Sports briefs
By NewsPress Now
College sports departments gearing up for ‘economic earthquake’
Iowa State has already scrapped plans for a new wrestling facility. Texas A&M laid off a dozen or so athletic staffers. That could be the tip of the iceberg when millions in college revenue starts going directly to the athletes and away from escalating coaching salaries, facilities and growing athletic department staffs.
A revenue-sharing model outlined in last week’s $2.8 billion antitrust settlement proposal from the NCAA and the five largest college conferences would allow schools to each provide up to $21 million annually to athletes or up to 22% of the average power league school’s annual revenue. That means budget wrangling and an untold number of potentially difficult decisions are looming for athletic departments across the country.
“At the end of the day, this is an economic earthquake within the system,” said Andrew Zimbalist, economics professor emeritus at Smith College. “And the system is in a very uncertain and risky and volatile state right now.”
Realignment, the transfer portal and the explosion in name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation have already changed virtually everything about college athletics. Settling the antitrust claims over the next decade brings even more upheaval and signals the end of an amateur athletics model that dates to the NCAA’s founding in 1906.
Football and basketball powerhouses will still rake in huge annual revenue numbers, but it will now be allocated differently; the where and how is to be determined in the coming months.
“When you have a shift of revenue up to 22% things won’t remain the same,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said at the league’s spring meetings in Destin, Florida. “That predicts that people will have to make decisions. That may be any number of wide range of issues that I haven’t even begun to consider, some of which I can imagine, some of which I’m certain will look at this week and in the weeks that follow.”
Mississippi athletic director Keith Carter said some money going to the donor-backed NIL collectives “in theory will shift over to the athletic department” to boost revenue. Carter also said schools must find ways to cut costs, including putting facilities projects on hold even with new money arriving this year from the SEC’s latest ESPN contract and new $7.8 billion deal between ESPN and the College Football Playoff.
“It’s going to be hodgepodge of finding new revenues and eliminating some expenses,” Carter said. “It’s going to be definitely different at each institution and how they do it.”
MAKING CHANGES
Schools like Iowa State and Texas A&M have already made changes proactively.
Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard scrapped plans for the new wrestling facility, which had been scheduled to open in the fall of 2025. He cited the “$20 million question” of how to account for direct compensation to athletes.
“It’s going to be a drastic change and that change isn’t going to happen overnight,” Pollard told reporters in early May. “We have a $100 million budget. We don’t have a $120 million budget.”
New Texas A&M athletic director Trev Alberts has already laid off about a dozen staffers. Alberts made it clear at the time the layoffs weren’t related to the $76.8 million buyout for fired football coach Jimbo Fisher, instead saying it was a “reorganization related to existing and emerging threats to our business model.”
Hefty buyouts and massive coaching contracts — like the $13 million annual salary recently awarded to Georgia’s two-time national champion coach Kirby Smart — mean there won’t be a pity party considering athletes’ long battles to get a piece of the economic pie.
“I think it’s easy to justify $10 million for a top coach if you’re not paying the athletes, but a couple of extra million for a coach might be money you’re not paying athletes,” said Richard Paulsen, a sports economist at the University of Michigan. “In the NFL and the NBA, the athletes are getting paid a lot more than the coaches.”
Times had already started changing once athletes were cleared to start making money off endorsements in July 2021. Big-name coaches like now-retired Nick Saban at Alabama and sparkling facilities were no longer necessarily the biggest draw for recruits and thus the most important investments for athletic programs.
“Now, if the question is you can get X dollars from one school and Y dollars from another, those things might not matter as much,” said Paulsen, whose school lost coach Jim Harbaugh to the NFL after a national championship.
CUTS ON THE WAY?
Zimbalist said athletic departments could be facing more cutbacks in staffs and changes in how much money they can keep spending on facilities.
“Some of the bigtime programs have staffs of 250-300 people and have very modern facilities and have been building more of them,” Zimbalist said. “Now there’s no way they’re going to be able to afford that.”
And that’s the wealthier college athletic departments. The impact on programs with more modest budgets remains to be seen, but Charlotte athletic director Mike Hill and his counterpart at Montana, Kent Haslam, have serious concerns. After all, Group of Five leagues (where Charlotte plays football) and those in the FCS (home of the Grizzlies) collectively are on the hook for nearly a quarter of the settlement.
