There are a number of things that make it so difficult today, but cost of attendance is the big reason. Athletic Departments pay the university for tuition for their athletes. And if they out of state, they pay the normal rate. This is a common misconception, that the scholarship bills just get cancelled out by the university or something. 10 scholarships for a team will immeadiately cost the athletic department between 250,000-500,000 dollars. And that’s JUST scholarship costs. Tuition has exponentially increased for 20 years.

Then you add in the unsustainable growth and spending on non-revenue sports, and you get a lot of wasted money. (I guess it’s all perspective, as when I was competing I wouldn’t have considered it waste, per se.) is there any reason an Olympic sports team should travel on a chartered jet for any competition? Doesn’t happen at VT, but non-revenue teams at other ACC programs have that luxury sometimes, and the economics are insane to me.

I agree that college sports are on the way out, or atleast as they have been. As an ex-Olympic sport athlete at VT, it’s sad to see the trend, but it’s not surprising. And honestly, when you break down college sports, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to give some one acceptance to the school, and a scholarship, for playing a sport well. (The acceptance part is more fundamentally out of whack than the scholarship part in my opinion.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out, but I envision many sports being cut, and kept in a simple club format. It will have huge impacts on the top levels of competition for many Olympic sports, where the world’s best often times are on NCAA Teams, or train with them as post graduates.

I think NCAA sports are in for a reckoning soon. And that may include basketball and football. Seems to me like time will eventually end non-rev varsity sports, for the most part. Also seems like time will eventually lead top revenue generating programs to form their own non-NCAA league. From one perspective, football players at big programs are forced to be paid in tuition dollars, without any alternatives. (I use football because there really is no viable alternative to college football, unlike essentially any other college sport.) they’re barred from working on the free market at their age, but their skills have money value, and that value is used by Universities.

Super complex issue. NCAA format is the norm, and has history backing it, but the system defies real capitalism. Gonna take some serious regulations and lobbying by the NCAA to keep on carrying on the way they are, in my opinion.