How BYU benefits from upheaval in the business of college sports: A comprehensive guide

The BYU athletic department budget has doubled in less than a decade during the greatest era of disruption of college sports in history, a university official told the Deseret News.

That rapid escalation is all part of a college sports revolution. First, the transfer portal let players freely move from school to school. Then the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that schools could boost the scholarship benefits they provide to student-athletes.

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Players also began to receive payments for the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). And on July 1, college athletic departments began to do what once was unthinkable — directly share a fifth of their revenue with student-athletes.

The transformation requires the constant attention of university leaders.

BYU President Shane Reese estimates that he spends more time on athletics — up to 15% of his schedule — than any of his predecessors.

He is BYU’s sheriff on this still-untamed frontier, what some have described as a wild, wild west in college sports.

“That is an accurate description,” said Reese’s deputy for sports, Advancement Vice President Keith Vorkink.

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The original Wild West was dominated by tall tales. The two BYU leaders said in interviews with the Deseret News that the college sports version is no different. They countered what they say are false narratives in media reports and on social media about BYU contracts and NIL deals with athletes like basketball star AJ Dybantsa.

“When you hear that we’re the highest bidder, I can tell you and show you that we haven’t been the highest bidder in almost every instance, but we are in the game,” Reese said. “We’re going to be competitive. We’re going to be out there looking for the best kids that want to come play here and who will represent the university in tremendous ways.”

He said BYU’s board of trustees, which is made up of leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors the university, wants an athletic department that reflects the school’s educational and spiritual mission.

“We want to be really competitive on the field, on the court and on the pitch, but also grounded in who we are as a university,” Reese said. “Candidly, if we’re not going to be different than other institutions, we’re not going to be successful. Differentiators are what make people successful from a business perspective, and our differentiator is that we’re grounded in our spiritual mission and that we are going to try to do things differently.”

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Reese, Vorkink and an athletic department official also described:

• Where BYU’s athletics revenue ranks nationally and within the Big 12.

• The athletic department’s major revenue streams.

• How the school will compensate student-athletes.

• How new rules for college sports finances affect BYU.

There’s more.

They also said BYU sports have thrived in the 2020s because of long-standing fiscal policy. They explained that one reason the program is well positioned for the rest of the decade is because, paradoxically, the school received only a partial share of conference revenue for the first two years in the Big 12.

What follows is a primer on both the financial state of BYU sports and the dawn of a new era in college sports business.

Big 12 revenue and BYU’s advantage

BYU football punched above its financial weight as an independent football team, competing against many power conference teams with far larger athletic budgets.

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“BYU’s always prided itself on operating on a ‘Moneyball‘ concept, trying to make the most efficient use of the resources,” said Dallan Moody, senior associate athletic director for finance and strategy, referencing the book and movie of the same name.

“We were forced to, and it’s the culture of the church, as well, that every year you submit a balanced budget and live within your means, which is a position of strength.”

As the university vigilantly sought to join a power conference, the financial lift required to transition from football independence and from the West Coast Conference in other sports was staggering.

There was work to do. BYU does not reveal the size of its athletic budget.

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Last year, one of the Big 12 leaders, Texas Tech, sported an athletic budget of nearly $129 million, according to the Associated Press. That’s likely less than half of Ohio State’s budget, which four years ago weighed in at $251 million, according to a USA Today database.

BYU needed membership in a power conference with a bigger TV contract to consistently compete. BYU finally joined the Big 12 on July 1, 2023, after disruption in other conferences.

The partial share BYU received the past two years was a boon on its own, but good reasons exist to suggest that the postponement of a full share was perfectly timed to benefit BYU.

It still comes with challenges.

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The changes from the NCAA v House settlement

Two monumental changes took place simultaneously this month. July 1 marked the start of BYU receiving that full share of Big 12 revenue. On the same day, new rules went into effect that allow schools to share up to $20.5 million a year in sports revenue with student-athletes.

Revenue sharing is the result of a lawsuit filed by former Arizona State swimmer Grant House, who sued the NCAA and the five largest athletic conferences because of rules that prohibited him and other student-athletes from receiving NIL money that the free market would have generated for them.

The House settlement, signed by a federal judge, represented a new hurdle for BYU and the nation’s other universities.

“Those are resources and revenues that don’t exist,” Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne said to Congress about the $20.5 million.

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BYU athletic department officials wondered, as the House negotiations proceeded, “how any athletic department will stay afloat, because it was such a huge number,” Moody said.

Suddenly, everyone needed to generate more revenue. Even schools with giant athletics budgets like Alabama and Texas have had to scramble to come up with new money.