“Having worked in the SEC, Conference USA and The American, I understand that this is a complex issue for our enterprise to resolve,” Hill said. “However, I cannot reconcile Charlotte and similarly resourced programs forfeiting millions in revenue that should be used to support our current student-athletes so former student-athletes — 90% of whom come from Power Five leagues whose revenue dwarfs everyone else’s — can be compensated.
“There is a reason the autonomy conferences were specifically named in the lawsuit and not the other 27 Division I leagues. As members of the NCAA, which is also named in the suit, we knew that there could be an impact on us — but it is disproportionate and disheartening.”
Haslam agreed.
“The early numbers show us losing roughly $200,000 in our distributions from the NCAA, and that’s significant for us,” Haslam told MTN Sports last week. “That’s got to be made up through ticket sales, through donations, though cost-cutting. So it’s real and it’s hitting everybody and it’s certainly frustrating.
Iga Swiatek saves a match point and comes back to beat Naomi Osaka
PARIS | Iga Swiatek played like the current No. 1 and the two-time defending champion at the French Open. No surprise there. That Naomi Osaka looked like the former No. 1 that she is — and on clay, no less — amounted to an announcement that she is still quite capable of elite tennis.
Surging down the stretch as Osaka faded, Swiatek saved a match point and grabbed the last five games to sneak her way to a 7-6 (1), 1-6, 7-5 victory in the second round of the French Open on Wednesday night in a thrill-a-minute contest befitting two women who both own four Grand Slam titles.
“For sure, this match was really intense. Much more intense for the second round than I ever expected. For sure, I’ll be more ready next time,” Swiatek said. “Naomi played amazing tennis. … I’m happy that she’s back and she’s playing well.”
For Swiatek, this extended her Roland Garros winning streak to 16 matches as she pursues a third consecutive trophy at the clay-court major. For Osaka, who cried when she left the court after letting a 5-2 lead in the concluding set slip away, this amounted to a return to her big-hitting best.
They went back-and-forth for nearly three hours as rain loudly pelted the outside of the closed roof at Court Philippe Chatrier — showers forced the postponements of 23 singles matches until Thursday — and a riveted, if hardly full, crowd alternated their support between the two players. Sometimes, spectators called out before a point was done, prompting admonishment from chair umpire Aurélie Tourte during the match. And from Swiatek afterward.
“Sometimes, under a lot of pressure, when you scream something during the rally or right before the return, it’s really, really hard to be focused,” Swiatek said. “The stakes are big and there is a lot of money here to win. So losing a few points may change a lot. So please, guys, if you can support us between the rallies but not during, that would be really, really amazing.”
Osaka served for the victory at 5-3 in the final set, and was a point away from winning, but she put a backhand into the net. Soon, when Osaka missed another backhand, this one long, Swiatek finally converted a break point on her 10th chance of that set, and they played on.
Maybe the lack of high-level matches caught up to Osaka, because her mistakes continued to mount, including a double-fault that put Swiatek in control 6-5. Swiatek, who has led the WTA rankings for nearly every week since April 2022, then held serve one last time.
“I don’t necessarily feel like I regret anything,” Osaka said.
Still, this was, without a doubt, Osaka’s top performance since she returned to the tour in January after 15 months away while becoming a mother. (Her daughter, who is 10 months old now, accompanied Osaka to Paris and recently started walking.)
“I was watching Iga win this tournament last year, and I was pregnant. It was just my dream to be able to play her,” Osaka said. “When I kind of think of it like that, I think I’m doing pretty well. And I’m also just trying not to be too hard on myself. I feel like I played her on her better surface. I’m a hard-court kid, so I would love to play her on my surface and see what happens.”
Because of the weather, only nine matches were completed Wednesday, and winners included Coco Gauff, Ons Jabeur, Sofia Kenin, Carlos Alcaraz, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Andrey Rublev.
It’s been a few years since Osaka played this capably and confidently, hammering big serves at up to 122 mph (197 kph) and imposing groundstrokes. Her quick-strike capabilities were on full display: Osaka won 82 of the 139 points (59%) that lasted four strokes or fewer, and she finished with a 54-37 advantage in total winners.
