IU football coach Curt Cignetti has spent his entire life around college football, and he’s seen plenty of change along the way.
But there’s been nothing like the last five years, as name, image and likeness (NIL) and the transfer portal have completely reshaped the landscape of college athletics.
Cignetti didn’t lead a team on the field as head coach until he was 50, so while some coaches around his age (63) have stepped away in the face of this new era, he’s just hitting his prime as the leader of a Power Four program. And that has meant this relatively old dog has had to continuously learn new tricks.
“You got to adjust, adapt, or die,” Cignetti said at a Bloomington fundraiser earlier this month. “You got to be light on your feet and be flexible, which I’ve tried to do the last five years.”
The NCAA and its conferences recently agreed to a landmark settlement of three antitrust cases (collectively referred to as House) over athlete compensation, agreeing to permit schools to directly pay athletes revenue starting July 1 under a capped system.
The settlement is in the final stages of approval. Whether it will bring stability to college sports or the next round of lawsuits remains to be seen.
While Cignetti has proven his ability to thrive in the face of uncertainty, what he wants more than anything else is a level playing field.
“I’d like to be able to see some regulation down the road so that us, Texas, and Oregon are playing by the same rules,” Cignetti said. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask for, but it’s a complicated issue right now when you get the courts involved.”
“Hopefully in the next couple years there will be some kind of rules, because right now us coaches are like ‘what are the rules?'”
The House settlement is anticipated to bring some measure of rules, at least temporarily. All schools will have a cap of around $20.5 million in revenue they can share with athletes.
And any other payments to athletes, such as those from NIL collectives, will have to be vetted by an independent third-party to determine whether they are legitimate arms-length transactions. Ostensibly, that should help reduce the scenario where the schools with the richest, most motivated boosters are making sham NIL payments to assemble elite rosters. Cignetti was vocal recently about some programs currently having as much as $40 million in booster funds available to build rosters.
The legality of the House settlement will no doubt be tested. Does it pass Title IX scrutiny? Will any agreement that didn’t involve the athletes at the bargaining table hold up? There are still more questions than answers.
But whatever the future holds for the particulars of college athletes getting paid, it’s clearly here to stay in some form. And as a basic concept, that’s something Cignetti says he is happy to see.
“I think there’s a lot of great things about NIL and rev-share,” he said. “The players definitely deserve a cut.
“These guys (the players), they work a job. This is a job. The amount of time they put into it, then they’ve gotta go to school. It’s entertainment. It’s big-time business, there’s a lot of money rolling in. They deserve a cut and I’m glad they’re getting it.”
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