Illustration of a basketball player dunking books into a hoop,

 Illustration by Frank Stockton

The End of the Ivy League?

How changes in college sports affect the Crimson

With one minute left in Harvard’s last men’s basketball game of the 2023-2024 season, sophomore Chisom Okpara drove toward the basket, leaped, and released the ball. It clanked off the rim back into his hands. On the second attempt, he made the shot, his twenty-fifth point of the game. He did not know that would be his final Crimson bucket.

Okpara was happy with his team, academics, and social life. But in April, star first-year point guard Malik Mack entered the transfer portal, which allowed coaches from other schools to recruit him. Soon after, fellow Ivy League sophomores Danny Wolf (Yale) and Kalu Anya (Brown) followed suit. Anya, a childhood friend, counseled Okpara to “just enter your name,” Okpara recalls. “You don’t know what’s going to happen. You can always come back.”

Once Okpara entered the transfer portal, schools ranging from Auburn and Texas to Stanford and Vanderbilt pursued him. These schools, he said, told him he could make between $200,000 and $500,000 by playing for their basketball team. On May 22, he committed to Stanford, where he will play against stronger competitors while earning a significant amount of money.

Had he been a student five years ago, Okpara would likely still be at Harvard. In that span, the economics and regulation of college sports have drastically changed. As of summer 2021, students have been permitted to earn money for use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) and to transfer without penalty. The top echelon of sports, like men’s basketball and football, now more closely resembles professional athletics than pre-NIL college athletics.

Yet despite the whirlwind of NIL deals, transfer recruitments, and conference realignments, the Ivy League of today looks much like the league of spring 2021 (COVID aside). Few athletes are paid. Coaches do not recruit transfers. The members are the same. Will the Ivy League, proud of its commitment to amateurism and academics, survive?

“Increasingly divergent” student athletics

As some Crimson players survey the new landscape with interest, their professors watch with great concern. Current and former members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ standing committee on athletic sports worry that the new era of monetization may not align with Harvard’s athletic goals. Since the introduction of NIL, major sports conferences like the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference (SEC) have added members and paid individual athletes millions. The Ivy schools’ vision for their student-athletes, says Coolidge professor of history Maya Jasanoff, “is increasingly divergent from what the model of a student-athlete is at other colleges and universities outside the Ivy League.”

Though the faculty committee is responsible for overseeing “all the faculty’s athletic programs,” Jasanoff, who recently completed five years as its chair, points out that it has little control over the student-athlete experience. She fears that Harvard Athletics, the Ivy League, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) may also be incapable of governing their athletes. “A lot of the top-line policy matters are influenced by…forces that are well outside the remit of the faculty, if not even the University as a whole,” she explains. “You have Supreme Court decisions…that are affecting how athletics operates. You don’t have Supreme Court decisions affecting which courses are being offered.”

With money flowing into college sports, some professors fear that student-athletes will become more athlete than student. “Faculty on campus have felt for some time that the academic component of the student experience has been shrinking,” Jasanoff continues. “We’re seeing a world of athletic competition in which the opportunities available to our students are different or bigger.” With payment attached, student-athletes are incentivized to spend more time on their sports, whether on-campus, by squeezing in extra workouts and training sessions, or off-campus, by accepting athletic assignments that entail missing class. Women’s basketball guard Harmoni Turner ’25, for example, spent a September week in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, competing for Team USA’s under-23 3x3 team.

Those external opportunities may not just alter the behavior of Harvard athletes—they might change the Crimson’s rosters, too. In recent decades, Harvard has fielded athletic stars like six-time National Football League (NFL) Pro Bowl center Matt Birk ’98, National Basketball Association (NBA) champion Jeremy Lin ’10, and eight-time NFL Pro Bowl fullback Kyle Juszczyk ’13. Harvard Law School lecturer Peter Carfagna ’75, J.D. ’79, who spent 11 years as chief legal officer and general counsel for a major sports agency, believes those talents likely would not attend Harvard today (especially for four years). When those stars attended Harvard, “They were forgoing full scholarship opportunities and paying for the privilege,” he says. With NIL, why would a star “go to Harvard instead of an NIL school and make…a life-changing amount of money?”

