Sports
As 'avalanche' hits NCAA and paying players debate continues, change is coming
With College Football Playoff expansion and NCAA men’s basketball tournament rights totaling $2.4 billion annually and women’s basketball’s most marketable player in history — Iowa’s Caitlin Clark — launching her sport to unprecedented television viewership, collegiate sports appear healthy, vibrant and lucrative. That goes for everyone except the participants.
Questions are brewing from college officials to legal scholars about whether athletes should receive a piece of the postseason revenue. Those discussions have spilled over to athlete rights and employment status, both of which likely will be determined in federal court.
NCAA president Charlie Baker, who spoke briefly before Sunday’s women’s championship game, said he wants “to make some changes to how support for student-athletes works in Division I.”
“We’ve done a number of things that are ready to deal with that, but I’m not going to get ahead of the membership on that sort of thing,” Baker said. “I’m sure it’s a conversation we’ll be having.”
But where does the membership stand on paying players? Judging from a recent panel discussion at the University of Iowa, legal scholars and experts are all over the place. With lawsuits threatening to blow apart the current amateur model and the prospect of a college football super league looming in case it does, the questions are endless. But authorities agree change is coming — fast.
“The avalanche has officially hit the NCAA,” said Dan Matheson, Iowa’s director of sport and recreation management program and a former NCAA associate director of enforcement.
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In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 9-0 Alston ruling in 2021, which allowed athletes to receive compensation for name, image and likeness (NIL), legal issues continue to mount for the NCAA. A National Labor Relations Board regional director ruled this year that Dartmouth men’s basketball players are employees. In a complaint filed with the NLRB and testimony ongoing, the National College Players Association considers USC athletes employees of the university, the Pac-12 and the NCAA. In addition, a class-action antitrust lawsuit regarding past NIL rights could cost the NCAA and its membership more than $5 billion.
With players allowed to generate income off their NIL, employment is the last step in the blurry barrier between amateur and professional status. It’s the most difficult one for most experts to navigate because no one can agree on the parameters. Is it just the athletes from revenue-generating sports or all of them? How will it impact Title IX? How much will each athlete earn? Will non-revenue sports survive?
Looking forward to a riveting panel discussion AND 2.0 CLE hours for all you lawyers in the area! There’s a livestream option here: https://t.co/6iM16S9F7y pic.twitter.com/TZSgHoCUga
— Dan Matheson (@DanMatheson) March 27, 2024
Alicia Jessop, a Pepperdine sports administration professor who doubles as the school’s NCAA faculty athletics representative, demanded the NCAA shift course and accept that athletes are employees. Jessop, a member of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball oversight committee and a practicing attorney, argued that putting up resistance and talk of collateral damage is “fear-mongering.”
“The NCAA continues to unsuccessfully and to the tune of millions of dollars in lobbying fees try to persuade Congress to grant it antitrust immunity,” Jessop said. “The likelihood of Congress passing such bills is as good as Caitlin Clark not being the No. 1 overall WNBA draft pick.”
Husch Blackwell law partner Jason Montgomery, a former NCAA lead investigator, disagreed.
“It’s clear that the NCAA is on the worst losing streak in sports since the Bills’ four Super Bowl losses. They are terrible at litigating,” he said. “But current and well-established law in this country says that college athletes are not employees. The Department of Labor says they’re not employees. No federal court has ever said they’re an employee.”
Universities are concerned employee status and compensation would bankrupt athletics departments. Paying athletes could force some departments to eliminate many non-revenue sports, which form the lifeblood of Olympic rosters. Nevius Legal attorney Libby Harmon, who worked as a lead NCAA investigator for 10 years and also served as compliance director at Michigan, said of the 626 athletes for Team USA in the 2020-21 Olympics, 76 percent were current or former athletes from 171 different institutions.
To Jessop, any attempt to trim Olympic sports is an excuse. She cited numbers from USA Today that most Division I coaches averaged a 15.3 percent salary increase in 2021 — after the pandemic financially crushed many departments — plus soaring salaries alongside modest scholarship increases. In the 2023 fiscal year, Ohio State athletics spent more than $90.7 million on coaches and staff salaries while paying $23.8 million for athletic scholarships, according to figures obtained by The Athletic. Harmon brought up Texas A&M’s $75 million buyout of football coach Jimbo Fisher saying, “That could fund Division I athletic departments multiple times over.”
“Don’t buy that there is no money in the system,” Jessop said. “This will require the reallocation of funds. Top college coaches will see pay reductions, strength trainers will no longer earn $1 million per year.”
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Still, it is naïve to expect athletics departments not to continue to invest in football and men’s basketball, the only two sports that generate profits at most power conference schools. Disrupting the system to include employee status, Montgomery argued, could bring it all down. Over the last three years, athletes now have money-making opportunities from NIL, full-ride scholarships up to the cost of attendance and around $6,000 each year in educational rewards.
“The popularity of college sports is at an all-time high,” Montgomery said. “The popularity of television in college sports is at an all-time high. Women’s sports are at an all-time high. And NCAA membership schools in the system produce the most Olympic athletes. So things are going really good in college sports. Let’s change everything. That makes very little business sense and it makes very little practical sense.”
In addition, if athletes are considered employees, programs could hire and fire them based strictly on performance.
“If student-athletes become employees, what does that relationship look like?” asked Josh Lens, an Arkansas sports and recreation professor, who formerly worked in Baylor’s compliance office. “I think it becomes more of an arm’s length relationship between the athletics department and coaches and their athletes, and it resembles more of a professional mode.
“There are great coaches out there and great people out there who truly care about their athletes; that doesn’t necessarily go away. But I think the dynamic changes if an athlete knows that they can have their scholarship taken away.”
The future
So what happens in five or 10 years? Most experts believe changes will take place, including those who want the current system to remain in place. But how extreme remains up for debate.
“This domino is going to fall. It’s not if, it’s when,” Jessop said. “There’s going to be widespread employees at some colleges.”
“I think it’s either going to be some employment model or some other revenue-sharing model. Either way, athletes are going to be compensated outright in the next five years,” Harmon said. “What that looks like remains to be seen.”
“I vehemently disagree that we should change our successful model that is the envy of the world to go to an employment-based model,” Montgomery said. “We can come up with different distributions, and there are areas certainly that the collegiate model needs to improve in. But I think it’s still going to be litigated in the next five years.”
Some believe a school or a conference will direct revenue toward athletes. Lens said he knows plenty of athletic administrators who want to bargain with their athletes right now.
“The NCAA might try to kick them out,” Lens said, “but somebody is going to take a very progressive step and do that on their own.”
Many, if not most, athletic departments are preparing for the next step and want closure as soon as possible. In an interview with The Athletic, Iowa athletic director Beth Goetz said, “There’s not a day that goes by where we’re not talking about what the future of college athletics would look like.” That also includes discussion of a super football league, reported last week by The Athletic, in which one entity would control college football with a union and collective bargaining. That would offload the antitrust issues the NCAA perpetually faces.
“We all want what’s best for college athletics and college sports and if you’re really trying to figure that out, putting limits on ideas that come out, I don’t know if that always makes sense,” Goetz said about the football super league. “Whether or not this is something that we really should pursue, I don’t know yet. But there might be some pieces of that that actually lead to a solution. … I think those are good conversation starters.”
(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
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A lot of history has a chance to be made when it comes to the MLB MVP awards this season.
Let’s check out the odds for the AL and NL MVP race at FanDuel Sportsbook as of July 16.
This page may contain affiliate links to legal sports betting partners. If you sign up or place a wager, FOX Sports may be compensated. Read more about Sports Betting on FOX Sports.
American League MVP
Yordan Alvarez: -165 (bet $10 to win $16.06 total)
Junior Caminero: +450 (bet $10 to win $55 total)
Bobby Witt Jr.: +500 (bet $10 to win $60 total)
Ben Rice: +1400 (bet $10 to win $150 total)
Nick Kurtz: +2000 (bet $10 to win $210 total)
Julio Rodriguez: +4500 (bet $10 to win $460 total)
Shea Langeliers: +5500 (bet $10 to win $560 total)
What to know: We’re going to have a new AL MVP. Two-time defending AL MVP Aaron Judge has not played since May due to injury. His three MVP awards are tied with a host of MLB legends for the third-most all-time, including Yankee icons Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra. However, he’ll have to wait to get his fourth, according to the current odds. The name atop the board is Houston’s Yordan Alvarez, who is leading the AL in home runs (31), hits (111), RBIs (70), on-base percentage (.426), slugging percentage (.633) and OPS (1.059). He is also second in the league in batting average (.318).
