The college sports revenue-sharing era potentially puts Kentucky in a tough spot
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- University of Kentucky has not released its player revenue-sharing strategy yet.
- Other schools prioritize football with over 70% of funds directed to that sport.
- Kentucky must weigh basketball legacy against football’s financial influence.
The new era of college sports revenue sharing with players has the potential to put the University of Kentucky in quite the pickle.
In the expectation that NCAA universities will be able to start directly sharing revenues with their athletes in the 2025-26 school year, various college sports programs have already revealed how they plan to distribute the $20.5 million they will be allowed to pay to their players.
Georgia proposes to pay its football players 75 percent of that $20.5 million pot — which would be $15.375 million. The Bulldogs men’s basketball players would receive 15 percent ($3.075 million), with women’s basketball getting 5 percent ($1.025 million) and all other Bulldogs sports teams splitting 5 percent ($1.025 million).
At LSU, the distribution criteria will be roughly the same as at Georgia.
Outside the SEC, Texas Tech of the Big 12 proposes to pay 74 percent to its football players ($15.170 million), 17 to 18 percent to men’s basketball ($3.69 million computed at 18 percent), 2 percent to women’s basketball ($410,000), 1.8 percent to baseball ($369,000) and 4.2 percent combined to athletes from all its other sports programs ($861,000).
If you think you have not read in such specificity about Kentucky’s plans for the revenue sharing era, it is because you haven’t. With direct revenue sharing from universities to players likely to start on July 1, UK has not revealed how it will dole out that money.
Speaking last month at the SEC spring meetings in Florida, UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart told the Courier Journal’s Payton Titus that “the beauty of the (revenue sharing) cap space is that it is relatively fluid. There may be years where different programs need more than the other, so I think that the management of that will be really, really important through our compliance folks.
“We want to be flexible, be able to adjust and we’ll do that. That’s where we’re going to be instead of writing hard-line things down on paper.”
The revenue sharing proposals — and what is a de facto salary cap of $20.5 million per school — are part of the proposed settlement of the consolidated antitrust lawsuit, House vs. NCAA, which challenged the right of college sports governing bodies to restrict the income college athletes could earn off of their names, images and likenesses.
On Monday, United States district court senior judge Claudia Wilken granted attorneys involved in the case an extension until June 27 to file for summary judgment and to challenge the admissibility of expert testimony.
Even if the judge does not ultimately approve the settlement, UK can, if it chooses, start directly paying its athletes. Kentucky state law was amended in March to allow UK — and other instate universities, if they so choose — to begin sharing revenue with athletes in 2025-26.
If the new regime is enacted, college athletes will still be able to earn income beyond the school revenue share via outside NIL deals. However, in a measure aimed at handicapping booster-funded recruiting collectives, athletes will have to seek approval for all NIL contracts from a clearinghouse run by the accounting firm, Deloitte.
For University of Kentucky athletics administrators, the new revenue-sharing era has the potential to yield some vexing choices over how to allocate funds.
Basketball vs. football
Obviously, men’s basketball has long been UK’s marquee athletic program. As such, there would be a rationale for the university to distribute its revenue sharing to athletes in such a way as to put the Kentucky men’s hoops program at an advantage over its peer schools.
Adding to that incentive, it is widely expected that if the revenue sharing model with the de facto cap on such expenditures is adopted, then universities that are basketball powers but do not also have to support power-conference football programs will have substantially more money to share with hoops players than will the schools in “big time” football leagues.
How patient are fans at Kentucky (and Kansas, North Carolina, Michigan State, etc. ... ) going to be if programs such as St. John’s, Villanova, Creighton and Gonzaga keep getting the top basketball prospects because they can offer more cash?
For UK, the problem with tilting revenue sharing heavily toward hoops is that, even at Kentucky, football is the most lucrative sport. According to the federal government’s Equity in Athletics Data Base, UK had $46,617,232 in revenue from football in 2022-23 (the most recent year for which figures are available) compared to $30,925,377 in men’s basketball revenue.
In the big picture, few believe that the forces that propel college sports realignment are abating, or that the present conference configuration at the top of NCAA Division I sports is final. Fact is, the attractiveness of a university’s football program almost exclusively determines how a school is viewed in realignment scenarios.
As talks percolate of a football-centric “super league” potentially forming, there is an argument that having a relevant pigskin program should be the University of Kentucky’s top objective in terms of securing its athletics future.
That forms the basis for the case that Kentucky, which has traditionally struggled to achieve and sustain football success in the Southeastern Conference, should allocate its revenue sharing in such a way as to try to create advantage for the Wildcats football program.
Given all of this, the revenue-sharing era in college sports is probably going to force the athletics administration at the University of Kentucky to live in a world of challenging choices.
This story was originally published June 5, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
