Ohio State University will retain all of its current 36 Division I teams and all of those teams’ scholarships, President Ted Carter announced in his investiture address Friday afternoon.
“Collegiate athletics is one of our focus themes because we want to retain the student athlete model for which we are a national leader,” Carter told The Dispatch in advance of his address.
Carter said college athletics is the “front porch” to the university and one of the core themes he laid out in his 10-year framework: “Education for Citizenship 2035.”
Carter said there are still a lot of decisions yet to be made and what exactly the athletics department will look like, but he said Friday that he and Ohio State Athletic Director Ross Bjork are committed to maintaining the student-athlete model.
“It is so important that we hold onto the student-athlete model,” Carter said.
Ohio State has more than 1,000 student athletes. Those student athletes have a 94% graduation rate and an average 3.3 GPA, Carter said.
“We want to be a voice in making sure that in the shared revenue, NIL, transfer portal world… that we retain our student athletes as student athletes,” Carter said Thursday. “In other words, when you come here and wear the uniform of Ohio State, you’re here to get a degree.”
“Yes, we expect conference champions and national champions,” he added. “But we can do both.”
Carter’s announcement comes in the midst of ongoing discussion related to House v. NCAA, an antitrust lawsuit filed against the NCAA brought by former Arizona State swimmer Grant House in 2020 challenging the NCAA’s name, image and likeness rules. The settlement, approved by the NCAA in May, combines three antitrust cases brought by student athletes.
In short, the settlement allows schools to directly pay their athletes, an extraordinary change for an association and member schools and conferences that had spent years and tens of millions of dollars in legal and lobbying costs fighting the idea, USA Today previously reported.
It requires $2.8 billion in backpay to former NCAA athletes over a 10-year period, and allows schools to opt into revenue sharing going forward. Universities can share up to 22% of their average athletic revenues. That equals more than $25 million annually, he said.
According to a recent Yahoo! Sports report, hundreds of student athletes and prospects across the country, many of them participating in Olympic sports, are in a precarious position as the signing date approaches. Some schools have eliminated roster spots and, for some, scholarship offers that they were once promised. Meanwhile, several dozen current college athletes are being notified that they are no longer part of their teams — some of the notifications arriving after the fall semester even began.
Sheridan Hendrix is a higher education reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. Sign up for Extra Credit, her education newsletter, here.
shendrix@dispatch.com
@sheridan120
