KNIGHT COMMISSION SESSION

AT NCAA CONVENTION

January 12, 2023 • 8:30-9:30 a.m. CT

Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Room 205

“The Multi-Billion Dollar Question:

How Should New CFP and D-I Revenues Be Used?”

"'Dead Money' in College Football is at an All Time High," All Things Considered, Dec. 7, 2022

Washington Post sportswriter Liz Clarke comments on the prevalence of "dead money" in college football and cites the Knight Commission and Knight-Newhouse Data to explain the uptick as universities spend millions on coaching severance pay.

"Colleges are more willing than ever to pay football coaches not to coach," Oct. 7, 2022

The Washington Post featured solutions the Knight Commission has proposed for excessive coaching buyouts. Knight Commission Co-Chair Len Elmore and Commission member Jonathan Mariner, former CFP of Major League Baseball, were interviewed:

With input from Mariner, the (Knight Commission) in 2021 proposed a new financial model for college sports that would include a system of disincentives, crafted and policed by individual conferences, that would penalize member schools for excessive coaching compensation and buyouts.

The model is akin to baseball’s luxury tax.

Mariner explains: “In baseball, we put in place a luxury tax that basically says, ‘You can spend as much as you want. But the more you spend, the more it’s going to cost you in terms of other incentives and disincentives."

"Explaining the trend of college football coaches fired midseason," Oct. 31, 2022

ESPN.com also featured the Knight Commission’s solution in an interview with Co-Chair Len Elmore:

"The CFP has done some wonderful things, but since 2015, buyouts for college football coaches alone have tripled. And so it seems to be that agents and ADs have upped the ante because there's more money available. It's like they're playing with Monopoly money. They're forgetting about the context in which this money should be looked at and spent."

Last year, the Knight Commission proposed a solution that involves conferences instituting new financial frameworks that could implement penalties on schools and teams for excessive coaching buyouts and compensation.

"FBS coach buyouts continue to be absurd, but can anything be done? A breakdown of where that stands," Dec. 13, 2022

“…Those (14) schools paid more than $150 million in buyouts for Power 5 head coaches not to work over the past season and a half…The numbers are staggering, and the way the sport is currently set up, there’s not much incentive to change that…So what can be done? Anything?...

The Knight Commission believes there’s at least a way to add some incentive for athletic directors to not spend so liberally. Want to overspend on contracts? You’re gonna pay the luxury tax… If the luxury tax model were to be enforced by each conference, it wouldn’t violate anti-trust laws.”