Final Four, football, fencing? College athlete salaries will deeply impact

At the Final Four this week, they will play for a trophy and the right to cut down the nets. Also at stake: Olympic gold medals.

In one of the increasingly urgent peculiarities of big-time college sports, the financial fates of college basketball players and their football brethren will have an outsized impact on America’s ability to field successful Olympic teams beyond this summer’s games in Paris.

Every issue consuming college sports right now — NIL, potential player salaries, conference realignment, TV deals, the expansion of the football playoff and maybe the basketball tournament — will affect how crew, gymnastics, wrestling and dozens of other Olympic sports teams do at the games for years to come.

“Our friends at the USOPC are rightfully concerned,” said Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin, who serves on a U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee panel that studies the college-Olympic connection.

Unlike virtually all countries, the United States government does not fund its Olympic teams. For decades, that system has worked because the U.S. has the world’s most extensively developed college system, which is where the bulk of the nation’s Olympic athletes — and hundreds representing other countries, as well — get their training.

But the teams they play for are reliant on the overall health of football and men’s basketball programs, revenue from which pay for virtually all Olympic sports played on campuses across the U.S.. Based on recent trends, some 75% of the U.S. team heading to the Paris Olympics later this year will be comprised of athletes who came out of the college system; 82% of U.S. Olympic medalists at the 2021 Tokyo Games played their sport in the NCAA.

In the new landscape of college sports — one in which players get paid through NIL compensation deals, but could also start revenue sharing with the schools themselves — a key question is whether there will be enough money to finance all those payments while also funding the more than 5,900 “small-sport” programs spread across 360 NCAA Division I schools that are the pipeline to the Olympics.

One estimate is that NCAA schools spend over $5 billion a year on so-called non-revenue, or Olympic, sports.

Whether it’s the recent decision in a case involving Dartmouth players who want to unionize or NCAA President Charlie Baker’s proposal to pay college players $30,000 a year, it seems inevitable that universities will be on the hook for paying athletes at some point in the next decade.

Sarah Hirshland, the CEO of the USOPC, said if that happens, some schools may choose to fund at least a portion of the tab by making cuts in their Olympic sports programs.

“This is where I get super uncomfortable and say, ‘Let’s make sure we are really thoughtful about this,’” Hirshland said. “Providing broad-based sport programs on campus is an essential part of our sport culture in the U.S.”

Some new money might be…