All of those familiar mannerisms were back, too. She turned her back to Swiatek to reset between points, hopped in place, tugged at her pink visor’s brim and slapped her palm on her thigh. Osaka celebrated points by shaking a clenched fist and shouting “Come on!”
She grabbed nine of 10 games to dominate the second set and lead 3-0 in the third. Then 4-1. Then 5-2.
As one ball or another would fly past Swiatek, zipped near a corner or right at a line, she turned toward her guest box and shot a look of confusion or concern in the direction of her coach and her sports psychologist.
“I felt for most of the match that I wasn’t really (in the) here and now,” Swiatek said. “My mind was, like, playing around sometimes.”
She’s not used to this sort of one-way traffic coming head-on in her direction. Normally, it’s Swiatek who is delivering lopsided sets at a foe’s expense, especially on clay. She now has won her last 14 matches this month, with titles on the surface at Madrid and Rome — a clay double no woman had done since Serena Williams in 2013.
But this marked a sudden return to the Osaka everyone came to expect, match in and match out, back when she was at the height of her powers, climbing atop the rankings and gathering two trophies apiece at the U.S. Open and Australian Open from late 2018 to early 2021.
It was in May 2021 that Osaka withdrew from the French Open before her second-round match, explaining that she experiences “huge waves of anxiety” before speaking to the media and revealing she had dealt with depression. She took time away from the tour for a mental health break, then opted for another hiatus after her title defense at the U.S. Open a few months later ended with a third-round loss.
She helped usher in a change in the way athletes, sports fans and society at large understood the importance of mental health — and prompted those in charge of various sports, including tennis, to take the issue seriously and try to accommodate and protect them better.
Osaka entered with an 0-4 record on the red stuff against opponents ranked in the top 10 and never has been past the third round at Roland Garros. This also would have been her first win anywhere against a top-10 opponent since January 2020.
Instead, though, it is Swiatek who moves on and continues her bid to become the first woman with three championships in a row in Paris since Justine Henin in 2007-09.
Nelly Korda faces her toughest test at U.S. Women’s Open
LANCASTER, Pa. | No matter how easy Nelly Korda has made golf look over the last two months, not even the best player in her sport can expect an easy time at the U.S. Women’s Open.
The biggest and richest event in women’s golf prides itself on being the toughest test, and Lancaster Country Club has all the trappings with its hilly, tree-lined terrain, partially blind shots into some of the greens and a routing in which holes constantly change direction.
“A beast,” Korda called it.
Whether the toughest test identifies the best player is up for debate.
Since the women’s world ranking began in 2006, only two players at No. 1 captured the U.S. Women’s Open — Annika Sorenstam in 2006 at Newport (an 18-hole playoff win over Pat Hurst) and Inbee Park in 2013 at Sebonack Golf Club on Long Island, the year Park won three straight majors.
Now it’s Korda’s turn, and she arrived at Lancaster on a stretch of winning not seen since Lorena Ochoa in 2008, the last person to have six victories before the calendar turned to June.
“It just tests every aspect of your game,” Korda said. “It’s tight off the tee. Visually it looks so much shorter than it is. There’s bunkers that visually you see that you think you’re going to carry that you end up maybe 10 yards short.
“If you’re in the rough and you miss fairways, the greens are very small and very slopy, and the rough is thick around the greens, too.”
The 79th edition of the Women’s Open gets started on Thursday, and Korda is as big an attraction as the course itself, which previously hosted the Open in 2015.
Korda tied an LPGA record by winning five straight tournaments, a streak capped off at the Chevron Championship in the first major of the season. She is coming off a win in her most recent tournament — that makes six wins in seven starts — at the Mizuho Americas Open at Liberty National in New Jersey.
“Right now I think Nelly is just in a league of her own,” said Allisen Corpuz, the defending champion who picked up her first major — and first LPGA title — last year at Pebble Beach.
There has been plenty of buzz around Lancaster beyond Korda. The purse is $12 million, and the USGA decided to follow the model of the PGA Tour’s elevated events by paying 20% of the purse to the winner — $2.4 million.
This also figures to be the last U.S. Women’s Open for Lexi Thompson, who is playing it for the 18th time and she still is only 29. Thompson said she is retiring from a full schedule after this year. Barring a high finish, she won’t be eligible next year and is unlikely to get a special exemption because she has never won.
