The Numbers We Weren’t Supposed to See
OPENING STATEMENT
Sometimes the most revealing information is the information institutions never intended to make public.
This week, Louisiana’s public universities offered an unexpected look at how athlete revenue sharing is divided. Team-level budgets from four University of Louisiana system schools were accidentally posted with public meeting documents even though a new state law allows universities to conceal what they pay individual teams and disclose only the overall total.
In a Louisiana Illuminator story, the school’s budget priorities are unmistakable.
Louisiana Tech budgeted $1.98 million: $1.2 million for football, nearly $500,000 for men’s basketball, $200,000 for baseball, and $86,000 for every single women’s sport combined. The allocation for all women’s sports amounts to 4.3% of the total budget. Similarly, Northwestern State allocated $650,000 of its $750,000 pool to football and men’s basketball, leaving $100,000 for all women’s sports. At Louisiana-Lafayette, women’s sports received about $157,000 from a roughly $1.5 million budget. Southeastern Louisiana directed $404,500 of $454,000 to men’s basketball and the remaining $49,500 to all women’s sports.
Across those four disclosed budgets, women’s sports received roughly $393,000 of approximately $4.68 million: about 8.4 percent.
It’s not a national dataset. But it would be difficult to argue that Louisiana is operating in a vacuum. These numbers are a window into a familiar decision-making structure: football and men’s basketball are treated as the investment; women’s sports are treated as the obligation.
That distinction matters as Congress debates the Protect College Sports Act (otherwise known as the PSCA). The current proposal would allow a school to spend up to $22.5 million above the House settlement’s revenue-sharing cap to retain current athletes. A school could unlock another $5 million, dollar for dollar, based on compensation provided to athletes in women’s, Olympic and other non-revenue sports.
The bill’s sponsors call the proposal an incentive to preserve broad-based athletics. An incentive is better than nothing. But the structure tells its own story. The large pool is for “retention.” The smaller add-on is where women’s and Olympic sports are expressly named. One category is treated as central to competition. The other is positioned as the condition for spending a little more.
Why are women athletes repeatedly asked to settle for protected participation while men receive the overwhelming share of new investment? Because it’s the NCAA’s familiar contradiction: invoking educational opportunity when it needs protection, then operating like a major commercial enterprise when deciding who receives the money.
There has been real progress in women’s sports. But progress at the surface does not erase precedent embedded deep inside athletic departments. When schools finally had new money to distribute, many appear to reach for the oldest playbook available.
Whether the PCSA ultimately passes is almost beside the point. Its architecture reflects the same historical habits now visible in Louisiana. College sports keeps building new systems on old assumptions, then describing the result as inevitable because football and men’s basketball generate more revenue. But “revenue-generating” is not a neutral description. It reflects decades of institutional choices about media exposure, marketing, facilities, staffing and whose competitions were positioned to become valuable.
The next legal test is already developing. The Ninth Circuit is considering appeals challenging the House settlement’s back-damages allocation, which directs roughly 90% to football and men’s basketball and the remainder elsewhere. Prospective revenue sharing continues, and the district court concluded the settlement itself does not require a Title IX violation because schools remain free, and legally obligated, to distribute compensation in a compliant way.
In the coming months, more budgets will become visible through public records, litigation, and reporting. We will learn whether Louisiana is an outlier or simply one of the first places where the math escaped into public view. We will also hear what the Ninth Circuit says about a compensation framework that assigns market value after generations of unequal institutional investment.
The NCAA has seen this movie before. For years, it refused to compensate athletes for the value they created. That position produced multibillion-dollar liability, weakened the NCAA’s credibility and led to its current Hail Mary: asking Congress for protection.
At some point, that playbook may become legally indefensible. Long before then, it should become institutionally unacceptable.
EXHIBIT A
This week, Senator Cory Booker and Senator Chris Murphy introduced an amendment to the PCSA designed to cap coaching compensation at $5 million annually. It is unlikely to survive, and to be clear, we don’t believe that suppressing anyone’s earning potential is an answer. But the amendment exposes an inconsistency at the center of the PCSA. Senator Maria Cantwell has correctly cited runaway spending, including a 370% increase in coaching salaries from 2005 to 2023, as evidence of college sports’ cost problem. Yet the bill’s meaningful cap is aimed only at athletes, whose direct compensation is new. If Washington’s goal is truly cost containment, we must again ask why the athletes are being forced to bear its limits, not the adults who have long benefited from the arms race.
EXHIBIT B
The NCAA’s latest eligibility defeat came from its own rulebook. An Indiana judge granted a preliminary injunction to Stephen Daley, Kellan Wyatt, and dozens of other athletes, finding that the NCAA’s 2026-27 manual makes Class of 2022 athletes eligible under its five-for-five framework. The court rejected the NCAA’s reliance on guidance outside the manual and called its exclusion of those athletes arbitrary. The order also protects plaintiffs who missed the transfer-portal window or signed professional contracts. Once again, the NCAA changed its rules, narrowed them afterward and lost when athletes demanded that its language be honored. Discretion is no substitute for consistency. Or good faith.
ON THE DOCKET
Watch what happens when institutional secrecy meets federal protection. That’s another potential outcome if the PCSA ultimately passes. UNC interviewed more than 60 people about misconduct in its football program but produced no written report. Michigan spent nearly $12 million and interviewed roughly 300 witnesses, yet offered only a limited public summary. These examples suggest an emerging playbook at PUBLIC institutions: investigate extensively, document selectively and ask the public to trust the result. Now consider that trend alongside a bill granting the NCAA, conferences and schools protection from certain antitrust challenges. If Congress reduces external accountability while universities reduce internal transparency, who will be left to challenge how college sports governs itself?
FOOTNOTES
“I can’t imagine how allowing a tiger on a football field across the country has anything to do with whether these employees or these individuals are employees or not, or this particular unit is appropriate.”
Administrative Law Judge Martin Kehoe, after Oregon State’s attorney invoked LSU’s tiger controversy during a hearing on whether the university’s women’s basketball players may unionize.
