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Message: [QUOTE="jostar1, post: 5051694, member: 1737"] Arguably the hottest topic at conference meetings and inside college athletic departments this month is how schools will handle the most groundbreaking element of a settlement in the House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuit: a revenue-sharing agreement that will allow schools to distribute roughly $20-23 million annually to their athletes beginning in 2025. The assumption is that football players will get the biggest piece of the pie within almost every athletic department, but men’s basketball is expected to be second in line, and its coaches are already wondering what their allotment looks like. Since seemingly every school will decide for itself, one league at the high-major level could have a distinct advantage: the Big East, a conference that does not sponsor football. “I don’t think any of us have the answer to it yet, but I think we do feel good about our position,” Xavier coach Sean Miller told The Athletic last week at Nike’s Peach Jam, the biggest basketball recruiting event of the year. This topic came up often there and at Big East coaches meetings. “In so many ways, it works to our advantage. The good thing about being in the Big East is it’s about one sport. I shouldn’t say one sport, but I think the importance of college basketball is at the top and after what just happened in the landscape of college sports, it puts us in a very unique position.” What if, while the SEC and Big Ten continue their football-first arms race, those basketball-centric Big East schools decided to give the bulk of the allowed revenue share to their primary sport? “That’s a problem,” Oats said, his eyes widening at the thought. “As long as it’s equitable across all the high-major schools, you’re fine. But if one’s got $22 million and one’s got $5 million, that’s a problem. We’re not going to be able to compete. They haven’t thought everything through.” Florida coach Todd Golden said SEC basketball coaches have been buzzing about this nightmare scenario since last year. “You have all these great basketball schools that have no football they have to take care of,” Golden said, “so yeah, definitely, we are worried about that.” According to documents filed Friday detailing the settlement agreement, schools will be able to voluntarily distribute up to 22 percent of the average power-conference school’s annual revenue each season from media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. It’s unlikely any school would devote all of that to just one sport, and it’s not a given that every school will have the maximum to work with — each athletic department has to find the money. Coaches have a lot of questions about how exactly that’s going to work. And although Big East coaches like that they do not have to split their in-house NIL pool with football, their media deals and athletic department revenues dwarf those in the Big Ten or SEC. When UConn coach Dan Hurley was told of coaches from other leagues being worried about the Big East’s advantage, he grinned and said they should be more worried that his league has won four of the last eight national titles — and that his Huskies have gone back-to-back. A good reminder that the schools with the biggest budgets do not always win in basketball. “I think there’s anxiety about everything, because the one thing we know is three months, six months, nine months from now, nothing is going to be like it is now,” Hurley said. “But as college coaches, our job is to figure it out. That’s what you do during the course of a game: when things go weird, figure it out.” [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach