Next year, colleges and universities will be permitted to pay players directly from their athletic departments. And in a controversial move, it sounds like the Tennessee Volunteers are planning to kick that cost to the fans.
As a result of a settlement in a case against the NCAA earlier this year, schools will be permitted to share a portion of their revenue directly with athletes. And it sounds like Tennessee is planning to get this extra money directly from the fans.
During a recent interview with Andy Slater of On3, Tennessee Volunteers athletic director Danny White said that the school would be implementing a plan to add a 10 percent surcharge to all season and single-game ticket sales called a “talent fee” to help cover the added cost of paying student-athletes.
“It’s a talent fee, and it’s going directly to the talent,” White told Slater. “It’s going to our student athletes as part of this new world order in college sports. So I know our fans will embrace it.”
Needless to say, this plan from Tennessee sparked outrage among many fans.
“More expensive than it ever has been to attend games, more commercial breaks than there ever have been, games are longer with fewer plays, time to raise prices for the billionth time to ensure working-class fans get left out for good,” college basketball analyst Will Warren said in a post on X.
“For the last 20 years we’ve bloated our athletic administration, inflated salaries, and wastefully spent money on opulent facilities… Now we can no longer exploit our labor force. Instead of us curbing our spending, you, the fan, will have to subsidize us,” Noah Henderson of Sports Illustrated wrote on X.
“We’ve been saying this since the dawn of collectives, but relying on fans to pay more to fund NIL is the opposite of how this should be done. Between this, incessant and longer commercial breaks, and games being on every network/streamer, CFB is shooting itself in the foot,” Ohio State fansite Land Grant Holy Land said in a post on X.
“hey! so this is insane!” Lucy Rohden of the Le Batard Show said in a post on X.
Clearly, this is not a popular move from Tennessee.
[On3]
