RandBall: This is the week major college sports became professional sports

It would be naive to say major college sports have retained their aura of pure amateurism without creeping toward professionalism in recent decades.

TV contracts have ballooned. Coaches’ salaries have swelled. The whole production of college sports has felt more professional. Name, image and likeness (NIL) has been a game-changer that puts money in athletes’ pockets.

At any of those points along the way, you might have felt like college sports crossed a threshold. But for me, the real tipping point was the approval of the House settlement that authorizes actual revenue-sharing for athletes.

Straight payments from schools to athletes — up to $20.5 million per school this year — are different from anything else that has come before.

Better players on revenue-generating teams will earn considerable six-figure salaries. Administrators will manage the money in a way similar to how a pro team manages a salary cap.

Tuesday was the first day those payments could be made to athletes.

This is where the rubber hits the road — or, more specifically, where the money hits the bank accounts.

Major college sports are pro sports, as Chip Scoggins and I talked about on Wednesday’s “Daily Delivery” podcast.

As Chip reported earlier this week, the Gophers will divvy up that $20.5 million this year among five programs: football, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball and men’s hockey. Football will likely get the vast majority (roughly 75%) in Year 1.

What does all of this mean? To me, it’s a mixed bag, but these are my biggest takeaways.

The good: College athletes are finally getting a fair share of the vast wealth they create. It simply was not fair that coaches and administrators were making millions of dollars as revenues ballooned while athletes were getting the same thing they had received for decades: a college education (plus some food, though not cream cheese on their bagels for a long time). That’s valuable, of course, but the money just wasn’t equitably distributed.

The bad: If you’ve believed in the sanctity and purity of college sports as a main reason for their appeal, that is gone. It also feels like we skipped a step or two between “college athletes should get some money” and “college athletes are going to be paid upper-middle-class salaries as teenagers.”

The unknowns: I wonder if the inequity of pay between athletes on individual teams and the inequity of some programs getting a cut of the revenue while others don’t will create jealousy and infighting. I’m also queasy about the trickle-down impact on high school and youth sports. Intense competition, training and specialization are already all too common as parents push their kids to earn valuable scholarships. What happens when you add the potential to earn more than a million dollars over the course of a college career?

We won’t know that answer for a while. We do know that this week is the start of a massive change.

Here are nine more things to know today: