Cal Legends and NIL has kept Cal alive. Can Cal survive the death of amateurism?

The House vs. NCAA lawsuit has been settled, and soon colleges will be directly paying athletes. What next for the Bears?

Heroes

It’s weird to finally get to this point. For the better part of a decade, I have been one tiny voice in the sea of voices calling for NCAA reform. Meanwhile, for years it has been incredibly obvious to anybody paying the slightest bit of attention that reform was going to be forced upon the NCAA via the legal process.

Now, finally, facing a multi-BILLION-dollar class action finding and knowing that they’ve spent the last 5 years getting laughed out of every court room across the United States, and NCAA finally came to the negotiating table and agreed to end amateurism forever. The inevitable has finally happened.

What does it mean in the short term?

• The NCAA will pay 2.75 billion dollars in damages to athletes denied rights to profits made from their talents over a 10 year period (so 275 million/year).

• Payment for past damages comes out of NCAA reserve money and future withheld distributions to NCAA universities at all levels.

• Meanwhile, roughly 22% of revenue from a power conference team or roughly 20 million dollars per team will be allotted for revenue sharing with athletes, and this amount is not defrayed by benefits already provided to athletes like healthcare and scholarships.

It will be the job of every athletic department in the country to navigate this new reality. Some schools (read Big-10 and SEC) will be able to easily absorb revenue sharing, and they may elect to pay beyond the minimum outlined in the settlement for a competitive advantage. For other schools (read any school from a conference at the FCS level or lower), this will require a major reallocation of resources, because a portion of their anticipated future revenue will go to paying the settlement.

And some schools (read ACC/Big-12 teams) will be somewhere in the middle and will have to navigate an uncertain future.

If you had asked me four years ago if I thought Cal was ready to navigate a post-amateurism future, I would have laughed in your face. But a few things have happened since then that have caused me to re-evaluate my pessimism. Because, surprise surprise, Cal adapted to the NIL place-holder reality pretty darn well.

By one recruiting service that attempts to account for talent in and talent out, Cal basketball has put together back-to-back top 10 transfer classes. On the football side of the ledger, Cal is in the process of putting together a transfer class that Rivals, 247, and On3* all agree is a top 20 class, just like 2023. For two straight years, both of Cal’s major revenue programs have been killing it in the transfer portal.

*On3’s website appears to have a glitch that has temporarily disabled Cal’s page and spot in the rankings, but Cal was 16th last I checked.

Cal, modern avatar for anti-athletics bureaucracy and institutional hostility towards spending money . . . has been one of the most successful schools at capitalizing on NIL? HOW?!

The short answer? Cal Legends is one of the best run NIL collectives in the country. The board that runs Cal Legends is composed of competent, hard working alums who have donated their time, expertise, and passion to the mission of saving Cal athletics.

In the last few years, there have been many examples of chaotic NIL shops. USC has been a mess. Florida’s collective screwed up enough to get themselves sued. Those are just the headline stories from a bunch of programs that have failed to maximize NIL opportunities due to mismanagement, lack of engagement with donors, or inability to deliver on agreements with athletes.

Cal Legends, on the other hand, has succeeded in leveraging donors, has been in alignment with Cal athletics, and has provided stability and certainty on agreements with Cal athletes. This organizational competence has allowed Cal to punch well above its weight in the portal.

I don’t want to imply that Cal Legends is the ONLY reason for Cal’s transfer portal success; credit must also go to Justin Wilcox and Mark Madsen, who have embraced this new route to get talent into their programs. And they must have some amount of backing from the rest of Cal’s athletic department structure.

But I also think it’s not hyperbole to suggest that if Cal Legends was a poorly run debacle, that Cal’s revenue programs would have badly struggled to recruit talent and Cal’s backslide into major athletics irrelevance would have continued at a time of great crisis.

The problem now is that the structure of college sports is going to drastically change once again. NIL is no longer going to be the driving force for athlete compensation at the power conference level, as funding will instead come directly from the institution. Which, you know, makes sense. Employees typically get paid directly by their employer and not straight from the hands of the consumers who like the product.

But it means that Cal will have to pivot again, and that the competitive advantage that Cal Legends has helped build may no longer be as impactful as it has been these past two years, through no fault of their own.

And while a small group of dedicated alums were able to organize Cal Legends without involvement from Cal’s bureaucracy, this next step will involve active steering and decision making from Cal itself.

The background of new chancellor Rich Lyons has given Cal fans reasons for optimism. Moreover, it would be a dumb choice for Cal to proactively join the ACC and thus stay in major conference athletics while also refusing to acknowledge and prepare for the reality of what choosing to remain in major conference athletics means.

It’s still a confusing, chaotic landscape that Cal must now navigate, with certain structural disadvantages cemented in place. But for the first time in years (decades?) I have some amount of optimism because Cal has smart people inside and outside the athletic department who want athletics to survive and thrive in positions where they can help.