Paying the Players: What Revenue Sharing and the ACC Bargain Mean for Stanford

For most of a century, college sports rested on a simple proposition: the athletes were students, and their compensation was an education. That proposition is now formally over. The question for Stanford, which has argued longer and more persuasively than almost anyone that athletics and academics belong together, is what replaces it.

The First Year of Revenue Sharing

The turning point came in June 2025, when U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken approved the settlement of House v. NCAA, a set of antitrust cases brought on behalf of college athletes. Beginning that July, participating universities could share revenue directly with their athletes, up to an annual cap.

On October 1, the College Sports Commission, the independent body created to enforce the new rules, published the first full accounting. In the 2025-26 cap year, it reported, schools paid $1.8 billion directly to 34,915 athletes at 307 institutions, across 45 sports. Each school could share up to $20.5 million. Of the 319 schools that opted in, 68 reached the cap or came within five percent of it. For the current year, the cap has risen to $21.58 million per school.

Those payments are separate from name, image and likeness deals with outside companies and donor groups, which the commission now reviews through a clearinghouse called NIL Go. Together, the two systems have turned the recruitment of a college athlete into something closer to a negotiation, conducted every year, with the transfer portal as the open market.

Stanford’s Position

Stanford announced in March 2025 that it would participate in revenue sharing, funding it through new athletic revenue and philanthropy. The university, which as a private institution is not required to disclose such figures, has not published how much it distributes or how it divides the money among teams.

What is clear is the shape of the constraint. Stanford fields 36 varsity teams, among the most in the country, and has long treated that breadth as central to its identity. A school with that many sports, and a commitment to keep them, faces sharper choices than one that concentrates its resources on football and basketball.

The conference bargain sharpens them further. When Stanford, Cal and SMU joined the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2024, the newcomers accepted reduced shares of the league’s media revenue. Cal’s membership documents, reported by the Sports Business Journal, call for it to contribute back 67 percent of its media distributions in each of its first seven years, 30 percent in the eighth and 25 percent in the ninth. Stanford has not disclosed its own terms, which are widely reported to be similar. SMU agreed to take no media revenue at all for nine years.

The result is a period, roughly the rest of this decade, in which Stanford must compete in a more expensive market while receiving a fraction of what its conference peers receive from television, and while paying the travel costs of a league whose nearest member is Cal and whose next-nearest is more than a thousand miles away.

A Professional Front Office

Stanford’s response has been to professionalize. In football, it created the role of general manager and gave it to Andrew Luck, the former Cardinal quarterback, separating the work of building a roster and raising money from the work of coaching it. The men’s and women’s basketball programs list general managers on their staffs as well.

The fundraising has followed. Stanford Report noted last year that Luck had helped raise more than $100 million for football, anchored by a $50 million gift from Bradford M. Freeman. In a September letter to the Stanford community, athletic director John Donahoe described a record fundraising year that also produced 20 new endowed scholarships and major upgrades to the softball stadium and the Arrillaga Tennis Center.

Donahoe, a former chief executive of Nike and eBay, has also signaled a turn toward commerce. “We are also building a sustainable financial model that includes identifying new commercial capabilities and corporate partners,” he wrote, adding that he expected to share “innovative and exciting opportunities in this space” in the coming weeks. He also noted his appointment to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s Collegiate Advisory Council, a reminder that Stanford’s stake in this debate extends to the Olympic pipeline its programs feed.

The Long Bet

There are two ways to read Stanford’s strategy. The skeptical reading holds that a university with Stanford’s admissions standards, cost structure and conference terms cannot outbid larger public programs for the athletes who determine football and basketball outcomes, and that money spent trying will come at the expense of the sports where Stanford actually dominates.

The more hopeful reading holds that Stanford’s advantages have simply changed form. Its donor base is unusually wealthy and loyal. Its degree retains unmatched value for athletes whose professional careers, in most sports, will be short or nonexistent. And its 50-year streak of NCAA championships suggests an institution that has adapted to every previous shift in the landscape.

Both readings contain truth, and the evidence will accumulate slowly: in recruiting classes, in Directors’ Cup standings, in whether the 36 teams remain 36. The Chronicle will follow that evidence closely. The business of college sports is no longer a sidebar to the games. At Stanford, it may decide which games are played at all.

Photo: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0