What we know, and still do not know, about UK Athletics’ revenue sharing plans
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- UK Athletics will distribute $18 million to athletes under NCAA revenue sharing.
- Exact revenue splits and scholarship counts remain undisclosed.
- NIL deals face review by NIL Go; Title IX compliance remains under legal scrutiny.
Just less than a week after a federal judge gave final approval to the NCAA’s House settlement, paving the way for schools to begin sharing revenue with athletes on July 1, Kentucky finally began to share specific details about its plan for the new era of college sports.
But questions remain.
Here is a closer look at what we know, and what we still do not know, about how UK is approaching revenue sharing.
How much revenue will Kentucky share with athletes?
The House settlement allows schools to share up to $20.5 million in revenue in year one. As expected, Kentucky will share the maximum amount. The settlement allows schools to count up to $2.5 million in added scholarships — scholarship limits were eliminated for individual sports in favor of overall roster limits — toward that cap, meaning UK will actually distribute $18 million to its athletes.
How will UK divide its revenue sharing among sports?
While a handful of schools confirmed months ago they expected to follow the same formula that divides the $2.8 billion in damages to athletes who competed since 2016 but were not eligible for NIL payments at the time — 75% for football, 15% for men’s basketball, 5% for women’s basketball and 5% for other sports — more recently schools, including Kentucky, have been tight-lipped about their plans.
“I think what people want to do is they want to get fixed numbers, and they want to say, ‘This is it,’” UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart said. “They draw hard lines. When you do that, it becomes really difficult for you to be flexible to whatever situation you may have in front of you. So, we’re going to be flexible to that, and we’re going to be looking at different ways that we can help each of our teams and we’ll get to a spot, and coaches will know.”
Missouri athletic director Laird Veatch acknowledged last week he was keeping those numbers secret for now in part due to not wanting to cede a competitive advantage to rivals who might use it to recruit against his programs.
With a men’s basketball program that prides itself on being the “gold standard” nationally and a football program that has historically struggled to compete in the SEC, UK looks particularly vulnerable to negative recruiting depending on how much revenue it distributes to those two programs. Barnhart, though, insisted his secrecy had little to do with competition.
“I think that the minute you start worrying about what everybody else is doing, that’s when you get into making decisions that aren’t best for you,” Barnhart said. “… I don’t want to chase things. I just want people to and our staff and our folks to go, ‘OK, that works. We can make that work. We’re going to get through it. We’ll navigate that with you.’ And coaches talk, administrations talk, all that happens, but if you look over the course of what we’ve done, we’ve generally done our own thing.
“I don’t think we’ll be too dissimilar to that as we go forward. There’ll be some things that will look similar to what others have done. There’ll be some things that won’t look similar to what others have done. And I just think — and Dr. (Eli) Capilouto and I have had many, many conversations about this — flexibility is critically important in these times. I think it’s critically important.”
How many new scholarships will Kentucky add?
The settlement contracts the overall number of athletes on each roster in most sports but now allows any athlete on the roster to be awarded a full scholarship, if the school chooses. For instance, the new football roster limit is down to 105 (though the SEC has decided all its members will remain at 85 scholarships in that sport). Men’s basketball can now have 15 scholarship players, and Kentucky looks on track to hit that number.
Like the revenue distribution formula, Kentucky has not shared its specific scholarship numbers publicly. It does not appear the school will fully fund the maximum number of scholarships in every sport — like Texas announced earlier this spring it would do — but the school revealed this week its total scholarship spending is expected to increase by almost $2 million next year (though that increase was offset by the elimination of Alston awards schools gave athletes before revenue sharing). The university has elected to help fund part of that increase by paying for the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition rates for athletes.
The scholarship number could be particularly important in sports like baseball, which is not expected to receive a large portion of the revenue sharing. Baseball previously was limited to 11.7 total scholarships, so the ability for historic powerhouses to fund up to 34 full scholarships now could be a major selling point in recruiting. Before the 2025 season, UK baseball coach Nick Mingione told the Herald-Leader he expected UK’s scholarship number to be “in the 20s” in 2026.
What will happen to UK’s NIL collectives?
In addition to whatever revenue sharing funds UK distributes to athletes, those players will still have the chance to earn additional money in outside name, image and likeness deals. However, now those NIL deals are subject to approval from a third-party clearinghouse called NIL Go that will be tasked with ensuring the contracts are legitimate deals for services rendered and fit into what its algorithm determines is fair market value in order to halt glorified pay-for-play deals from NIL collectives that have been common in recent years.
The clearinghouse is expected to quickly be challenged in courts, but for now schools must decide whether to continue to farm out athletes’ NIL negotiations to collectives or bring those functions in-house. Barnhart told the Herald-Leader after last week’s board meeting UK is still weighing its options.
“We would love people to be aligned with our student-athletes, in whatever way benefits them, and is right through the process,” Barnhart said. “And so we’ll work our way through that. And I think we’ve got some thoughtful ways we can do that to help them. We’ve got, obviously, one of the great multimedia rights partners in the country, and they’re very thoughtful about what they do.
“So, I’m encouraged by that, but I think you’re going to see the next six to 12 months will be one of sort of a crystallization, so to speak, of our pathways. Where I think it’s been pretty murky and pretty cloudy, difficult to understand where everybody’s going, I think in the next year you’ll see some, it’ll become more clear.”
How will UK factor Title IX into its plans?
Shortly before President Joe Biden left office, the Department of Education issued a memo stating it believed NIL deals between schools and athletes were subject to Title IX regulations, meaning revenue sharing would need to be evenly distributed between male and female athletes. The Trump Administration quickly rescinded that guidance upon taking power, though.
Asked about Title IX on Thursday, Barnhart acknowledged judge Claudia Wilken had not provided schools much guidance on the issue when approving the House settlement. Appeals to the settlement on Title IX grounds have already been filed.
“We’re concerned with Title IX,” he said. “We want to make sure we’re thoughtful about how we do it. There’s pieces of this puzzle that they say applies to Title IX and it doesn’t apply to Title IX, and we’ve got to be thoughtful in what we do. So we have conversations about it.
“But the most important thing is that our coaches walk out of here saying, ‘We’ve been thought of. We have been given what we need to succeed and to be a part of the Southeastern Conference in a national landscape.’ And our coaches, we’ve done that. We’ve invested in them, whether that’s what we’ve done in Memorial Coliseum or what we’ve done in scholarships, new scholarships we’re putting into our program. We’re ready to go, to pursue what we need to do to continue to have our women’s programs be the best in the country.”