GUEST POST: Forget roster limits. It's time to bring back JV teams.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Today, I’m happy to turn the time over to my friend, Dr. Victoria Jackson of Arizona State. Dr. Jackson isn’t just a sports historian, she’s also been a tireless advocate for college athletes and higher education.

Last week, she reached out to me with an idea on how to potentially help preserve many athletic opportunities, particularly in her beloved track and cross-country. Bring back JV teams.

Her remarks are below:

As an educator, historian, and track and field person, it is my professional opinion that setting roster limits in college cross-country and track and field is stupid. Seriously.

Placing a cap to restrict a school’s XC and T&F participants hurts the school, hurts the sport, hurts U.S. Olympic and Paralympic development, and, most importantly, hurts young people who are in college, transitioning from high school to college, or considering college. 

At the same time, I understand that under the current big-time college sports business approach (the one in which schools work to maximize football revenues to outspend their peers on football and pay for – mostly – everything else), fielding large college XC and T&F rosters is expensive.

I absolutely understand why the schools in the power conferences (and subject to the House settlement conditions) are going to need to make seismic changes to the ways that they have been doing business now that a sizeable chunk of those revenues will be shared with (mostly) football players. I have long argued that more football money should be staying with the football athletes who are earning it and that we – the American public – never should have permitted a system to develop in which college football players have been paying for other American athletes’ college experiences and Olympic dreams. I’ve done this in op-eds, magazine longreads, white papers, and testimony before Congress.

I’ve also been trying to rattle my track and field people into action. In the same types of media and policy venues, I’ve warned that we have been living large, especially in the past quarter-century, on a resource-rich system we did not build and that we need to figure out how to sell the value of our sport and identify new subsidization streams. (I’ve been dreaming up ideas too, like allocating the federal excise tax on sports betting to subsidize college Olympic sports and building public-private community sports partnerships to make facilities publicly available and partially taxpayer funded.) 

Because once schools begin sharing revenue with football players — something that I believe will eventually drag top-of-pyramid college football into a fully professionalized business model (whether that means football is spun off or something else) — other college sports will need to advocate for themselves and also take care of themselves.

But let’s get back to the (yes, stupid) roster limits. The caps set by the House settlement of 17 for cross-country and 45 for track and field – numbers that are quite low! – need not be the final word on participation opportunities in our sport.

Hear me out on this: Bring back JV teams.  

Want to read the rest of the newsletter? Subscribe today!