Bob Bowlsby is ‘really concerned’ about future of Olympic sports at college level

CORALVILLE — As the national collegiate athletics landscape continues to shift in the coming years, Bob Bowlsby is “really concerned” about the future of Olympic nonrevenue sports.

“I think what you’re going to see is the movement of more and more resources into football, men’s and women’s basketball and a few selected other sports,” said Bowlsby, the former Big 12 commissioner and Northern Iowa’s current interim athletics director, at a panel discussion hosted by the Iowa City Area Sports Commission.

Bowlsby expects that to be at the expense of the rest of the intercollegiate teams on campus.

“First you will see the decline of the men’s Olympic sports along funding lines,” Bowlsby said. “And then eventually — once the men’s side is cleared out and we have 12 sports on the women’s side and four sports on the men’s side — you’ll see the decline of women’s Olympic sports too.”

If Bowlsby’s forecast proves to be correct, it could affect each school differently. What counts as a revenue sport — or at least an Olympic sport that does not lose as much money — can vary from school to school.

“This isn’t a place where wrestling is ever going to go away, but there will be places where institutions just can’t afford to support wrestling anymore,” Bowlsby said in Coralville. “When you lose wrestling programs or gymnastics programs or tennis or swimming programs, the entire enterprise suffers as a result of that.”

The ongoing era of changes in collegiate athletics accelerated with athletes’ ability to profit off name, image and likeness, which started in 2021, and the proliferation of the transfer portal in recent years. Those changes — ones that others in collegiate athletics have celebrated as a “much-needed shift” in power from coaches to athletes — are highly unlikely to be undone because of various legal obstacles.

NIL and transfer portal changes also might be simply the opening act for what’s to come in collegiate athletics.

The Johnson v. NCAA court case could open the door for athletes to be considered employees of the university while the House v. NCAA case could open the door for revenue-sharing with athletes. Other legal challenges continue to arise, including one filed last week by the attorneys general in Tennessee and Virginia against the NCAA.

Bowlsby made specific mention of Grant House, a former Arizona State swimmer who is one of the plaintiffs in the House v. NCAA case.

“Nobody told this kid that he’s probably going to drive the diminishment of the number of swimming programs across the country,” Bowlsby said. “There are going to be places that just say, ‘We’re not going to do it anymore.’”

Collegiate athletics leaders, including Bowlsby during his tenure as Big 12 commissioner, have long lobbied for Congressional action to protect the NCAA from antitrust laws.

“I spent a lot of time in Washington trying to help people understand what it is that we’re up against,” Bowlsby said. “What I learned was that we’re not always dealing with the best and brightest in terms of the folks we’ve sent to Washington. … It is very difficult to get people to listen.”

It also does not help that higher education is, as Bowlsby described it, “under extreme pressure.” The relationship between universities and state legislatures are “going to be threadbare in some places.”

“There’s a commonly held belief in the legislature that we’re teaching nothing but political ideology and indoctrination on campus,” Bowlsby said.

As much as collegiate athletics is facing an “enormously complex” situation, Bowlsby has some optimism about things working out in the long run.

“Intercollegiate athletics and higher education has a way of finding its equilibrium,” Bowlsby said. “I think we will find equilibrium. Is it going to go back to where it was before or anything that really looks like it? I doubt it.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com