Iowa State AD Jamie Pollard gives thoughts on the future of NIL and revenue sharing

The last decade-plus has provided plenty of issues that were decried as potentially existential for college athletics.

From waves of realignment to a devastating loss at the Supreme Court and plenty more, it has been a time of constant change that has made the future of the industry an uncertain mess.

Now even greater change appears to be on the horizon with the biggest potential upheaval yet – revenue sharing with players – being discussed at college sports’ highest levels.

More: Iowa State's Jamie Pollard says college sports' power players are 'going to eat their own'

“It’s just another disruption in our industry,” Iowa State athletics director Jamie Pollard said Thursday at the Cyclone Tailgate Tour in West Des Moines, “and every one of these seems insurmountable. This one might really be insurmountable, but we’ll get through it.”

What form potential revenue sharing might take or how big a bite of the apple student-athletes will receive remain huge and unanswered questions. But the trajectory of the discussion points in one direction as the recently allowed name, image and likeness (NIL) rights players now control, along with other player-friendly deregulation, has upended college sports.

Pollard, who has helmed Cyclone athletics for 19 years, had plenty to say this week on the state of his industry as it enters perhaps its most turbulent period ever.

Here’s a sampling of his thoughts regarding revenue sharing and NIL.

What are your thoughts about a potential future world of revenue sharing? 

It’s just another disruption in our industry, and every one of these seems insurmountable. This one might really be insurmountable, but we’ll get through it. College athletics is really important to our country. Eighty percent of all medals won at the last Olympics were won by either current collegiate athletes or athletes that participated in NCAA sports. It’s not going to go away, but it’s going to look vastly different than what it has in the past. Maybe that’s good. To say today exactly what that’s going to look like, no one knows that. We’re all hypothesizing about how we’re going to deal with this, but we’ll figure it out. We always do. We’ll continue to move forward.

Whatever the revenue sharing percentage ends up being, how does that affect what you guys are looking at facilities-wise two or three years down the road? 

First of all, what I would say is it’s going to be a drastic change, and that change isn’t going to happen overnight. We have a $100 million budget. We don’t have a $120 million budget. It will be permissive legislation, which means you don’t have to do it, and, quite frankly, from talking to most of my peers, most of us have no idea how we will do it. So as an accountant, I can look at it and say the only way we can do $20 million (to players) is to only spend 80, but I don’t know where we’d get rid of the 20. At least overnight. That’s the million-dollar question or $20 million question for all of us. We'll figure it out, but it’s not a simple answer, and it’s not an answer someone can say, "This is what we’ll do tomorrow." Anybody that does that is just blowing smoke at you.

Do you have to financially plan that the $20 million is not going to be permissive because I imagine (your coaches) are going to want to spend every dollar that they can to win games? 

No, not necessarily, because you could argue today with collectives it’s permissive that you can spend whatever you want to spend, and we’re clearly not doing that. Because that’s not who we are. One of the things that excites me about the new world is I think we’ve been kind of operating in that world already, and there are others that have operated willy-nilly and now they are going to even make their problems even worse. We’ve established a culture that you can’t argue about the success. (Football coach Matt Campbell and men’s basketball coach T.J. Otzelberger) probably have had their most success in the last three years from a recruiting standpoint during a time period where most of us would have thought we couldn’t have done that, right? Because we weren’t doing necessarily everything everybody else was doing, and what I think it does is a great reflection of the two of them and (wrestling) coach (Kevin) Dresser and (women’s basketball) coach (Bill) Fennelly as well that they’ve been able to thread the needle of having a culture that recognizes NIL, but isn’t led by NIL.

How would you describe what NIL has been like since it was created?

First of all, what’s happened, NIL in and of itself was something that was very appropriate, but NIL isn’t what’s happened. It’s pay for play. What we’re doing with collectives, there’s no science to this, but collectives are maybe 10 percent NIL and 90 percent getting money from donors and funneling it to athletes. We’re already revenue-sharing. We just did it outside the institution. When it comes in-house, we’ll call it NIL because we’ll ask each of those young females or males to sign over all their name, image and likeness rights so we don’t have to compete with ourselves, but make no bones about it, the payments they will be getting will not have anything to do with their value of name, image and likeness. It’s going to be revenue-sharing.

That’s how you view it? That you buy out NIL to where (a student-athlete) could not go out to a third party like a Hy-Vee or whatever?

That’s all the devil in the detail, but the logic would say you’re not going to share revenue and then say you can go compete against us. So I think one of the things you’re going to see in the new way forward, at least as I see it, it’s also going to help with transfers. Because if I’m going to pay you X, you transfer, you don’t get that money anymore. Some of it’s going to be deferred. And some of it says you’ve got to play in a bowl game. And some of it says you’ve got to play in the NCAA Tournament and some of it says you need to graduate. And some of it says you have to go to class. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine. You just won’t get all the money that you were promised. And I think that will be great because it will be very transparent. It will be black and white. For schools like Iowa State, that have been doing it the right way and have been doing it the right way for years, it actually will be pretty easy because that’s how we’ve bene doing it.

Do you need a congressional carve-out for that?

No, because it would be totally voluntarily. You don’t have to sign it. And if you don’t sign it, we don’t have to pay you. It's pretty simple. That’s how I view it right now. There’s no credit for your tuition, your unlimited meals, your books, your board. We’re not getting any credit for that. If you want to be a member of our softball team, you’ll just sign over those rights so we can use them. If you don’t want to, then you pay your way to go to school. We'll pay it for you, but you’ve got to give us something for it. Right now, we’re not doing that. We're just flat-out taking money from donors and trying to survive. When I say we, I’m talking about our industry, right? We (Iowa State) haven't been doing it that way, and that’s why I think we’re better prepared for what’s about to happen, but that being said, we’re a long ways from being ready for what’s about to happen.

How is Title IX part of this conversation?

That’s another great question with no known answer, right? What I do know is you don’t pay salaries equally. You pay it based on market. Revenue is earned not equally. Revenue is earned proportionally. Eighty percent of our revenue comes from football. Fifteen comes from men’s basketball, and five percent from everybody else. I’m not saying that’s how that will get distributed, but I think that’s a starting point. The day you say you’re just going to share it equally, you’re going to have another lawsuit from a set of football and basketball players that are going to say, "We earned it all. Why are we not getting our fair share of it?" But the Office of Civil Rights is a whole other separate governmental agency, and no one knows how that will play out. All we can do is try our best to make decisions on what we think our facts. That’s why I say there’s a lot of questions.

Travis Hines covers Iowa State University sports for the Des Moines Register and Ames Tribune. Contact him at thines@amestrib.com or  (515) 284-8000. Follow him on X at @TravisHines21.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa State's Jamie Pollard sounds off on the future of college sports