Steve Irvine and Mark Ingram Q&A Part 1
By Steve Irvine
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - November 13, 2024
UAB athletic director Mark Ingram sat down late last week to answer questions about the state of the UAB athletic program. One of the big questions surrounded the NCAA vs. House settlement, which resulted in the NCAA being responsible for back pay of more than a combined $2.5 billion to a group of student-athletes after it was ruled they were deprived of NIL opportunity and revenue sharing. Ingram spoke on how that affects UAB and other Group of Five programs.
How do you maneuver through the changing landscape of college athletics, particularly with the ruling on the House vs. NCAA case?
“Our commissioner, Tim Pernetti, is a real competitor. He’s great. I’ve known Tim for a long time. He was the athletic director at Rutgers. We have just kind of known each other for a long, long time. He’s really smart. He's bullish, assertive. There was an article I read this morning about a minimum investment in terms of revenue sharing for the league. He isn't making a statement of what that number would be, but that he thinks there should be one. We will have to, once we understand what that number is, which will require a lead-wide vote, figure out how we're going to do that. The best information that I've gotten on this, frankly, is from my peers in the SEC and the Big Ten, because they seem to know a lot more than we know. How is that? Why is that? I'm not sure. But they seem to know a lot more about where this is and where it's headed than anybody else. Listening to them talk about their cost containment things and hearing them with their budget figures versus ours, it’s an astonishing difference. The things that they're gonna have to eliminate or reduce, not necessarily sports, but just really some things that we don't get credit for, that are student-athlete benefits. Whether they are bigger budgets for their staff, whether it's strength and conditioning, nutrition, training room, meals that they provide, maybe how they do official visits, instead of doing a 48-hour visit they'll go to a 24-hour visit, instead of bringing the whole entourage in, maybe they bring in a player and a guest. You know, these sort of things to then have the dollars to afford compensating the players. Hearing that from them, now we have to go and formulate a plan on how could we do that. The best way I can describe it. It's like Goodwill Hunting. They've already got it on the board and are sketching it out. And we don't even know what the math problem is yet. And by we, I don't mean UAB, I mean our conference and Group of Five.
The House settlement is two parts. Initially, there is 10 years of backpay, which goes to pay Power Four athletes only. While only the Power Four conferences, at that time Power Five, were named in the lawsuit, everybody that has received a NCAA distribution, we’re all getting lumped into the reimbursement plan. No former UAB student athlete is going to receive any money, unless at some point, maybe, they transferred from a Power Five school. For the next 10 years, the current number we’ve been given is $417,000 dollars, out of our budget, that the NCAA will hold (yearly) from what in the past they would have paid us. So, for the next 10 years, they are going to withhold that money to pay off the lawsuit, which is 10 years of backpay to those Power Five students. We don’t have a choice. Depending on your conference, it depends on how much money you have to pay. It’s based on basketball units and how much they paid your conference from the NCAA distribution from the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament. I don’t want the number is, but the incumbent members of the American would have to pay a bigger number, because they were getting three or four teams in the tournament. Of the 10-year window they looked at, nine of them we were in C-USA. That’s part one in the back pay, part two is future revenue sharing with the athletes.”
I'm not opposed to the concept of having a minimum investment, but I don't have any idea what that is. One of the challenges, I think, for us, and I can't speak to other conferences, but our distribution within our own league is not the same across the board. What the incumbent members have - Memphis, South Florida, Tulane, Tulsa, Temple, East Carolina - their conference distribution is more than double what our conference distribution is. And when I say our, I'm talking about the people out of the C-USA coming into the American. Now we're all the same, but we're less than half of (the revenue distribution). So when we start talking about a minimum spend within the league and the framework of the league, I think that that has to be taken into consideration that there is a competitive disadvantage prior to this by virtue that they have more dollars to operate than we do. If that translates into how much they can turn around and spend on talent on the field or court, we've created an inequity within the framework of our own conference. We've got to have that conversation. We can't have that in a silo. These things are not separate conversations. They are all encompassing conversations that we need to discuss. It's a difficult position to be in when you have a tight budget and you're trying to provide a world-class experience to all your student-athletes, that's what we're trying to do. If you can take existing dollars, maybe that you spend on them in one way and then just give them the dollars rather than the benefit, maybe that's what the answer is. I know that's, again, that's what people in the Power Four conferences are doing. We will be looking at them and seeing what they do and try to follow their lead, so that we don't get looked at as doing less than them. ”
How difficult is it to make a plan when you don’t have all the answers?
“It's easy when you know all the answers. I mean, is that how difficult is that? Here's the problem that's going to solve it. Right. That's what I'm saying is, I mean, all of us ADs, we're on the phone with each other all the time. Hey, do you have any new ideas? Hey, I talked to AD over here, they're doing this, have you heard that? No, I didn't hear that yet, that's a good idea. It’s not just that cost containment. It's also, how can we creatively generate some new revenue streams, too? We started a podcast called The Inferno. That's new inventory that we have not had before. Are there things like that that we can create to say, ‘Hey, this is new or different than we've had before?’ And how can we find a way to maximize that, so that we can stay competitive within our own league?”
How much is still a moving picture?
“The amount of litigation that the NCAA is taking on is remarkable. It's easy to pick on the NCAA because they're this governing body that we really don't know, we the fan, we don't really know what they're doing. It's like complaining about any government office, like complaining about the White House. You don't have any idea what they're doing in the White House. Forget politics, forget which party you're aligned with, I'm just saying, generally speaking, you complain about Congress, you complain about Senate, you complain about (other things). You don't really have any idea what they're actually doing and how hard it actually is unless you're in it. The NCAA is that way, so they're kind of an easy target. But they’ve just dealt with an onslaught of litigation. The concern is how can we get back to doing business? The business was educating people. How can we get back to the business of providing access to education through sports? That's what we all got into this for. Now it's turning into more of a quasi-business. We're an enterprise, we're not a business, we're an enterprise. We have to use business principles often times to balance the budget and that sort of stuff. But we are, our goal and intent was how can we help promote our universities and provide access to education through sports for young people.
You've got this House settlement, you've got NCAA rules, whatever the rules are from the settlement, you have the Office of Civil Rights, which is a lot of fans don't realize that Title IX is an educational amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A lot of people, I think, believe that it's something that came from the NCAA, that's not true. So these three entities, which are not the same entity, I don't want to say they don't work together, but they don't report to one another. They're all trying to follow rules. We're trying to work under the umbrella of all three of these different entities. That's also part of the challenge, is they don't always take on business principles. Ultimately, I don't I don't want to use the term don't care, but these entities don't care if we win or lose. Somebody's going to win, it doesn't matter. Someone's going to win the national championship in volleyball, the NCAA doesn't care who that is. I don't mean that to say it in an ugly way. They're neutral, they just run the championship for somebody to go win it. And so, balancing the books and winning the games and all this stuff is an important part of what we all do. You have these three entities that provide rules that you're trying to follow that don't necessarily always obey those things.”
How much more do you know about the NIL puzzle and how much does it change daily?
“Your first question, which was about the House (settlement), one of the things that is not clearly understood yet is how does the House settlement impact NIL. There's a lot of talk about authentic NIL and that there's going to be a clearinghouse of sorts that's going to make you sort of obey the true value, a student-athlete's value of their name and the use of their name, image, and likeness in your market. I think sports like basketball, where athletes don't wear a hat or a helmet or sunglasses or something on their face means their face, their image, has maybe greater value. I think they will have a bit of an advantage. How much of an advantage, I don't know. But you know when you look at the NFL, the people that have these marketing deals, it's quarterbacks and receivers, running back sometimes. There's very few occasions, very few occasions, where you'll get some really great defensive lineman, Aaron Donald (or) JJ Watt, but it's not every D lineman on every team. It's those real special guys and the ones that have been in for a long time that have done a lot of postgame interviews, therefore people know who they are. But your quarterbacks and receivers, whose name get called out all the time and then interviewed after the game, when you put his face on a billboard, people know who that guy is because they've seen him a lot. You can't just do that with the right guard. That doesn't mean the right guard's not a great player in their own right. They're not in a position to be promoted the same way. Even in pro sports, those guys don't have these big deals and they're best of the best. So how can we be paying, how can schools pay a second string right guard $100,000 when the starting right guard for the Tennessee Titans can't get $100,000?