Some Harvardians see NIL as an opportunity to deemphasize athletics. Now that Harvard’s national competition is acting differently, Holman professor of business administration Paul Gompers would explore dropping down to Division III (the lowest NCAA tier). There, member-institutions tend to have NIL policies more in line with Harvard’s. Leaving Division I, he says, would reduce pressure on coaches to compete with NIL-laden programs and reaffirm the importance of student-athletes’ academic work.

Deprioritizing athletics could also help Harvard create a more diverse class, argues Jasanoff. That task has become more difficult since June 2023, when the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in undergraduate admissions. “The demographics of recruited athletes are richer, whiter, and less often first-generation than the demographics of the class as a whole,” she points out. The only two exceptions to the pattern, to her knowledge, are basketball and football—the two sports most dramatically reshaped by NIL.

On the court and the gridiron

Monetization opportunities are most available in men’s basketball and football. The 11-man starting lineup of an SEC football team earns around $14.4 million in NIL money, according to a September New York Times report. That’s roughly half what Harvard Athletics reportedly spends to field 42 different varsity teams—more teams than any other school.

That NIL money flows to athletes with very little oversight. In April 2021, the NCAA announced that undergraduates from five major sports (baseball, football, men’s and women’s basketball, and men’s ice hockey) could transfer schools once without penalty. That June, a Supreme Court case severely hindered the association’s ability to restrict its athletes’ incomes. Soon thereafter, it also “suspended” its ban on student-athletes earning money from their NIL. As a result, college sports quickly “became a completely unregulatable marketplace for free agency,” says Carfagna, who played football for the Crimson.

Alumni of sports-centric colleges soon started to form collectives, which operate independently from universities, to pay athletes. Though payments must be at “market rate” and nominally tied to selling an athlete’s NIL, the market is so new that “market rates have been whatever somebody is willing to pay,” Nichols family director of athletics Erin McDermott said in a March interview. “It got very unwieldy very quickly.” For a few million dollars, a top football school can essentially purchase a new star quarterback, whisking him away from his previous school.

So far, very little of that money has come to the Ivy League. No Ivy school is directly paying players, and none have NIL collectives. Some, though, do help their students facilitate private deals. Princeton partnered with a platform called Opendorse, where its athletes can set prices for services like social media posts, in-person appearances, and autographs. Harvard has partnered with a platform called INFLCR, where athletes can download game footage for self-promotion. Women’s basketballer Turner, for example, struggled to earn sponsorships until a dramatically lit video of her shooting a three-pointer received nearly 10 million views on TikTok. That exposure enabled her to sign with an agency and secure deals with brands like Papa Johns and Fabletics. She did not disclose the value of her partnerships, but says she no longer stresses over “simple toiletries, food…transportation.” (Harvard Athletics declined to comment on how many athletes have secured NIL deals, but associate director of athletics Imry Halevi says that “many of our student-athletes have enjoyed the ease of access that INFLCR provides for…reporting NIL deals.”)

Erin McDermott with Harvard stadium in the background
Erin McDermott  |  Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/HPAC/Courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications

Even if large sums are not flowing toward Ivy players, commercialization is still shaping the league in ways unimagined when it was formed in 1954. (And this magazine’s September-October 1997 cover story, “The Professionalization of Ivy League Sports,” on year-round competition, proprietary training, recruiting, and athletes’ own early specialization, seems quaint, if not prehistoric.)

