After a landmark legal settlement of three antitrust cases against the NCAA, college athletic departments will be allowed to begin sharing revenue with college athletes in the form of direct payments in the fall of 2025. And it sounds like the Ohio State Buckeyes are committed to paying their athletes as much as they are allowed.
The direct payments to college athletes would be capped at 22 percent of the average major conference school’s primary revenues. Which, according to the Columbus Dispatch, would be about $22 million for Ohio State annually and increase by percentage points over the following years. And soon-to-be Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork plans to pay all of that to the players.
“We know the percentage,” Bjork told The Columbus Dispatch. “We know the rough calculation. We know there are escalators. That’s about all we know right now.”
While Ohio State is planning to pay the maximum allowable amount to its athletes, Bjork does not expect all athletes to be paid the same across all sports.
“There are going to be hard decisions,” Bjork said, “because it’s a recalibration of the model.”
“This is the equation that everybody’s got to figure out,” Bjork continued. “If you have $11 million for men’s sports, how much goes to football? We have a lot of basketball tradition-laden programs in the Big Ten. There are basketball powerhouses that don’t have football. They could spend all $11 million on basketball.
“But if we also have to do football here at Ohio State, which we will, what does that leave for basketball? Those are all the challenges that we have to map out.”
So while it’s not clear how Ohio State will split up that money, it is clear that the Buckeyes plan to pay $22 million directly to its athletes beginning in 2025 – which is obviously a lot of money.