Smaller schools that can’t generate an additional $20 million have cut sports and athletic department jobs to fund payments to student-athletes.

It’s even more complicated than that sounds, Vorkink said.

That’s because the House settlement also cuts into every athletic department’s budget. The settlement awarded $2.8 billion to student-athletes who competed between 2016 and 2024 without benefiting from their names, images and likenesses.

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• The NCAA will pay over $1.1 billion of the damages.

• The Power Four conferences will pay about $664 million.

• The other 27 Division I conferences owe the remaining $990 million.

The NCAA is withholding revenue from schools to pay its share.

BYU is directly affected.

For example, the NCAA owes $40 million to the Big 12 for earning 20 “units” during the 2025 men’s basketball tournament. (A conference earns a unit every time one of its teams plays a game in the tournament.) To pay the damages it owes, the NCAA will begin to hold back some of the earned March Madness money, which schools had earmarked as part of their budgets, Vorkink said.

The surprising benefit for BYU

Here’s how the timing of the House settlement helps BYU.

BYU’s partial share of Big 12 revenues last year totaled $19 million. Its full share for the 2025-26 school year is expected to be at least $31.7 million, according to the Big 12.

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“We had a good TV contract for an independent university for football with ESPN,” Vorkink said, “but it still pales in comparison to what we get by being a part of the Big 12.”

That additional $13 million the university will receive from the conference this year will go a long way toward funding BYU’s commitment to participate in sharing nearly the full $20.5 million in revenue with its student-athletes under the House settlement.

“We’re going to use new Big 12 revenues,” Vorkink said. “One of the benefits of not being a full-share Big 12 school is that we’ve been operating on a budget that anticipates less than a full share. So going into a full share now really helps us because that is money we had not already earmarked to something else.”

For many other schools, even the football titans, fans will bear much of the cost for revenue sharing with players. Many schools are raising the cost of tickets and concessions. Tennessee added a “talent fee” to the price of tickets. Clemson is the first school to add an athletic surcharge — $150 — to every student’s tuition bill, the Associated Press reported.

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“We’ll generate some additional revenue from ticket price increases — not massive, but some,“ Vorkink said. ”And then we anticipate increases in corporate sponsorships. The combination of those will get us to wherever our rev share number ends up.”

The University of Utah is focusing on fundraising and increasing donations as the major factors for raising money to fund revenue sharing. The school announced in April it would drop its beach volleyball program.

“We are all-in on investing up to the maximum allowable in revenue share, which is approximately $20.5 million for 2025-26,” Utah athletic director Mark Harlan said in June.

How BYU ranks nationally and in the Big 12

The House settlement cleared the way for one of the biggest disruptions in college sports history. The NCAA was built more than a century ago on the principle that student-athletes had to be amateurs.

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That once seemed engraved in marble, but changes have chipped away at amateurism for decades. For example, BYU fans will remember how a new rule allowed Danny Ainge to play professional baseball at the same time he starred as an amateur for the Cougar basketball team more than four decades ago.

Now schools are beginning to make direct payments to student-athletes under the revenue-sharing portion of the House settlement. That $20.5 million annual cap on those payments is derived by a formula: The cap equals 22% of the average amount of certain athletic revenues at the top 70 schools.

Do the math, and that means the average of those specific athletics revenues at P4 schools is $93.2 million.

“We’re in that neighborhood,” Vorkink said of BYU.

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But an average is just that. He said some schools take in two to three times that much revenue. Some take in much less.

Don’t mistake that number for the actual size of the full athletics budget at BYU or any other P4 school, because the House revenue-sharing formula doesn’t call for sharing donations made by boosters, for example.

The BYU athletic department also is well-positioned in today’s financial climate because it does not go into debt to build facilities or fund sports, Vorkink said.

The growth of BYU’s budget

Moody, the senior associate AD, said BYU’s athletics budget has grown by 40% to 50% over the past three years.

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Vorkink and Moody said the budget has doubled from what it was somewhere between five and 10 years ago.

“We’re getting Big 12-type television revenue, and our donors and sponsors have responded,” Moody said.

Moody says BYU is now on equal footing with its Big 12 peers.

“We’ll be in a very good position going forward against our competition in the Big 12, from a budget perspective. Our donations are comparable, our ticket sales, our sponsorships, and the TV money of course is similar because we all are receiving the same amount now.”

BYU’s chief revenue streams for sports are the Big 12 media contract, ticket sales, donations, corporate sponsorships and the Big 12’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament revenue, Vorkink said.