Tim Murphy, who in January retired after 30 years as Stephenson Family head coach for Harvard football, says he noticed new challenges during his final few recruiting cycles. Harvard does not offer athletic scholarships, so it often loses recruits attracted by full scholarships from other schools. But before NIL, it could still vie for athletes who were offered little to no money because the NCAA regulates how many scholarships schools can award. Now, schools can use NIL money to pay students who aren’t on formal scholarships, reeling in what Murphy calls “extra” recruits. In the past few years, he says, several recruits have accepted NIL money from Northwestern and Stanford rather than come to Harvard at cost. “That’s a battle that we’re generally not going to win,” he says.

Yet Harvard has not yet lost active football players. During the last three years, 15 players transferred, but each had already graduated. (The Ivy League, unlike most other Division I conferences, does not allow graduate students to compete.) Athletic director McDermott believes so few football players transfer because players who “opt into Ivy League football…know what you’re in,” she recently said, referring to the league’s shorter schedule and lack of postseason play.

Men’s basketball, on the other hand, could be facing a transfer crisis. Mack and Okpara were both talented underclassmen who came to Harvard, received starting opportunities, played well—and then transferred to NIL schools. Okpara himself thinks Harvard will have no trouble maintaining its current recruiting caliber, but star players, he says, will start treating the Ivy League like “a stepping stone to get to high majors and hopefully get paid.”

Losing players to the transfer portal will complicate the job of Tommy Amaker, who is entering his eighteenth season as Stemberg Family head coach of men’s basketball. (Harvard Athletics declined to make Amaker available for comment, but Imry Halevi said that not “enough time has passed to really see what long-term impacts these developments have had on recruiting and the future of college athletics.”) The College accepts only a dozen or so transfer students per year, none of them typically athletes. With the number of athletic first-year admission spots static, teams shrink when players transfer to other institutions.

Coaches in transfer-prone sports like men’s basketball must therefore weigh the risk of bringing in a talented player who quickly makes an impact and attracts attention from deep-pocketed rival athletic departments. “You’re going to have this transactional thing going on, and you’re going to have to try to strategically manage that,” says McDermott. “It’s not new, necessarily. It’s just different now.”

Will the increasing complexity of coaching make it more difficult for Harvard to recruit and retain top coaches? McDermott does not think so, describing the Ivy League as a simpler place to coach. She adds that recent head-coach openings have garnered more interest than usual, perhaps because candidates believe Harvard’s core values are better aligned with why they got into coaching. At other schools, she says, a “big part of their job now is dealing with the mobility of athletes and…fundraising.”

Former football coach Murphy thinks Harvard will always be able to attract quality coaches—but retaining them may be tougher. He took a pay cut to join the Crimson in 1994, leaving the head coach post at the University of Cincinnati. “Not every good coach is going to stay at Harvard for 30 years,” he admits. “However, you don’t want a coach who is just going to hit and run.” Harvard will have to persuade top coaches to forgo a larger paycheck to stay at a place where “academics absolutely, positively comes first,” he says.

Harvard’s athletic aims may also narrow its pool of potential coaches. Even though the Crimson can compete at the top of the nation in some sports, McDermott emphasizes that winning national championships is not Harvard Athletics’ express goal. She charges coaches with winning the Ivy League, which usually entails an invitation to a national NCAA Division I postseason tournament.

Narrowing its athletic vision to just the Ivy League may help Harvard resist the new pressures on academic athletics. But some Crimson stakeholders are skeptical that Harvard coaches will actually focus only on seven opponents. “I think our coaches are human and I think our coaches view their status outside the Ivy League,” says the Business School’s Gompers. “They want to win national titles, they want to be in the top-10, they want to have All-Americans.”

Elsewhere in Allston

The big-money sports are not the only Harvard teams facing a new competitive environment for talent. In June, All-American tennis player Cooper Williams announced that he was transferring to Duke after only one year at Harvard. Though Williams, Duke, and its NIL collective declined to comment about whether money influenced his decision to transfer, the Duke NIL collective does solicit donations for men’s tennis.

