.66%: What Penn State’s Reporting Indicates About the Future of Women’s Sports

OPENING STATEMENTS

There’s been a lot of noise about Penn State’s latest athletics financial report since it was posted last week, both in what it details and what it suggests. While the largest number - the eye‑popping $535 million in athletics-related debt - has received the headlines, it’s the smallest number that is just as revealing.

Penn State allocated just .66% of Institutional NIL Revenue Share to female athletes. You read that correctly: less than 1%. That’s $120,000 of the nearly $18.4 million in total allocated to all athletes. And it includes the $10,000 for the women’s volleyball team that won a national championship.

Interesting in the report is that the House v. NCAA revenue‑sharing provisions didn’t officially start until July 1, 2025. But Penn State chose to include figures on its 2024-25 Member Financial Reporting System form, suggesting this is pre-booked allocation, or perhaps a look at the anticipated outlay for the current academic year. 

Whatever the scenario, the distribution follows the rough “rule of thumb” that’s been anticipated: about ¾ of the pool to football (Penn State allocated $13.3 million), a big slice to men’s basketball (Penn State allocated just over $3 million) and whatever’s left scattered across everyone else. At Penn State, that meant nearly $1.5 million for wrestling, $300,000 for baseball and, among others, $110,000 for women’s basketball - the only female sport to receive money other than volleyball.

Comparisons are hard to come by at this point, because Penn State was unique in its reporting of NIL rev share. Friend and colleague Dr. Donna Lopiano said she looked at about 120 other Division I NCAA MFRS reports and found that only a handful even showed 2024‑25 NIL revenue sharing at all. In most of those, either the money was not allocated by sex (Oklahoma State, Louisville, Texas, etc.) or the splits looked heavily tilted toward men, even if the total distributions were much, much smaller (UTSA, Tarleton State, North Texas). Penn State is the outlier not because it’s more inequitable, but because it provided enough detail — across MFRS, Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA), and Common Data Set enrollment — to see the full “athletic related student aid” picture and actually run the math. When you can see under the hood, the pattern is hard to miss.​

How does this align with Title IX? That’s another billion-dollar question. Federal guidance has already ping‑ponged over whether revenue‑sharing and institutionally controlled NIL payments should be treated as athletic aid for these purposes. But Title IX is supposed to look at institutional opportunity and equity: how the school allocates scholarships, benefits, and other forms of athletic financial assistance. 

Penn State’s .66% figure is a red flag for exactly that reason. If a school builds a dual‑track system, one in which men, especially in football and men’s basketball, receive the overwhelming share of school‑controlled cash while women remain comparatively underfunded, even when they’re winning national titles, it’s not hard to imagine the next generation of Title IX lawsuits. Remember, we’re starting from a landscape in which roughly 90% of athletic departments already miss basic Title IX benchmarks, and where the original House back‑pay formula would have sent only about 5% of $2.8 billion in damages to women before multiple appeal groups argued that distribution itself violated federal law.

So expect the courts - much as they have been central to eligibility questions right now - will be asked to do what agencies haven’t: draw a line.

The 2024‑25 reports we’re looking at now were due to the NCAA’s MFRS system on January 15, 2026, covering the last year before House’s injunctive relief formally kicked in. The real test comes with 2025‑26, the first full revenue‑sharing year under House v. NCAA. Schools’ 2025‑26 numbers will be preliminarily compiled in fall 2026 and formally submitted in January 2027. That means sometime around this time next year, we’ll get the first truly comprehensive look at how institutions are structuring their pay architecture: how much is going to football and men’s basketball versus how much is earmarked for women’s sports, Olympic sports, and everyone else.​

When those reports hit, Penn State’s numbers may look less like an outlier and more like a preview. The question is whether anyone in power chooses to, instead, treat them as a warning. Will schools conduct gender‑equity revenue‑share audits before each distribution cycle, or keep flying blind and hope no one sues? What metrics will they lean on to justify disparities - “market value,” television inventory, donor interest - even when women’s sports are growing faster and driving outsized engagement in the NIL space? How long before a women’s team that’s winning, drawing crowds, and getting pennies on the institutional NIL dollar files the first major Title IX challenge targeting revenue‑sharing allocations themselves?

Penn State has given us something rare at this moment: receipts. The 0.66% figure is not just a statistic, it’s a signal. It tells athletes, advocates, and policymakers exactly what the future will look like if we don’t build equity into the pay era from the start, a system that cements the old hierarchies with new money. The time to intervene is now, before those patterns harden into precedent.​

EXHIBIT A

The NCAA doubled down this week on its refusal to settle Johnson v. NCAA, the potential game‑changer over whether Division I athletes are employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. In a joint filing, the athletes, led by former Villanova football player Ralph “Trey” Johnson, said they’re open to a class‑wide settlement conference, while the NCAA and defendant schools rejected the idea as “not helpful or productive.” That stance keeps Johnson on track to deliver exactly what the NCAA fears most: a clear federal ruling on athlete employee status in the heart of the revenue‑share era.

EXHIBIT B

Shout out toGreg Chick for hisNILnomics newsletter this week about the Learfield Directors' Cup. If you’re not familiar, it recognizes the top overall collegiate athletic programs. The always data-rich analysis looks at overall costs and efficiency and makes the suggestion that it’s “a vanity project created by athletic directors to award themselves points for doing what Title IX already requires them to do.” UNC comes out looking good, but not Cal or the SEC as a whole. Worth a few minutes of your time.

ON THE DOCKET

I’m watching closely to see how the Epstein files ripple through sports, with the latest example popping up yesterday when Abby Wambach walked away from Wasserman after two decades, after his name was revealed in the files. I’m curious to see what other female Wasserman athletes, such as Paige Bueckers, Brittney Griner, Breanna Stewart, Alex Morgan, Naomi Girma, and Katie Ledecky decide to do - and what that means for the next wave of professional female stars.

FOOTNOTES

$12.5 Million

What North Dakota State must pay the Mountain West and NCAA to move from FCS to FBS and join the conference