National League MVP
Shohei Ohtani: -1500 (bet $10 to win $10.67 total)
Pete Crow-Armstrong: +750 (bet $10 to win $85 total)
Kyle Schwarber: +3000 (bet $10 to win $310 total)
James Wood: +4000 (bet $10 to win $410 total)
Juan Soto: +4000 (bet $10 to win $410 total)
Corbin Carroll: +6500 (bet $10 to win $660 total)
Otto Lopez: +6500 (bet $10 to win $660 total)
What to know: It appears Ohtani is gonna do this thing again, mostly because of his combination of pitching and hitting. At the plate, he’s third in the NL in OBP (.403), third in OPS (.952), fifth in home runs (22) and fifth in slugging (.549). And on the mound, he’s 8-2 in 14 starts with a 1.79 ERA, 0.95 WHIP and 95 strikeouts. Yeesh. Last season, Ohtani won back-to-back NL MVP awards for the first time since Albert Pujols did it in 2008 and 2009. He also won the AL MVP in 2023, making him the first player in MLB history to win MVP back-to-back in each league. This year, if Ohtani is to win NL MVP, he will make a dent in Barry Bonds’ record of four straight MVP wins (2001-2004). All four of Ohtani’s MVP wins have been unanimous, with him receiving all 30 first-place votes. He has the second-most MVPs in history, trailing only Bonds’ seven.
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — If something happened once, it can happen again. That’s kind of what Yogi Berra was getting at when he said “it’s like deja vu all over again.”
Berra, the late Yankee catcher and once New Jersey’s unofficial poet laureate, spent most of his life within walking distance of East Rutherford, N.J., where history could repeat itself all over again in Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and Argentina. And that makes his words newly relevant.
Argentina and Lionel Messi, the reigning champions, will be seeking to become the first to repeat in 64 years while Spain will be playing in the title game for just the second time ever. And the similarities to its first trip, in 2010, are uncanny.
Sixteen years ago Spain became just the second reigning European champion to win a World Cup. It will enter Sunday’s game as the reigning European champion.
In the run-up to the 2010 World Cup, Spain ran off a 35-game unbeaten streak, which matched the longest in history at the time. La Roja will enter Sunday’s game with a 37-game unbeaten streak, which matches the current longest streak in history.
And that 2010 team was known for an absence of ego and a depth of character, a blue-collar collection of quiet superstars built around a core of Andrés Iniesta, Xavi Hernández and Carles Puyol, players who emphasized humility, unity and selflessness.
This team? It’s the same.
“We’re one big family,” center back Pau Cubarsí said in Spanish.
A family that has already achieved its goal, according to coach Luis de la Fuente. So while Argentina may be feeling the pressure of chasing World Cup history, De la Fuente said his team is playing with house money
“I don’t believe in the idea that finals are there to be won. They’re there to be enjoyed,” he said. “What’s to come could be the icing on the cake.”
Of course a cake is nothing without the icing. But then Spain hasn’t had to separate joy from success in this World Cup, enjoying an unbeaten run to the final whose only blemish has been a tournament-opening draw with Cape Verde.
That was the first of six clean sheets for Spanish keeper Unai Simón, though it’s really been a group effort with Simón facing an average of just two shots on goal a game.
“This team never ceases to amaze me,” De la Fuente said. “The scope for improvement is endless. It was a labor of love, a process. It was about reaching the crucial moment in the best possible shape.”
De la Fuente, 65, whose only senior international appearance as a player came in the 1988 Olympics, coached Spain’s U-23 team to a silver medal in the Tokyo Games in 2021 then took over the national team a year later, after it crashed out of a second straight World Cup in the round of 16.
De la Fuente spent nearly two decades coaching at the youth level, including nine years with Spain’s U19 and U21 national teams. But seven months after taking over the senior team, he led later Spain to its first UEFA Nations League title and a year after that it won its first Champions League title in more than a decade. La Roja has lost just twice in 48 games under De la Fuente, who has the highest winning percentage of any man who has managed more than nine games for Spain.
Given his background, De la Fuente trusts young players — with an average age of 26.7, Spain has the sixth-youngest roster in the World Cup — and his starting lineup includes two teenagers in Cubarsí and forward Lamine Yamal. The core of the team — Simón, Mikel Merino, Dani Olmo, Rodri, Mikel Oyarzabal, Fabián Ruiz — are players he coached to European youth-level championships and ones he has known for half their lives.
