution of how subsidies for college athletes are viewed by the public and, most telling, the courts.
The Supreme Court’s four years ago aside — that antitrust challenge was brought by former Phoebus High and West Virginia football player Shawne Alston — the most influential jurist in this prolonged legal drama is 75-year-old Claudia Wilken.
She ruled against the NCAA in the landmark 2014 case filed by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon over the uncompensated use of his likeness in a video game. Five years later, , and Friday she approved the settlement of three antitrust cases, known collectively as House, filed by former athletes against the ACC, Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, Pac-12 and NCAA.
Her decision forever buries the antiquated notion of major-college athletes as amateurs and permits schools over the next decade to share a capped portion of their athletics revenue with players. The cap for fiscal 2025-26, which starts July 1, is expected to be approximately $20.5 million.
Athletes can also negotiate name, image and likeness (NIL) endorsement contracts, with the settlement creating a clearinghouse, operated by Deloitte, to rapidly determine whether those deals are of fair market value.
Schools that willfully exceed the revenue-sharing cap and/or ignore the clearinghouse risk sanctions not from the NCAA’s feckless enforcement arm but from the newly deputized , headed by former Major League Baseball Executive Vice President, Legal & Operations
In theory, the clearinghouse and commission will eliminate the unregulated, booster-financed payments to athletes that have masqueraded as NIL compensation since the NCAA authorized endorsement contracts in 2021.
Skepticism is encouraged, but no matter the settlement’s effectiveness, major college sports will have some marquee athletes earning north of $1 million, and scores making six figures, for the foreseeable future.
And bravo for that. Indeed, given that the surviving power conferences — Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big 12 — reported a combined $3 billion in 2023-24 revenue, it’s little wonder that college athlete compensation has become as accepted as Venmo.
Which brings us back to Virginia Tech and Virginia in the relative Dark Ages.
Passive campus oversight of Hokies athletics during the 1980s led to financial deficits and academic neglect, and as football coach and athletic director, Bill Dooley was stretched too thin. His teams authored seven consecutive winning ӽ紫ýs from 1980-86 — what current Tech faithful wouldn’t give for a similar run — even as his management of the department waned.
But consider some of the transactions that contributed to the NCAA in 1987 banning the men’s basketball program from postӽ紫ý for two years.
A booster gave a player’s wife $7,200 toward financing a car. Athletes received discounted or free housing from a summer employer, and a donor provided complimentary meals to athletes at his restaurant.
Such benefits, improper then, are laughable now.
But the collective fallout led Dooley, basketball coach Charlie Moir and university president William Lavery to resign. The NCAA never implicated Moir, who guided teams that included Dell Curry and Dale Solomon to four NCAA Tournaments in 11 ӽ紫ýs, and in 2006, Tech inducted Moir into its Hall of Fame.
The most notable casualty of Virginia’s infractions case was Dick Schultz, the Cavaliers’ athletic director from 1981-87 and the visionary who hired George Welsh from the Naval Academy to coach UVA’s football program.
So distinguished was Schultz that the NCAA selected him as the governing body’s executive director. But in 1990, Virginia officials discovered that the athletic department’s fundraising arm had, over seven years, provided interest-free loans to 30 athletes, 15 graduate assistant coaches and three students working in the department.
The 48 loans totaled less than $50,000, which these days couldn’t buy you a long-snapper.
But years of investigations led to the NCAA placing Virginia on probation for the illicit benefits and an independent fact-finder to conclude that Schultz knew of the practice. Despite stridently denying the charge, he resigned from the NCAA in 1993.
Two years later, the USOC hired Schultz as executive director, a post he held until 2000.
A quarter-century later, major college sports finally embraces an uncertain but long-overdue world of compensating its athletes.
David Teel: david.teel@virginiamedia.com; @ByDavidTeel
