photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

The north end of David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium, which includes a new conference center, is pictured on Oct. 16, 2025.

Hang around the finances of college athletics for just a little bit and one fact will become abundantly clear: Athletic departments are motivated to spend every dollar they get.

As you would expect, the departments are led by highly competitive people, and the departments are full of highly competitive student-athletes. In short, everybody there cares about scores.

In the business of college athletics there is only one way you keep score — with literal scoreboards. How many games did I win on the field, the court? If my program wins more games than your program, I’m the winner. I’m better.

In terms of athletic competition, I’m all for that philosophy. Don’t count me as a fan of everybody should receive a participation trophy. But in the world of business, you keep score differently. That’s a key point that seems to be largely missed by U.S. senators who recently approved new regulations for college athletics.

They seem to think we are trying to solve an athletic problem when we actually are trying to solve a business problem. It is a business problem when you have an entire industry motivated to spend every dollar it gets. It is a business problem of extreme urgency when an industry begins spending every dollar it gets and then some. That’s now the case at many athletic departments across the country, which are being subsidized by general operating funds of universities.

All of that is why most industries keep score in a different way. Take publicly-traded companies, for example. Their field of play is an earnings report. I made $1 billion this quarter. My profit margin was 15%. My competitor made $700 million this quarter. Its profit margin was 10%. I win. I’m better. Win enough earnings reports, and usually your stock price will rise. Again, I win. I’m better.

That scoring system doesn’t produce a perfect world, but it produces a much more financially-sustainable business than a philosophy of spending every dollar you get.

The Senate-approved Protect College Sports Act fails to recognize that problem. Arguably, it makes it worse. Today, a legal settlement largely caps the amount of “revenue-sharing” payments a university can make to its student-athletes at approximately $21 million. (Note that most businesses don’t share revenue. They share profits.) The act — which still must win U.S. House and presidential approval before becoming law — adds several other categories of payments that can be made to student athletes. If approved, athletic departments could make nearly $50 million a year in student-athlete payments.

That prospect should make every faculty and staff member at KU squirm. Such a world means that every time Kansas athletes fail on the field, every time an athletic fundraiser fails in a donor pitch, the university’s educational operations are at a greater risk of failure.

Kansas Athletics spends every dollar its gets — and lately, a bit more — so it doesn’t currently have extra money to make extra payments. If success doesn’t come on the fields or courts, current revenues probably will go down. If you aren’t making the full amount of payments possible to student-athletes, you probably aren’t going to attract the top talent that would cause success on the field to increase. You likely are beginning to see the circular nature of this problem.

Maybe donors will save the day, although many of them currently are occupied paying for a football stadium. But, perhaps, there’s more money to be had. If not, there’s the university’s general operating budget that could subsidize the athletic department. It would be couched as an investment. Start making the maximum player payments, get better on the field, generate more revenue from fans and donors. It might work — or it might become a new problem of a circular nature.

Some of you might be saying that at least the student-athletes are getting paid. They had been exploited for too long. Not long ago — maybe a decade ago — the exploitation narrative was an easier sell. Major athletic departments were taking in $100 million-plus in revenues, and student-athletes weren’t receiving any direct payments from the universities, not even to cover basic living expenses.

That was different than the situation for graduate teaching assistants or research assistants, who receive some stipends in addition to scholarships. In 2015, the rules changed where college athletes could start receiving living expense stipends. Maybe you could argue the stipends weren’t enough, but it seems clear that what has happened now is a classic overcorrection. I dare you to find a research assistant who is making $1 million a year, which seems to be cheap for a starting quarterback in a major conference.

But, you say, research doesn’t generate $100 million-plus a year in revenue for the university. Of course, you are wrong. KU’s research enterprise generates more than $400 million a year in outside funding for the university. Where’s the concern for research assistants being exploited?

You could do similar math for graduate teaching assistants, who help KU bring in hundreds of millions in tuition dollars. There has been some public concern of GTAs being exploited, but not the type that is causing U.S. senators to spend much time on the issue.

That said, I’m supportive of Congress taking action on college athletics. I think this particular bill may make matters worse before they become better, but it is possible to lose the first quarter and still win the game. That’s my hope here.

The bill creates an antitrust exemption for college athletics. It gives college sports the chance to have a spending cap similar to the NBA and NFL. Such a cap system is a clear answer for college athletics. Create a formula that sets a total athletic department spending cap based on the number of student athletes and number of teams in the department. Make the cap smaller than what schools are routinely spending today.

To state the obvious, you can provide a high quality athletic experience to 500 student athletes (the approximate size of many athletic departments) for less than $100 million. What if athletic departments were routinely operating on $80 million? Fans and television networks aren’t going to pay college athletic departments less just because the departments have spending caps. The NFL and NBA have already proven that. So, athletic departments would keep their revenues high, their spending would decrease, and a beloved pastime would be more sustainable.

But what to do with the $20 million to $30 million of annual excess funds that would exist at some athletic departments? Send it to the university’s operating fund for scholarships or other educational improvements. Does that sound like a system of exploitation?

For fun, I would add one more twist to the spending cap proposal. If there are donors who want to give big money that would push spending over the cap, take the money. But, for every dollar you spend over the cap, send two dollars to the university’s general fund.

That system would have the benefit of highlighting one of the most important lessons of sport: Teamwork can be a beautiful thing.