That has given the team a level of familiarity and trust that goes both ways.
“This team never ceases to amaze me,” the coach said. “The scope for improvement is endless. It was a labor of love, a process. It was about reaching the crucial moment in the best possible shape.”
And they’ve gotten there, said right back Pedro Porro, another product of De la Fuente’s youth teams, by all pulling in the same direction.
“From the very first day we got here — not just me, but the whole team — we’ve been working toward a common goal,” Porro said. “That’s part of the process. There are no excuses.”
That, too, is something De la Fuente brought to the job, though it’s not an original concept for Spain. It’s more like deja vu all over again.
“We are ordinary, generous people,” the coach said. “We’ve recaptured the spirit of 2010.”
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The ESPYS brought some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment to New York City on Wednesday night, a day that typically ranks among the slowest on the sports calendar.
But this year’s ceremony was preceded by a World Cup semifinal match in Atlanta that was already being described as an instant classic. Lionel Messi and Argentina punched their ticket to a second straight World Cup final with a win over England. The defending champions will meet Spain on Saturday in nearby New Jersey, just a short trip across the Hudson River from where comedian Marcello Hernández opened the ESPYS.
The “Saturday Night Live” star wasted little time taking a few jabs at Jake Paul, Tiger Woods and other sports figures.
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Marcello Hernández speaks onstage during the 2026 ESPY Awards at David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
“Mike Tyson ripped my watch off. Welcome to the ESPYS!” Hernández joked after making a boxing-style entrance in a robe with Tyson as part of his entourage.
“I must say, it’s an honor to be here among so many great athletes, and Jake Paul,” Hernández began in his roughly 10-minute monologue.
Paul appeared to take the joke in stride, laughing and applauding as cameras cut to him in the crowd. Hernández then stayed on the YouTube star-turned-boxer, needling him over his history of fighting older opponents.
“Jake, that’s just a joke. Don’t fight me,” Hernández continued. “My dad and my stepdad are both here. They’re over 50, and I know that’s how you like them. So, fight them instead.”
Paul kept laughing as Hernández’s bit played out, eventually closing with the comedian shifting attention to his father and stepfather, who were shown in the audience.
Atmosphere at the 2026 ESPYS at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Square on July 15, 2026, in New York, New York. (Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images)
Hernández later used Caleb Williams’ “Madden 27” cover as a lead into Woods.
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“I want to congratulate Caleb Williams, the quarterback for the Chicago Bears, who will be on the cover of the new Madden video game. Congratulations to Caleb,” Hernández said, before adding, “And Tiger Woods will be on the cover of Grand Theft Auto.”
Woods was arrested in Florida in March on charges of DUI after a car crash. The arrest report said a deputy found pain pills in his pocket and observed signs of impairment at the scene. Woods later announced he would take time away from golf to seek treatment.
Hernández also worked North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick into the monologue, using the 74-year-old’s relationship with Jordon Hudson as part of a joke about the New York Knicks’ title drought.
“The Knicks won their first championship since 1973. And to put into perceptive how long ago that was, in 1973 hockey players didn’t wear helmets, basketball had no three point line. And in 1973, Bill Belichick was the age his girlfriend is now.”
The Knicks later took home the ESPY for Best Team.
Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby and other members of the 2025-26 Knicks championship team took the stage to accept the award, but Josh Hart was noticeably absent. Brunson drew laughs when he joked, “I want to say thank you to the ESPYS for pulling Josh Hart’s invite.”
Earlier in the night Brunson also received the “Best Championship Performance” award.
Jalen Brunson accepts the Best Championship Performance award onstage during the 2026 ESPY Awards at David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City on July 15, 2026. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for W+P)
Former NBA player Jason Collins, who died in May at age 47 following a battle with Stage 4 glioblastoma, posthumously received the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage. Former MLB pitcher Jim Abbott received the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance, while Scott Ruskan was honored with the Pat Tillman Award for Service.
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The ESPYS are held every summer, bringing together top athletes and other stars to celebrate the best moments from the past year in sports while honoring figures recognized for courage, service and impact. In past years, the ceremony has been held in Los Angeles, but shifted to New York this year.
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