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“The athletics budget has increased considerably over the last 20 years, but it’s even more pronounced since the announcement of joining the Big 12,” he said. “In addition to the revenues that come directly from the conference, we get more now from ticket sales and from corporate sponsors. Everything’s come up because the game sort of changed.”

Fans are willing to pay more for tickets to much better home football and basketball games because the quality of BYU’s schedule improved dramatically.

“Now LaVell Edwards Stadium is generating more revenue for a football game, the Marriott Center is generating more revenue for a basketball game, and we’re getting donors and corporate sponsors that want to be a part of this at levels they didn’t before,” Vorkink said.

What will BYU share with student-athletes?

BYU’s revenue-sharing plans call for spending close to the $20.5 million cap.

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“There is a race for most schools to be at the cap,” Vorkink said. “We’re going to be a little under the cap, if nothing else for philosophical reasons. We don’t want our strategy to be about money and transactional. We want to be in the game but not at the top.”

The House settlement will divide backpay to student-athletes under a formula that will provide about 75% of the damages to football players because that sport generates most of the athletics revenue at most schools. Another 15-20% is earmarked for men’s basketball players with 5-10% reserved for women’s basketball players. Whatever is left would go to Olympic and non-revenue sports.

Most schools are expected to follow that formula for revenue sharing.

“Most institutions will distribute the revenue sharing according to the proportion of revenue the sports generate, which means that football will get the lion’s share,” Reese said. “We’re going to take an approach that has some of that flavor, but also distributes it so that all scholarship athletes will get some support from the university.”

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Reese and Vorkink described five buckets of student-athlete compensation:

• The House settlement revenue share.

• Third-party NIL, which as its name indicates, does not involve BYU or its boosters.

• Alston payments, which are a new, additional form of education-related financial awards.

• Associated-entity NIL, which now must truly reflect fair compensation related to market value.

Let’s look into how each of these work through the prism of BYU’s top basketball recruit, AJ Dybantsa. It’s important to first understand that NIL in 2025 is much different than it has been the past few years.

BYU will fold much of what players had been receiving via NIL payments into revenue sharing payments, Vorkink said. It also will provide scholarships and Alston payments to student-athletes and be involved in associated-entity NIL, Reese and Vorkink said.

“All student-athletes will get some support from the university,” Reese said.

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Here’s a look at what those payments will be, how they are changing and how BYU will juggle them, as well as how the process fits the school’s mission and philosophy, all through the lens of a player making the most of this new era.

BYU and AJ Dybantsa

Many college sports fans are still trying to understand NIL, which has rattled college sports since those payments began in 2021.

Dybantsa, who is expected to be a top pick in next year’s NBA draft, is a good example. Some outlets incorrectly reported that BYU’s incoming freshman basketball star received $7 million in NIL to play for the school. The Athletic reported in January that it was closer to $5 million.

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BYU will never bring in student-athletes who only care about the highest bid, Reese and Vorkink said.

They rebutted narratives that BYU is outbidding everyone else for big-time players like Dybantsa.

“That’s not true, and it’s particularly not true in high-profile cases,” Vorkink said.

Alabama and North Carolina at least matched BYU’s offer, the Athletic reported.

“We’ve got to be competitive. We’ve got to be in the game,” Reese said, “but we can’t be the highest bidder.” Reese and Vorkink said they want BYU to find players who find a mutual fit at the school.

Egor Demin, who played for BYU last season and was selected No. 8 in the NBA draft, said he chose to play for the Cougars in part because he had turned to faith as a lonely teenager playing professionally for Real Madrid in Spain. BYU proved perfect for him.

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Dybantsa said he chose BYU because he loved the idea of a school with fewer “distractions.”

“We want people to come here because they see value added,” Reese said. “There are some players that come because they see us as a distraction-free environment, and I think that’s a good reason to come. There are players that come here because they think that they’ll be made a better person, they’ll be strengthened.”

The two university leaders also addressed unfounded narratives that the church is funding payments to players or the athletic department.

“There are zero dollars that come from church appropriation to the athletic department,” Vorkink said.

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“Since the athletic department was formed until today, for the entirety of our athletic department’s existence, no church funds have ever been spent on athletics,” Reese said.

“That’s true for the operational budget of the athletics department. It’s true for the facilities of the athletics department. It’s true for the NIL now. No church funds are spent on that,” he said. “It’s been our stance from the dawn of time. I never know where that narrative gets its legs, but there’s no question that nothing is further from the truth. We spend zero dollars on athletics that are church/tithing dollars.”

A dramatic change to NIL

The House settlement was a new earthquake for NIL.

