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Tennessee football's 10 percent talent fee is sparking debate about how many schools and sports will follow suit

By GARY B. GRAVES AP Sports Writer

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — The quiet part about the evolving landscape of name, image and likeness compensation in college athletics needed to be said out loud, and it wasn't all that shocking when the Tennessee athletic department stepped forward and released its collective Throat and stated the obvious.

It's been a week since the school announced a 10% “talent fee” on football season ticket renewals for 2025 to help pay its athletes and help the No. 5 Vols attract and recruit top talent hold. This is on top of a 4.5% increase, which, as athletic director Danny White explained in a video, helps the program “remain flexible” as the college model changes.

The price hike could be seen as a preventive measure following a 2016 agreement to pay $2.78 billion in damages to hundreds of thousands of athletes. As part of that settlement, the schools agreed to distribute up to $21 million in earnings annually to athletes. from the beginning of next autumn.

Some schools are anticipating all of this will put a strain on their budgets and have already implemented ticket price increases. Tennessee might be the first to mention a deal specifically for talent, as the bidding wars for top players are obviously what they are.

“I can’t imagine they’ll be the only ones to announce something like this,” Louisville AD Josh Heird told The Associated Press. “It's just a question of how do you as an athletic department think you can get out of that revenue share number to try to compensate the student-athletes at the highest level possible?”

The NCAA opened the door to NIL payments to athletes in July 2021, leading to the emergence of so-called funder-funded collectives around many programs separate from school athletic departments. It is still too early to predict where the collectives will end up, but regulating them is an important part of the solution.

As far as talent fees are concerned, the question is whether season ticket holders will accept paying an additional surcharge in addition to the processing and convenience fees that are added to the face value. The same goes for the single game spectator who is thinking about what the ticket price will be.

Judging by the announcement from Tennessee, where the 101,915-seat Neyland Stadium is consistently sold out for Vols home games and thousands more are on the waiting list, it suggests that will be the case. And the school likely has plenty of company in football powerhouses like Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State and Texas, for example.

But that fan acceptance also raises the high expectations of hoisting the national championship trophy or at least making regular appearances in the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff. Not that any of these schools have any problems understanding the task.

“Given the landscape of college athletics and today's economy, I think most fans at the power conference schools will probably be okay with a small talent fee or tax like we're seeing here because they field competitive teams want,” said Lamar Reams, department head and professor of sports administration at Ohio University.

“For fans, this is a very concrete and transparent tax that they know they can contribute to. So if there is some success on the field and in the future, they can certainly consider that they contributed or played a role in that.”

Reams noted that such fees may not be acceptable to fans of a school with less football success or tradition. And those who are initially willing to pay may eventually shy away from it if the results on the field or on the field fail to provide a return on the investment.

Given the huge disparity between athletic scholarship awards and revenue sports coaching salaries at many Power Four schools, Craig Morehead, an associate professor at Indiana State University, wouldn't be shocked if talent fees became more common.

“They are looking for new sources of revenue to cover what they see as new expenses rather than reallocating existing resources,” said Morehead, who teaches in ISU’s Department of Kinesiology, Recreation and Physical Education.

Talent fees could also become an option at smaller Division I schools with strong football or basketball traditions. San Diego State athletic director JD Wicker echoed Reams' belief that sometimes making fans feel more invested in the team's success can be a positive thing.

“If (Tennessee) is in the days of Jeremy Pruitt, you probably won’t do it,” Wicker said, referring to the former Vols coach. “But when you’re one of the top six in the country and you go to Oklahoma and you’ve had a lot of success, it’s a lot easier.”

And as college sports prepare for revenue sharing, Wicker noted, “People are getting creative.”

The Associated Press contributed to this article.