Think NIL blew up college sports? California is going for the knockout with new bill

The Capitol in Sacramento.

(Christopher Boswell)

That is hard to know. It has a long way to go, needing to make it through the Senate and then through a bunch of committees in the Assembly and then the Assembly floor before moving onto the governor’s desk.

The bill has already been amended. The original asked for Title IX protections and mechanisms in place to curb the cutting of non-revenue sports, but those parts have been removed to fully focus on revenue sharing.

Given the massive implications for athletic department budgets as it’s currently written, there has already been discussion about amending the payment structure to give schools the option of distributing only new revenues (increases year over year) to the players.

In that case, say USC football made $10 million more in 2022 than it did in 2021. Then all of the gain would go to feeding the players’ degree completion funds — $117,650 each — but the department would be able to continue to use the same amount from 2021 to fund the rest of its sports and avoid the doomsday scenario.

If a program didn’t increase revenues in a year, then the players would receive nothing.

One thing to factor in is that the Pac-12 will be renegotiating its media rights contracts for 2024, which should bring in significantly more revenue from the conference.

If SB 1401 becomes law, much of that windfall could go to the athletes and quickly make them whole, so to speak, in working toward the bill’s requirement of a 50/50 split.

It seems likely that if the bill passes, it will have something like this new revenues option in place, because it would give the schools a chance to maintain their current level of operations.