Students and student-athletes alike gathered in the Wellin Museum to hear a discussion centered around the compensation of student-athletes in college sports, marking the opening Common Ground event for the academic year. The panel discussion consisted of three distinguished individuals in the athletic industry: moderator Jeremy Foley, panelist Jim Cavale and panelist Amy Privette Perko. Foley served as director of athletics at the University of Florida for 25 years. Cavale acts as the current chairman and founder of Athletes.org, a college athletics players association that works to help student-athletes negotiate their playing terms. He also built and sold a business titled INFLCR (pronounced “Influencer”) that helps student-athletes build and manage a social media presence. Privette Perko is CEO of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a think tank working to prioritize athletes’ overall success, particularly related to health and academics.

To begin the Common Ground panel, Foley opened the floor to ask why there are so many competing interests in Division I (DI) sports. Foley set the stage by offering a range of profits college sports are currently generating. According to Foley, the March Madness Basketball Tournament reportedly made 1.1 billion dollars in revenue this past year alone. However, tournament earnings are not the only way money is being brought into the collegiate athletic industry. With the ability to profit off of name, image and likeness, players are able to take advantage of a new field of pay-to-play. Foley also reported how coaches benefit from the monetary gains of the athletic sphere, with some making up to 13 million dollars from the performance of their players and the success of their team. These significant profits that coaches receive are part of the push from student athletes to want to receive profits, too.

Moving further into the discussion, Foley posed a question: how did we get to where we are in the “Wild West” of college sports regarding who gets paid in college sports? Privette Perko opened by stating that due to lack of leadership from the inside of the organization of college athletics, “the courts are deciding the future in college sports.” A 2008 case that awarded money to a student athlete for their name, image and likeness that was used in a video game effectively opened a floodgate of opportunities and began a string of cases. However, policy change has been a very slow process. Cavale touched on how it should not be a system where “one big sport [football] funds others,” because it is not fair for the money one sport makes to go wholly to other teams. One argument for the need to compensate college athletes is that past college athletes are reportedly owed about 2.1 billion dollars. 20 to 22 million dollars is going to come out of the collective revenue of DI colleges to begin to compensate these past athletes.

Foley then posed the question of who should be leading the total enterprise of college athletics. Cavale jumped in, mentioning that the increase in funding in college athletics is what is helping to attract star talent to different teams. Cavale stated that in college sports, “the enterprise is looking out for itself” and athletes are getting a smaller slice of the pie. Without any sort of resolution or partnership between athletes and the colleges, Cavale warned that “there will continue to be lawsuits” from athletes attempting to gain their cut of profits. Privette Perko added that these decisions must focus on “putting the athletes at the center.” Currently, Privette Perko mentioned how 60 to 70 large entity schools are contributing to a one-size-fits all approach that will heavily outweigh the needs of smaller schools along with other sports. Privette Perko warned that going down this path without a development of a “separate entity” for football will result in “lost opportunity with some of those other sports if we move forward with the path that has been drawn out.” Cavel then argued that football players should not pay for everything, but if it was “run like a business,” then enough money could be made to continue football, pay its players, and benefit other sports through new opportunities such as media deals. Privette Perko added that “to begin addressing the problems that are there you have to start with the structure,” because football needs its own entity as its “highly commercial.” Privette Perko closed her argument by saying that what college athletics really needs to be doing is putting “more athlete voices in power.”