So what we're still trying to figure out is how or if the House settlement will impact how we are currently managing that or will those dollars shift. Will we pay through revenue share? Will we take those dollars and pay the players in a Rev share model. These are big questions. Can you do that for just one sport or just three sports? This brings back what I said earlier, what are the Title IX implications of that? It's distressing when you hear when you hear your peers say ‘Look man, we're all getting sued.’ I don't want to get sued. That's distressing when people kind of say ‘Look, just settle in that's what's gonna happen.’ I think unfortunately there are some, and I'm just telling you regurgitating what some say, is that we're going to have to go through and make a decision and do a thing and there’s going to be somebody (facing) a lawsuit. Then a court will have to go determine, did they apply this new House settlement rule properly or not. Another real challenge with all this is that we don't think we're going to know until April, if the House settlement passes (for good). We're not going to know until April and then we're expected to implement July 1. When we turn the corner on the holidays here into the new calendar year, we will be immediately looking towards forecasting for next year from our enterprise perspective, the business enterprise. How are we generating revenue? How are we managing our expenses? How are we managing travel, etc., etc.? And you've got this thing looming out there, that's a big thing, that you're also trying to speculate on how will that impact you. It's a real conundrum. It's not a UAB problem, it's an everybody problem.”
With the football program, when you’re going through a struggling season, as an AD do you look at a season after it fully plays out to judge the season or make assessment as it goes?
“Yeah, well, we always evaluate our coaches at the end of every season regardless of the sport. We sit down with the coach. But we're in constant communication during the year. It's not like we don't talk all year and then at the end of the season we have a conversation. You know I have the privilege of seeing how hard these guys work every day. I was really glad, not for the obvious reasons of getting the win against Tulsa, but I was glad that our fans got to see the team perform the way that they did because that's the way they perform in practice. And I think Trent said that in the press conference and it's accurate. In the same way that he said, I was glad for the players and for the coaches that that the result showed up on Saturday, not just Monday through Thursday. And I was glad our fans were able to see that too. That's been something that we've been able to see all along that has not shown up on Saturday. I'm thrilled for that and and we still got a lot of football to play with Trent.”
With Trent Dilfer, considering his win-loss record and struggles on the field, have you still seen some of the things that you saw when you hired him?
“Yeah, he's incredibly transparent. He's taken our team out to the community service things without cameras and fanfare. Taking them over to Parker High School and done things around the community to really help teach and educate our team as young people. As an educator, (he) would like to evolve the players into great citizens and productive young men. He's made academics a really high priority for them and really overemphasized getting a degree and the importance of that degree. And those are things that he talked a lot about. So he has done all those things that he said he would do, which I value and think are very important.”
In regards to football scheduling, why is there only one buy game currently scheduled?
“You know, we have a lot of, let's call it feelers out to schools, on the one after that, which would be the 2026 season. The Southeastern Conference has not made a decision as to whether or not they're going to play nine conference games or stay at eight. That pending decision hangs in the balance. There are not games available to go get until they make a decision. It's not for lack of vision, lack of effort, lack of understanding. It's, we are in the moment at their mercy as to what they're gonna do. Other leagues are constantly talking about ‘Hey, we need to play more league games.’ I don't know where they are. I've asked their ADs, and they're pretty close to the vest because they don't want to air the laundry. Nobody's trying to throw anybody on the bus there. So we're just in a bit of a holding pattern. I asked somebody close to the situation do you have any idea when you'll make that decision? And they kind of chuckled and said, no. It's important to us because, first of all, we have to have a game. We have to play somebody. Knowing what they're doing will completely determine what we do.”
Are there thoughts about going outside the SEC for these games?
“We would, yeah. You can't just pick up a phone and go, you know who would be great to play, let's go play them. They might not want to play you. They might not have a game available. They might have a game avaible but maybe don’t have the date that lines up. It's more complicated than it probably looks. So. again, even if the dates do line up, they may say we don't want to play you. Well, why? Because you're really good your style of offense is not what we want to play or we want to play somebody closer. I don't know. It could be any number of things. What we've tried to do is keep it regional for our fans. It's fun to go to these stadiums and look up and see a big patch of green there. That's fun. Our players love it and I want our fans to love it. I want our fans to know that that's a big part of what drives that decision. Financially, we need the games to help run the department. That's why we do the game guarantee. It's a significant part of our revenue. But how we choose who we choose is based on our fans' ability to travel and cheer for their team.”