“The settlement really wanted to go after the wild west of collectives,” Vorkink said of the organizations that sprang after the court ruling that created NIL payments. The collectives brokered payments to student-athletes supposedly related to marketing deals.

The House settlement’s solution to that unregulated market was to create a College Sports Commission to monitor revenue-sharing payments and NIL Go to police NIL payments. NIL Go may sound like a green light, but it really is a red light for unregulated payments — think NIL governance. Decisions will be made by the accounting firm Deloitte.

Dybantsa is an NIL leviathan and the perfect example of third-party NIL. He had a deal with Red Bull by the time he was a junior in high school. The company bought in early on the talent that makes him a possible No. 1 pick in next year’s NBA draft.

Third-party NIL like that is the natural outgrowth of a student-athlete’s popularity that leads to a company making a deal for the athlete to sponsor its products. It had nothing to do with his recruiting.

His latest contract is with Fanatics, signed last week just days after he was the MVP of the FIBA under-19 World Cup tournament, where he won a gold medal with Team USA.

As part of the deal, Dybantsa’s name and image will appear on special Topps basketball cards and he will earn money from jersey sales and other memorabilia. Fanatics, which has deals with the NBA’s last two No. 1 picks — Victor Wembanyama and Cooper Flagg — called it one of the company’s “most significant NIL deals ever.”

One outlet declared that Dybantsa’s deal with Fanatics/Topps “puts Dybantsa alongside global superstars like Lionel Messi and Shohei Ohtani.”

The third-party aspect of the deal meant it did not involve BYU or its NIL collective.

In fact, the Royal Blue Collective, the outfit that was arranging deals between businesses and BYU players, will largely go away if it doesn’t completely shut down as BYU folds most of its previous NIL activity into revenue sharing, Vorkink said. The majority of other collectives are also expected to go away as the payment landscape has moved in the new direction.

Associated-entity NIL deals are between a business with a tie to a university and one of its athletes. NIL Go is intended to review every deal over $600 to ensure that it doesn’t exceed “the fair range of compensation” related to market value, Moody said.

For example, Mountain America Credit Union is a longtime BYU sponsor. If it wanted a men’s basketball player to be the face of the credit union’s ads, it could enter an agreement to pay him, Vorkink said. Then that deal would go to the College Sports Commission and NIL Go.

“They will evaluate whether the amount represents fair market value,” Vorkink said.

Theoretically, NIL Go will reject payments beyond that value, and the wild west will have a marshal with a real spine.

“Everyone will be watching to see if the CSC has teeth,” Vorkink said. “If (for example) Mountain America sends in a contract to pay a player $10 million, the ruling should come back and say, ‘That’s way over market value.’”

The AJ Dybantsa deal

This is what the five revenue buckets will look like for Dybantsa.

BYU will make revenue-sharing payments to Dybantsa under the House rules. The NIL deals he signed with BYU’s collective before the House settlement went into effect will be grandfathered in. He will benefit from additional third-party NIL deals like the one with Fanatics. He could sign associated-entity NIL deals. He will receive a scholarship to cover tuition and room and board.

Finally, he will receive an Alston stipend from BYU.

Alston payments are named for another case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA had improperly restricted college athletes from receiving non-cash, academic-related compensation, such as laptops and internships.

Since that ruling in 2021, BYU and other schools have been allowed to provide annual benefits worth up to $5,980 to each student-athlete.

Many schools are abandoning Alston and will simply use revenue sharing to attract athletes, Vorkink and Moody said.

BYU remains all-in on Alston for important reasons.

A unique way BYU helps student-athletes

“We’re actually going to use this still as a tool, because under Alston we can tie things to our mission,” Vorkink said. “We’ll enhance up to the max of Alston payments for student-athletes around an academic piece, around a dress and grooming standards piece, around a career development piece. We’re going to still use this because it allows us to be distinctive.”

Reese also likes the idea of incentives for players centered on academics and the university’s mission.

“Those are principles we’ve tried to impute into our program,” he said.

GPA and progress toward graduation are part of the formula, Moody said.

“We even put a little bit of that award aside into an escrow account, so upon graduation they get the balance of what they earned,” he said.

A BYU athlete like football wide receiver Chase Roberts, then, may get bank deposits throughout the year.

Alston payments arrive on a semester basis, while room and board may come monthly. Scholarship funds will show up at the front end of a semester. Revenue sharing could come in three or more payments, at the beginning of a season, midseason or at the end, Moody said.

The bottom line for BYU is that, even though athletic departments now will pay student-athletes directly, the new rules hold promise for leveling the playing field, school leaders said.

“I think it’s going to be a strategic advantage for BYU,” athletic director Brian Santiago told BYUtv.