Casey Wasserman Diagnoses Problems with NCAA, Proposes Solutions for Olympic Sports

Casey Wasserman, founder of Wasserman Media and chair of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Organizing Committee, shared his thoughts on the direction of college sports during an interview on The Rich Eisen Show last week.

Wasserman said one of the key questions is whether college football will remain within the NCAA — where it largely subsidizes Olympic sports across the country — or whether it will become its own separate entity.

“I think we’re at this turning point which is, college football is absolutely the second-most popular and valuable sport in America — it’s not even a question,” Wasserman said. “The question is, do they monetize that opportunity and keep all the money in college football and don’t share it, so college football becomes its own entity, away from the NCAA? So, Michigan basketball and UCLA basketball are part of the Big 10, but college football is its own thing?”

“And then Michigan basketball and UCLA softball are over because there’s no money,” he continued. “Because the money – 90% of the value and the economics – come from college football. Or, do you keep them in the system, and use that money to solve the problem, because NIL [name, image, and likeness] is not fixing the problem.”

Wasserman said NIL has made the problem worse over the past few years by concentrating even more money in college football.

“NIL is just, truly pay-for-play, and where are you going to spend your money, you’re going to spend money where you drive revenue, and you drive revenue in football,” he said. “So, you were just making the rich richer in that system.

“You know, I think the average NIL deal in the country is $500 … But Ohio State says it costs them $13 million a year to maintain their roster. I mean [Coach] Ryan Day says that publicly. That’s not a secret. I can assure you in terms of Title IX, he’s not spending $13 million – Ohio State’s not spending $13 million a year – on their women’s programs.

“So it’s just made college football way more outside the system, and the problem is that all of the Olympic sports, if you will, or basketball and all the Olympic sports only exist because football provides so much of the economics to subsidize those.”

Team USA’s Olympic success, of course, depends on the survival of Olympic sports at the NCAA level without federal funding to support the movement.

“By the way, in this country, all of our American athletes who are Olympians, are trained in universities,” Wasserman said. “So if we lose that system, we don’t have Team USA any more. Our government does not provide funding to the U.S. Olympic Movement. There’s zero federal dollars going to any part of the U.S. Olympic Movement. All of our athletes are trained in colleges, and that’s a great source of pride. And that’s going to evaporate.”

In terms of solutions, Wasserman said the NCAA doesn’t have “the control or purview clearly, because it’s very clear the conference commissioners at a minimum and the university presidents are running the system. You have to keep the money in the system.”

He doesn’t expect the federal government to come to the rescue because the current system benefits many politicians with SEC and Big Ten schools in their state.

“The only entity with the ability – I’m not sure they’re capable or qualified – but the ability is the federal government,” Wasserman said. “It takes national legislation, but here’s the part where miss, or underestimate.

“If you’re a senator from Mississippi, or Iowa, you kind of like the system the way it is [for the SEC and Big Ten],” he continued. “Are you really going to take away from yourselves to prop up the Big 12 and the ACC and these other conferences to lift everybody or do you like winning the national championship every year, or having the SEC and Big Ten get a disproportionate share of income? You’re asking people to be truly magnanimous for something that is truly local and parochial to their states and their environment.

“That’s a hard thing to do to get the two senators from Georgia to say, ‘yeah, we’re going to take money away from the University of Georgia, who wins national championships – the pride of the state – and we’re going to give it to Washington State.’”

If the NCAA and the federal government are unlikely candidates to save Olympic sports, who might step up? Wasserman suggested there is an opportunity for conference commissioners to come together, though it certainly sounds idealistic after their recent trend of making decisions based on college football and TV money.

“I think what you’re going to have to do is the conference commissioners, there’s really the Big 10, the SEC, the ACC and the Big 12, are going to have to say, ‘Look, football is great and we can make a lot of money organizing college football in a different kind of way, but if we’re doing that and it’s not benefitting all the other student-athletes, we’re actually missing the mark here, and we’re not doing our job, and we’re not actually serving the universities,'” said Wasserman, a UCLA alum. “I mean, UCLA, we’re proud of all those athletes and student-athletes who do incredible things. So, we’re going to miss that if they don’t take that ownership of that responsibility and embrace it, they’re going to be the ones who get blamed for it, and the system right now is totally screwed.”

Wasserman proposed another creative solution that doesn’t involve the need for cooperation from conference commissioners, federal legislators, or NCAA officials: a Hail Mary from the NFL.

“I actually think the NFL can say, look, we can help solve the problem, not take control of college football, but sort of create the pathway, and use that as a means to save all these Olympic sports that are good for this country and by the way, think about the Paris Olympics this summer: There’ll be 100 athletes competing in Paris for countries not for the United States, who went to college for free and got their athletic training at American universities,” Wasserman said. “We train our competitors. Talk about power and soft power … that’s a powerful thing. All those things are going to go away if we don’t fix this problem. To push the institutions to do what’s right to maintain the sanctity of non-football sports, I think the NFL has a real opportunity to be a leader in that movement.”

You can check out the full conversation below, which also features a preview of how Los Angeles will operate during the 2028 Summer Olympics.

• Related: Casey Wasserman Says LA28 Has More Contracted Revenue Than What Paris 2024 Will Generate