Among those who could challenge is Rose Zhang, the decorated amateur at Stanford who won in her LPGA debut as a professional last year, and then ended Korda’s winning streak with a victory at the Cognizant Founders Cup.
Zhang just turned 21 and has not even spent a full year as a pro. She still can appreciate what Korda is doing, and how tough the 25-year-old American will be to beat.
“I’m witnessing some crazy history, and it’s really, really inspiring to see her,” Zhang said. “She’s almost looking unfazed. … Even though she’s not acting like a human being right now — or playing like it — I think she has a lot of pressure on her. And that’s why I’m saying she’s so incredible, because she’s able to handle all that pressure.”
Korda has two majors among her 14 titles on the LPGA, the other coming in 2021 at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship that first elevated her to No. 1 in the world.
In the two years that followed, there was a revolving door at No. 1 among five players. Korda had a health scare with blood clot in 2022. She now is back to full strength and dominating.
“Nelly is almost what we are trying to aim for, because if you beat her you’re probably going to have the trophy in your hands,” said Hannah Green, the only other multiple winner on the LPGA Tour this year.
But the Women’s Open can have a mind of its own, and there have been plenty of surprises over the years, from Corpuz at Pebble Beach last year to A-lim Kim at Champions in Houston during the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2020, even back to Hilary Lunke in 2003.
Korda has only two top 10s in the Women’s Open — a tie for 10th at Shoal Creek in 2018 and a tie for eighth at Pine Needles in 2022. Both times, she finished 11 shots out of the lead.
The U.S. Women’s Open doesn’t discriminate. It’s tough for everyone.
“It’s important not to get ahead of yourself and just think, ‘Oh, I have to beat Nelly.’ You’ve got a lot more people out here who are really just as driven,” Zhang said. “Because to get to the U.S. Open, it doesn’t just take a lucky chance. It requires a lot of years of playing and being able to practice for this moment. I mean, Lancaster is a difficult place.”
Bronny James is staying in the NBA draft, agent Rich Paul announces
Bronny James is keeping his name in the NBA draft, with the hopes of joining his father in the league next season.
“He’s a really good prospect who has a lot of room for growth,” Rich Paul, the CEO of Klutch Sports Group, told ESPN, which first reported the decision. Paul later confirmed the decision to The Associated Press.
LeBron James, Bronny’s father and the NBA’s all-time scoring leader, posted his reaction on his social media accounts, including one Instagram story that had the simple caption: “BRONNY STAYING IN DRAFT!” The decision was not unexpected, given that Bronny James had given no sign in recent weeks that he would exercise his option of returning to college and postponing his NBA plans.
Bronny James played one year of college basketball at Southern California and averaged 4.8 points, 2.8 rebounds and 2.1 assists per game last season. He played in 25 games, missing the start of the season after needing a procedure last year to fix what was diagnosed as a congenital heart defect, which was found after he went into cardiac arrest during a summer workout.
A panel of doctors cleared James for NBA play earlier this month.
“I’m just trying to put in the work and see where it takes me,” Bronny James said at the NBA draft combine after getting that clearance and taking part in workouts.
Bronny James — who was listed at 6-foot-4 on USC’s roster but measured at 6 feet, 1 1/2 inches at the combine — announced his intention of entering the draft in April, with the caveat that he was also going into the transfer portal and maintaining his college eligibility. Early entry candidates for the draft had until 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday to decide whether they would stay in or return to college.
The draft is June 26-27.
LeBron James, who can become a free agent this summer, will be entering his 22nd NBA season this fall. If Bronny James plays in the NBA next season, they would be the first father-son duo in the league simultaneously as players. There have been about 100 instances in NBA history of players joining the league after their fathers played, but none at the same time.
LeBron James said many times in recent years that he would like to play in the league alongside his son, and it certainly remains a possibility that a team that drafts Bronny James might do so with hopes of luring his father to that roster.
“The kid has to do what he wants to do — and I don’t even want to say kid no more — the young man will decide what he wants to do and how he wants his career to go,” LeBron James said when the Lakers’ season ended earlier this spring.
—From AP reports
