Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…At most, yeah. You have a football team and a basketball team, you have a women's basketball team, and then you probably have field hockey. I think there are a lot of people on that team. I think synchronized swimming has big numbers. You'd be making choices that I would argue aren't in the best interest of your entire student athlete body, so a lot of opportunity would go away. For folks who don't know, I'm pretty sure when I was at Ohio State, I remember the stat that us in the University of Oregon by virtue of Nike using it as their testing ground and the incredible rabid fanhood for the university, I think the football program paid for every other sport, thus making the athletic department itself profitable and could contribute back to other things in the university. I think, us, in the University of Oregon, we're the only country and the nation at that time that actually could do that. I think there are more that are profitable now. The general structure is football and men's basketball make the money and they pay for everything else. That's generally how it works. Maybe we should have that discussion, but there is a trade-off. There is in everything. The trade-off is the opportunity for the men's track, the women's track, the softball team, the field hockey team, my wife's swimming team, and all these, all of a sudden, those are on the chopping block. When you talk about how do we expand opportunity in our society and how do we make sure that institutions are more receptive to people from all different backgrounds, in particular, really difficult backgrounds, in particular, minority backgrounds, one of the best ways is through sports. If you're going to kill the college model, you're going to kill that opportunity right alongside of it. That is the trade-off. Again, people can come down wherever they want on that issue, but I think we need to be eyes wide open as we think through this. For me, the conclusion was always been, look, I don't know what the answer to that question is. I do know that NIL is pretty straightforward. I know that people should be able to market themselves. If a college swimmer anywhere in the country wants to teach swim lessons to help pay for school, because by the way, they're not on scholarship, so they're taking on student debt just like everyone else, if that's true, then we should let them market themselves. I don't think that's controversial.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.