CLEVELAND — During Friday’s second round of the 25th Mid-American Conference (MAC) Basketball Tournament in Cleveland, Ohio, MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher completed his annual media ‘roundtable’ and took questions.

I was at last year’s edition and was back for more as the conference’s leader took the stand. During the press conference, he fielded questions about a few different topics. But the two biggest things he spoke about were funding and the transfer portal.

Here are my thoughts.

Funding

After Ball State men’s basketball final game against Miami March xxx, Cardinals’ head coach Michael Lewis shared his thoughts on the funding the program receives from the university.

“In today's landscape of college basketball, your commitment to your program has to match the expectations, and there's nobody on our campus at Ball State, or should there be, where the expectations are higher than the men's basketball program,” Lewis said.

During the presser, I asked Steinbrecher if he thought this was a Ball State issue or if this was something programs have seen across the MAC. His answer was short and direct.

"I won't speak to whatever Michael said. I would say all of our directors of athletics and everyone involved in their athletics’ program are focused on how they fund their programs."

While the question of funding is something a commissioner or boss most likely doesn’t like to discuss, I believe that was the case here. Why would he? It’s not his fault if Ball State doesn’t get the funding like other MAC schools might get.

Yet, funding did come up once again. This time it was prompted by a question about revenue sharing. According to ESPN, it was announced Monday, March 12, the American Athletic Conference will require all schools, besides Army and Navy, to set at least $10 million for student athletes over the next three years.

It’s the only league to set a minimum as revenue sharing is becoming more popular and is expected to begin across all Division I programs in July.

“I spent several hours in a meeting with athletics directors yesterday morning to spend time talking about how they're all involved in that and [how they’re] figuring it out,” he said. “And there's what I'll call, how do you generate or develop revenue sources to fund that? That's one issue. Set that aside. The other issues are the mechanical issues [like] how do you manage that?”

Steinbrecher hopes the NCAA will begin to set up ‘guardrails’ to help ease the tension across the funding landscape. But even he knows that it’s only ‘one step’ if that was to occur.

“A lot of it will have to be done through the federal government. We need help from Congress,” Steinbrecher said. “We need a definition around what are student athletes? Are they student employees? Are they something in between? We got to get some definition around that.”

“We need a single, NIL standard that is a national standard and a federal standard that preempts all of these individual state laws … I've said this before. It's hard to do national championships without a national set of rules. We've got to figure out how to get back to how we can have some rules without being sued for an antitrust violation every time we do that.”

The transfer portal

The transfer portal has been here for years and it’s not going anywhere. Yes, it’s not uncommon for an athlete to transfer multiple times. Hell, there have been cases of athletes playing for two or three times throughout their careers.

It’s common now.

However, Steinbrecher thinks there are bigger fish to fry than just athletics.

“There's a number of student athletes that are getting some financial opportunities, and that's good for them, and I hope they learn to manage that well,” he said. “They can take advantage of it and those unique opportunities. But we're seemingly doing it at the expense of the educational outcomes.”

Steinbrecher went on to say that due to the number of times a player can transfer, it hinders their opportunity to graduate college.

“That's what we're here for, first and foremost,” he said. And so put a pin in the calendar. Four years out, five years out, and let's look at where we are on graduation rates and other educational outcomes. And if we've fallen off the cliff, that pendulum is going to swing back.”

When he said that, it made me think. Hell, I’m a 21-year-old college student. If I decided to switch different schools every year, that’s a brand new set of things I’d have to think about. Honestly, I don’t want to imagine it.

But whatever the answer is to finding ways — and I’m all for this — to control the rate and make it fair for every institution, it will take everyone. Not just the NCAA.

“You hear a complaint from people in Congress [because] they don't like the idea that people are moving every other year, right?” Steinbrecher said. “That drives them up a wall. I get it. You need to have a history lesson. Walk through how we got there and say, ‘Okay, how do you want to help us [or] perhaps manage that differently?’ We need the student athletes to engage in that conversation as well.”

Contact Zach Carter via email at zachary.carter@bsu.edu or via X @ZachCarter85.

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