Opinion | College Sports Is Broken. Here’s What Must Come Next.

College football teams get chartered planes and nice hotels. But for Olympic sports like field hockey, track and field, and crew, which most athletes play, flying commercial is the norm. For a University of Michigan team to travel to a game at the University of Oregon, for example, requires over seven and a half hours of travel on Delta Airlines, with a layover in Salt Lake City or Seattle. That’s longer than a flight from Detroit to London. As part of the Big Ten Conference, a Rutgers volleyball player might fly more than 2,800 miles to compete in a game at the University of Washington on a Tuesday, before returning for a Wednesday morning exam. Calling this amateur or college athletics is simply laughable. Many student athletes rarely have the chance to step foot in a classroom, attending their classes online and taking proctored exams in hotel ballrooms near the next game site.

The only way any of it can begin to make sense is if players get a percentage of the money that conferences make off that labor.

There are a number of ways it could happen. For example, all student athletes at the University of Michigan would become employees or independent contractors of the Big Ten Conference, and would receive a percentage of the $59 million or so each member school makes per year from TV rights. Another model would involve the networks directly engaging in name, image and likeness deals with student athletes from major conferences, allowing these student athletes to make a guaranteed income without increasing their time commitment significantly. Say the Big Ten required its TV partners to share 30 percent of its revenues with its student athletes,. Each athlete would receive a percentage of that. At Michigan, where roughly 900 athletes compete in Ann Arbor, that would mean a wide receiver or field hockey player would get approximately $20,000 per year.

In early August, during the latest round of Big Ten expansion, I heard from leaders from across other power conferences — from university presidents to athletic directors and coaches — several of whom agreed with a plan for revenue sharing. Two current Big Ten Football coaches, Iowa’s head coach, Kirk Ferentz, and Michigan’s coach, Jim Harbaugh, have already expressed support for revenue sharing. It’s time for leaders who agree privately to help create a critical mass of support. The N.C.A.A.’s rules on revenue sharing are driven by their members; this change will not come from the N.C.A.A.’s home base of Indianapolis, but from leaders at member institutions speaking frankly about the challenges to come. It must also take into account the input of student athletes, who are too often shut out of decisions that directly affect them.

Make no mistake, the courts are judging the Big Ten Conference, and the other major N.C.A.A.’ conferences, on their behavior. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court wrote in a concurring opinion to the landmark 2021 N.C.A.A. v. Alston decision, “[n]owhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate . . . The N.C.A.A.’ is not above the law.”

With several other cases pending, the status quo is crumbling quickly. If the governing bodies and universities do not choose to reform soon, the courts, tired of the hypocrisy, will force their hand.