more money and free grad school and 6 extra years of healthcare. I'd imagine most if not all schools will have budget shortfalls this year due to COVID. Where is the extra money going to come from?

Some departments are barely surviving, they can't even meet them somewhere in the middle, they are already cutting sports and shaving admin costs.

And keeping other sports alive does cost the schools more money. In addition to cutting into the share of the football and basketball players, they still have to pay for travel, coaches, tutors, food, healthcare, admin and other facilities for the other sports.

I don't see how you could look at Cal's athletic budget and see how a school that had a $20m loss in 2019 (after the main campus took on $10m/year of their debt payment) can support millions in additional expenditures.

Pay to play is extremely problematic if the pay is coming from the universities, the legal complications of making all the players employees would be extraordinary and lead to added costs to the universities and decreased benefits to players now that they get to pay taxes.

NIL legislation (which is a form of pay to play) makes sense. Players can profit off their own brand and revenues going to universities will likely be diverted to the players in form of sponsorships. Teams no longer need to spend as much on facilities and coaches because outside sponsorships from boosters will do more recruiting than facilities and coaches. This will also lead to schools cutting sports as their revenue is directed towards the players who are actually generating revenue.

Pro leagues are not a good comparison, they make way more money and although their non-player expenses are higher, they are not proportional to the amount of revenue they earn in comparison with college sports.

If you take just the national TV contract share of each NFL team (take out ticket sales, sponsorships, and local TV deals) it is more than the entire revenue of the highest grossing athletic department (Texas) which has to finance a football team and 19 other sports teams (17 of which are not profitable). They are not a good comparison. The Lakers do about $400 million/year in revenue and just have to finance a basketball team.

The industry standard for the major sports league does not compare to the NCAA, you are talking about 18-22y/os who are in the top 1% of athletes their age vs. the .0001% of athletes who are being part of more profitable league for years and getting revenue sharing (Which MLB does not even get). And by the way the young players in all three of those leagues have significant caps on their compensation until they have been in those leagues for 4-5 years. Rookies who are mostly older and all better than NCAA athletes are not getting a very high percentage of the 48% and 50% revenue pots in the NBA and NFL.

Most people who know how to negotiate start with high but reasonable demands after doing homework, not demands that won't even bring anyone to the negotiating table. If they want social justice initiatives and COVID protocols, I'm sure schools would talk about all that for PR. They aren't going to come and talk about these demands, many of which the conference can't even meet under current NCAA rules.