NCAA issues cash payouts but will monitor how they're spent

College athletics departments will receive amounts ranging from about $165,000 to more than $1.3 million from a one-time supplemental distribution of $200 million the NCAA is making to Division I schools in mid-April, according to a school-by-school distribution report compiled recently by the association.

Under a plan approved a year ago by the NCAA Board of Governors and the Division I Board of Directors, the amounts are based on the number of athletic scholarships the schools provided during the 2013-14 school year. Schools received credit for one scholarship for every set of partial awards that added up to the equivalent of a full scholarship.

This means schools with the largest athletics programs will be getting the greatest shares of this money, which will be restricted to uses that directly benefit athlete academic and welfare initiatives, according to a Q&A document posted on the NCAA's web site. Ohio State will receive the most, just more than $1.3 million because it awarded the equivalent of nearly 404 scholarships.

DOCUMENT:   What each school is getting

Five of the other 11 schools that were in the Big Ten Conference in 2013-14 also will be receiving more than $1 million — Michigan, Penn State, Michigan State, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

The only other schools getting more than $1 million are Stanford, Virginia and North Carolina.

At the other end of the spectrum, Davidson will be getting the smallest amount: slightly more than $165,000 from having awarded the equivalent of just more than 50 scholarships.

Public-private difference

That information is part of rare view into one small — but potentially significant — aspect of how private schools set up their athletics programs. It is particularly relevant as the ongoing Division I men’s basketball tournament again demonstrates the staying power of schools like Gonzaga and Xavier, which will meet on Saturday for a spot in the Final Four after eliminating multiple teams from Power Five conferences.

Though private schools report a wide array of information to the NCAA, including data about the number of athletic scholarships they award, none of those data generally are available publicly. Private schools are not subject to open-records disclosure laws. Neither is the NCAA, which is organized as a private, non-profit organization.

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The new distribution report shows how strategic some private schools are being with their athletic scholarships as they remain competitive nationally in men’s and/or women’s basketball with schools from power conferences that are pulling away from the rest of Division I financially because of skyrocketing football-related revenue.

Of the nearly 350 schools getting money from the $200 million distribution, fewer than 50 awarded less than the equivalent of 100 scholarships in 2013-14. About three-quarters of those schools are private, including Gonzaga (87.25), Xavier (97.08), Butler (99.23), Creighton (89.3) and Dayton (86.86). The Division I scholarship limit in men’s basketball is 13; in women’s basketball, it’s 15. These schools likely have been at — or near — the limits in those two sports.

“If we could fully fund all of our sports, we’d be all for it,” Creighton athletics spokesman Rob Anderson said. The school’s tuition “is not cheap. We’re trying to raise money, and every year we get closer to the (scholarship) maximum in our Olympic sports. But men’s basketball is a big revenue generator — we were fifth in the nation in attendance this season (at nearly 17,500 per game) — and we do everything we can to sustain men’s basketball success.”

Too much football influence?

Gonzaga, Xavier and Creighton do not have football teams. Butler and Dayton each have a team in the non-scholarship Pioneer Football League. Athletes at those, and other, private schools may be receiving financial grants based on need and/or academic merit, as may be the case in relatively modestly funded public-school athletic programs that have enjoyed recent basketball success. UNC Wilmington, for example, awarded the equivalent of 99.37 athletic scholarships in 2013-14.

Though these schools’ shares from the $200 million distribution are being driven by their athletic scholarship numbers, schools that don’t award athletic scholarships — those in the Ivy League and the service academies — are getting money based on the average amounts being distributed to Football Championship Subdivision schools: $520,337, which would be from having awarded the equivalent of about 158 scholarships.

Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference commissioner Rich Ensor, whose league includes eight private schools that each awarded less than the equivalent of 100 scholarships 2013-14, said he had no problem with the Ivy schools’ distribution and “we’re happy to have this funding. We appreciate it.”

“Our issue,” Ensor said, “is why is football getting such weight in the formula” for the $200 million distribution. Ensor pointed out that football results in the awarding of many scholarships, and is driving schools’ shares of the distribution, but “no funding goes to the NCAA from football operations” because conferences control TV contracts for football and the bowl system. Nearly all of the NCAA’s revenue comes from its media and marketing rights contract with CBS and Turner for the men’s basketball tournament.

Meanwhile, Ensor said, many of the NCAA’s recent legal problems and settlements are “being driven by football.”

Schools will face restrictions on how they can use the money, which is coming from the liquidation of a type of endowment that had grown to more $360 million. The money is to be put toward “the direct benefit of the student-athlete and their academic success, life skills, career success, health and safety and student-athlete focused diversity and inclusion initiatives,” according the Q&A document. The money cannot be used for items such as coaches’ salaries, strength equipment, and stadium or arena improvements aimed at fans.

Each school will have to provide the NCAA office with answers to a 48-item spending plan questionnaire within three months of receiving the money, and the plan will have to be approved by NCAA staff before any of the money can be spent. Schools will be subject to random audits of their use of the money, and the spending plan questionnaire advises schools that supporting “documents should be retained for a 10 year period … which may exceed your institution’s current document retention policy.”