In April, Quinnipiac University announced that it was demoting its women’s varsity rugby program to club status while adding a men’s distance track team. A few weeks later, 23 current and incoming women’s rugby players sued. Quinnipiac’s move, they alleged, discriminated against female athletes in part by denying them equal access to revenue sharing and to NIL (name, image, and likeness) opportunities.
The Quinnipiac experience is a harbinger. The 2025 House v. NCAA settlement, which expanded NIL opportunities for athletes, has introduced elements of market justice into college sports. Title IX, as currently enforced, still demands proportionate parity in resources allocated between men’s and women’s sports. The House NIL settlement puts colleges on a collision course with Title’s IX’s reigning demand for engineered proportional outcomes.
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Under the settlement, schools can share athletic revenue directly with athletes under a schoolwide cap that starts at roughly $20.5 million and rises by about 4 percent yearly. Athletes can also receive uncapped NIL payments from outside collectives funded by boosters and donors. In exchange, schools could now offer scholarships to any athlete on a roster, though roster sizes would be capped. In practice, athletes who generate the most value will receive much of both the capped revenue-sharing money and the uncapped NIL money.
That outcome follows ordinary economic incentives. Football and men’s basketball generate the overwhelming share of television revenue, ticket sales, and donor support at major programs. EADA data, which exclude capital expenses, show that these two sports routinely bring in huge operating surpluses at power conference schools. At the University of Michigan, for example, these two sports cleared over $120 million in operating surpluses. At the University of Tennessee, the total was just over $116 million; at Notre Dame, over $102 million. At least 12 of the 18 teams in the Big Ten cleared over $50 million from these two sports alone, while at least eight of the 16 SEC teams did.
Almost every other sport—men’s and women’s—runs a deficit. For decades, the commercial sports subsidized the rest. In the Big Ten, the average deficit at the 12 schools that report complete data on women’s sports hovers around $20 million. Deficits exceeded $27 million for nine women’s sports programs reporting real numbers in the SEC. Highly successful volleyball programs at Nebraska and Wisconsin lost well over $1 million in 2025. Even the national champion South Carolina women’s basketball team ran a deficit of more than $5 million, the sixth-largest for women’s basketball in the SEC.
Men’s non-revenue sports lose less, in part because there are fewer of them. In the Big Ten, they lost only about $10 million for the 12 that reported numbers in 2025; the SEC average was $11 million.
The NIL settlement creates the conditions for redirecting football and men’s basketball surpluses back to the athletes who create them, both through direct university payments (which go almost exclusively to football and men’s basketball players) and through outside collectives that will presumably divert donations from athletic departments. Nearly all NIL money goes to football and men’s basketball.
None of these realities can survive the reigning Title IX regime. Since the 1990s, as I show in a recent report, Title IX has been interpreted as demanding proportional parity. If women make up 55 percent of the undergraduate student body, schools must either have or continually move toward women taking up 55 percent of the athletic slots. Institutions meet that standard by padding women’s rosters, adding women’s sports, or cutting men’s non-revenue sports.
When schools face budget pressure, as Quinnipiac has in the past, cutting both men’s and women’s teams creates dire legal risk. The post-House world intensifies the pressure, since it shrinks subsidies to nonrevenue sports. A school’s competitive decision to allocate most of the new capped money to football and men’s basketball invites challenges that the distribution violates Title IX’s requirement for equitable treatment.
Early evidence confirms the tension. Female athletes filed an appeal objecting to the NIL settlement’s back-pay formula, arguing that directing more than 90 percent of the $2.8 billion fund to former football and men’s basketball players constitutes sex discrimination. Similar suits are pending about the revenue-sharing payments going mostly to male, revenue-generating athletes.
The closer that athletic departments coordinate with the collectives that distribute NIL money, the greater the risk that those payments will also be treated as university benefits subject to Title IX scrutiny, as a current lawsuit by beach volleyball players at the University of Oregon alleges. The Quinnipiac lawsuit combines all these issues with old disputes over whether schools can consider economic viability when cutting money-losing female sports.
President Trump’s April 2026 executive order, “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports,” seeks to limit player mobility and regulate how much players can be paid through legitimate fair-market NIL compensation instead of larger side payments. It identifies the danger that the NIL settlement poses to college nonrevenue sports. The combination of pay-for-play pressures and the redirection of donor money toward collectives funding football and men’s basketball could force the curtailment of women’s and Olympic sports.
Yet the order does not deal with the challenges that Title IX surely poses to the NIL settlement as a whole. President Trump’s hope, apparently, is that sufficient donor money will continue to be diverted from football to subsidize women’s bowling or men’s soccer. His order will not survive its coming collision course with Title IX.
As long as Title IX is enforced as a demand for proportional outcomes rather than equal opportunity, schools will remain torn between the realities of nature and the market, on one hand, and the demands of equity, on the other. A new, better way of regulating college sports awaits a revision of Title’s IX’s proportional-parity demands.