That example aside, little has yet changed for the “non-revenue” sports where Harvard often shines—such as fencing, rowing, sailing, and squash. Their student-athletes currently have low potential to monetize their reputations either in the free market (via endorsements) or privately (via NIL collectives). In these sports, Harvard’s closest national competitors tend to be Ivy schools, and its success holds true for both teams (four of which won national championships in 2024) and individuals (21 of Harvard’s 26 Paris 2024 Olympians competed in a sport that most Division I schools do not offer).

Can the Ivy League continue to be a place where student-athletes test themselves against the best?

 

When coaches help facilitate individual success even in smaller sports, Crimson student-athletes can cash in. Before the fall 2023 cross-country season, an agency reached out to associate head coach Alex Gibby, saying that Graham Blanks ’25 might be able to land an NIL deal. After signing Blanks, the agency handled all the negotiations throughout the season. Blanks was not directly involved but heard that the value of a partnership kept increasing as he kept winning cross-country meets.

When he won the 2023 men’s individual NCAA Division I cross country national championship—the first Ivy League man to do so—he knew he’d been paid, so he bought the whole team dinner at Grendel’s Den. Six weeks after that championship (and four weeks after breaking the NCAA 5,000-meter indoor record), the future 2024 Olympian signed an NIL deal with New Balance that means, he says, that he does not need to work an on-campus job or worry about dining out.

Staying a Division I competitor?

In all likelihood, some Ivy League money will soon go toward paying athletes. As of press time, the NCAA was negotiating to settle three class-action lawsuits filed by athletes who competed in the pre-NIL era. Some $2.78 billion of damages may be used to compensate student-athletes who did not have the opportunity to earn money while playing. As Division I conference members, the Ivy League institutions will have to pay into any settlement. McDermott says the payout “is not keeping me up at night,” but might require refocusing donor attention from infrastructure projects toward filling other budget gaps.

Through that settlement, if approved by the court, Harvard will pay past NCAA athletes. But will it pay future Harvard athletes? McDermott is not necessarily opposed. The school would need to hold itself “accountable to the arrangements being truly for name, image, and likeness,” she says. The Ivy League would need to pass “true regulations” so that the deals are tethered to NIL. And athletic departments would have to take ownership of NIL rather than farm it out to loosely affiliated collectives. It is not yet clear how much power the league has to determine the financial status of its athletes. For now, though, much of what happens in the Ivies will be shaped by outside forces: court rulings and the wealth of the power conferences (whose national television deals are now worth billions of dollars).

As other schools adapt more radically to the new athletic landscape, does Harvard still have a place within Division I, the most competitive of the NCAA’s three tiers? McDermott believes so. She does not envision Harvard leaving the division “unless there are some really exclusionary things that happen that we are not anticipating,” such as mandatory revenue sharing, or power conferences like the Big Ten or SEC splintering off from the NCAA.

Even if other Division I schools spend more money to improve their teams than Harvard does, remaining in that upper division helps the College recruit athletes, who usually want the opportunity to play against top-tier opponents. The men’s basketball team, for example, challenged Indiana last year and will face Colorado this year; both opponents made March Madness the year prior to the matchup. “Whether it’s athletics, physics, or music,” says Leverett University Professor Jerry Green, who has served on the faculty standing committee on athletic sports, “Harvard should give people who are really good at something the chance to test themselves against the best.”

But can the Ivy League continue to be a place where student-athletes test themselves against the best? In sports that have not yet been monetized, signs point to yes: witness 2024’s four Harvard national championships and 26 Crimson Olympians. But in higher-revenue sports, the Ivies’ era of graduating top talent might be over. Just look toward NBA hopeful Chisom Okpara, who this winter will don Cardinal red rather than crimson. Can Harvard get the next Okpara to stay?

Staff writer Max J. Krupnick profiled landscape architect Bas Smets in the July-August issue.

Read more articles by Max J. Krupnick

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