NCAA Settlement Raises Questions About How Boston College Athletics Will Allocate Funds

One of the more unresolved areas of the new House vs. NCAA settlement, which became officially ratified on Friday, clearing the way for universities to begin compensating student-athletes starting on July 1, 2025, is how each university plans to allocate its respective funds.

The settlement enables athletic departments to distribute their own funds—which come from annual revenue streams—to pay student-athletes in 2025-26 and beyond. The total cap for these funds will start around $20.5 million per school, and that figure could rise to as high as $33 million in the next decade.

So a massive question henceforth arises: which teams will receive the most pay and why? Additionally, how does Title IX legislation—a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance—impact the allocation of these funds, and how is that regulated?

Here is a breakdown of how the Boston College Athletic Department might navigate the new settlement as a university:

There is no single direction for universities to follow in terms of how the money should be distributed across sports. There are very few guidelines in place.

With that being said, the expectation is that around 75 percent of the funds—which is approximately $15 million with a cap of $20.5 million—will be distributed to the football team at power-conference schools, such as BC.

But that is not a certainty, nor a rule which universities must abide by.

CBS Sports’ Shehan Jeyarajah brings up a good point regarding this distribution, and how different universities might go about allocating their funds depending on the nature of the universities’ athletic department.

Jeyarajah acknowledges that this process boils down to which team brings in the most revenue, but it fails to recognize the teams which attain the most success.

He cites two examples, the University of Kentucky and Connecticut (UConn), as schools which may choose to direct 50 percent or more of the funds to the basketball programs because they collect far more revenue on a yearly basis in comparison to football.

Like all Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) schools, BC profits the most from its football team. But the football team—at least in the past decade or two—is not even in the same hemisphere with the most successful teams at Boston College, which raises questions.

The difference between BC and other ACC universities is that it sponsors both a power-conference football team in addition to a men’s and women’s hockey team which are considered top-tier programs in the college hockey landscape.

Since 1998, BC men’s hockey has qualified for the NCAA tournament 17 times, making it to 12 Frozen Fours, seven National Championship games, and have won four national titles. The women’s team, launched in 1994, has won the Hockey East three times and has made seven trips to the Frozen Four.

BC football, meanwhile, has not surpassed the eight-win mark in a season since 2009, and has won the ACC’s Atlantic Division only twice—in 2007 and 2008.

If 75 percent of the $20.5 million is going to be allocated to football players at BC, then the athletic department faces a very legitimate issue regarding fairness and opportunity for the teams which actually deliver tangible success to the school.

According to Dan Wetzel of ESPN, athletic directors from across the country predict that the 75-percent figure will skew even further to football and men’s basketball.

Meanwhile, BC football has barely scratched the surface of national relevancy in the past decade, and men’s basketball is not even on the radar for that matter. The rough estimate of how the funds will be distributed, though, states that around 15 percent of the $20.5 million is expected to be allocated to men’s basketball.

BC men’s and women’s hockey might not deliver a substantial profit in fiscal year-to-year, or any for that matter, but they deliver success to the school which is not even touched by football and basketball.

Largely due to the team’s lack of success, it is unclear whether BC even makes a sizable margin of profit from its basketball program, whereas a school like Alabama still profited $5.9 million from its basketball team in fiscal 2024, Wetzel cited.

If only five percent of the $20.5 million will be directed to sports outside of football and basketball, hockey included, as opposed to a whole 15 percent for men’s basketball and five percent for the women’s side, how can that be justified in the future?

Especially now that NCAA Division I hockey programs can recruit from the Canadian Hockey League, bringing even more talent—and thus success—to college hockey programs, there will be even more of a desire than ever to allocate funds to the title-producing teams.

In the future, it might not sit well with BC men’s hockey head coach Greg Brown if men’s or women’s basketball—neither of which have flourished in years and are not even on the cusp of winning a national title, let alone making the NCAA Tournament—continue to have double or even triple the amount of the $20.5 million allocated to them.

This gray area is one which university athletic departments must navigate wisely, or complaints from coaches, athletic department sponsors, alumni, and students will undoubtedly arise.