Paul Finebaum makes prediction on House Settlement, how it will impact future of college sports

Paul Finebaum joined ESPN’s SportsCenter to dish on the latest regarding the NCAA House Settlement after an agreement was reached this week. He believes college athletics as we know it will go the way of the dinosaur, and that might not be the best thing to move each sport into the future.

“I couldn’t help but think back about 10 years ago, when Mark Emmert, then the President of the NCAA, essentially said college athletes will be paid over my dead body. He’s still alive, but the NCAA is dead,” Finebaum proclaimed. “It may still be in existence. We’re still having tournaments, such as the Women’s World Series and the Men’s Baseball Tournament, but the NCAA, as we know it, is gone. They literally have no jurisdiction whatsoever, other than to be tournament directors.

“This was supposed to level the playing field. Everybody pays the same into the kitty and then divides it up, but it will do anything. The big will get bigger, and the small schools will simply slip away. Other than maybe in in basketball-only conferences that can use all that money for basketball, as opposed to like, Alabama and Georgia and Ohio State, where they have to split up $20.5 million.”

While sports like football would likely be able to survive a nuclear blast, Finebaum thinks some rising competitions, like softball and women’s sports as a whole, are facing an uphill battle. The ESPN analyst was blunt in his assessment, worrying about what comes next.

“It will look a little bit like the NCAA basketball tournament this year, where the mid-majors, where we had all those great upsets, the Butlers of the past and so many incredible stories, the Valpos — they’re going to be gone. It’s going to be the big schools on top, the rest of college athletics is going to suffer,” Finebaum said, regarding what college athletics will look like over the next decade.

“… The real casualty of all this, I believe, is going to be the one part of college athletics that has grown so much. We watched the Women’s World Series last night, a million dollar pitcher, by the way, for Texas Tech. Women’s sports, I think, are going to suffer from this. If you’re one of these Ohio States or Alabamas, and you’re dividing up $20.5 million, you know where most of it’s going, it’s going to football. That’s really a major casualty.

“… College Athletics did this to themselves. They’re not really suffering for it, because it’s a billion dollar industry, but it’s going to be very uneven in the future. I think, at some point, fans are going to start tuning out. There’s such an existential threat to what we grew up loving, and we still do. It’s not going to be the same anymore.”

All told, we’ll have to wait and see if Paul Finebaum doom-and-gloom prediction comes true. Regardless, college athletics as a whole is changing right before our eyes, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what the future holds.