Mike Locksley suggests recruiting salary cap in college football

Maryland isn’t the easiest place to win, playing in one of the best divisions in all of college football. Head coach Mike Locksley knows that all too well. He also knows how important recruiting is to compete.

In that, he wants to make a fundamental change to the sport. He wants to see players getting paid a salary, similar to the NFL.

“We signed a billion-dollar TV deal in the Big Ten,” Locksley told RJ Young of Fox Sports.

“Let’s take $25 million out of that and give it to every school and say, ‘That’s your salary cap. That’s what you recruit with. You manage it how you see fit,’ which is very similar to what the NFL does with their salary cap.”

As Mike Locksley pointed out, the Big Ten signed a groundbreaking media deal worth $7 billion last August. USC and UCLA will also be joining the Big Ten, at which point distribution will begin sloping upward for each school.

What Locksley was unclear about is if he meant the Big Ten or all of college football should implement this $25 million salary cap.

If it’s all of college football, there are definitely questions that would have to be answered financially. After all, the SEC and Big Ten don’t make comparable money with C-USA or the Sun Belt. Even a Power Five conference like the Big 12 has a deal amounting to a fraction of what the Big Ten makes.

On top of that, adding a salary cap would be an existential crisis for the NCAA. It would be seen as an admission that players are employees of the school. That is Pandora’s Box for the NCAA and it’s something the NCAA wants to keep closed.

At the same time, it’s easy to see where Mike Locksley is coming from in all of this. This would, at some level, even the playing field for Maryland. Every school has a different recruiting budget and is working with a different NIL infrastructure.

The NCAA is pushing off the employment conversation

New NCAA President Charlie Baker has pushed back on the idea that student-athletes should be employees, even saying that they don’t want to be employees.

“I don’t think you’ll find very many student-athletes who want to be employees,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said during a Q&A session Monday at LEAD1 meetings. “I haven’t found many, and there are a lot of really good reasons for that. Obviously, there’s a lot of traffic in the courts at this point about this issue these days, which is going to limit what I would choose to say about it. But I think student-athletes want to be student-athletes. And it’s up to us to figure out how to make that work for them in a variety of environments and in circumstances that are different.”

At the same time, multiple veteran sports lawyers at LEAD1 Association’s annual spring meeting seemed to say that employment is inevitable.

“Is there a way of stopping the employment train? …” said Jon Israel, partner and co-chair of the sports and entertainment group at Foley & Lardner, LLP.

“If you look at the external forces, which [SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey] had mentioned last night, there may not be a way to stop that train. You’ve got all these elements coming at you … I don’t know if there’s a path to stopping it other than some legislation. Because I think the external forces out there are going to push you in that direction.”