NCAA president proposed college football changes even bigger than NIL and the Transfer Portal

College football fans have felt like the sport they love has been changing in drastic ways in recent years as NIL and the transfer portal have altered the landscape of college athletics as a whole. The changes aren’t done, according to reports from Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger and ESPN’s Dan Murphy.

NCAA President Charlie Baker submitted a proposal (in the form of a letter) to the NCAA’s Division-1 member institutions that suggests changes even bigger than the transfer portal and NIL. In the proposal, sweeping changes would affect all sports as Division-I schools could “opt in” or “opt out” of joining a new subdivision of Division-1 athletics.

In this subdivision, schools would be required to pay at least half of their scholarship athletes a minimum of $30,000 in an “enhanced educational trust fund.” This would be in addition to scholarship costs. The schools would have to abide by Title-IX statutes, allocating 50% of the money to male scholarship athletes and 50% of the money to female scholarship athletes.

In an effort to be “forward-thinking,” the NCAA proposal would give the new subdivision more autonomy with other rules, such as scholarship limits and restrictions regarding NIL and the transfer portal.

In this subdivision, athletic departments would be able to be involved directly with NIL instead of being forced to deal with third-party collectives. (To be clear, this already is happening, but it would become legal in Baker’s proposed future).

The subdivision schools would still be part of the NCAA and would compete for some form of NCAA championships. However, there would become a clear separation between the high-revenue programs and those that struggle to keep up financially. Essentially, the new Power-4 conferences (SEC, ACC, Big 10, and Big 12) would make up the majority of this subdivision.

The proposal would affect all sports at each school that opted into the new subdivision, but college football programs across the country would be the ones most affected.