IN; Scott Dolson announcement retirement and departure from Indiana Hoosiers basketball athletics director…..
IN; Scott Dolson announcement retirement and departure from Indiana Hoosiers basketball athletics director…..
Indiana Athletic Director Scott Dolson Discusses Big Ten Media Deal, Approach to NIL
In an opening statement, Dolson addressed the Big Ten conference’s new media rights deal that is projected to be worth over $7 billion across seven years.
“It’s going to be incredible with media rights in terms of our brand and the exposure for our students athletes in our programs,” Dolson said. “The financial impact will be significant, and it is critical, but quite frankly it’s one of those things that don’t believe everything you read. It’s going to be good, but it’s going to take some time to ramp up. I’m not saying anything to minimize the deal, but what I’ve had to do is make certain that particularly internally people understand that there’s going to take some time. Those deals are generally backloaded. We’ve got a lot to sort out before we really start to alter budgets or anything like that, but again, it’s a tremendous deal. We’ve done a lot of managing expectations on that end. From our media partner standpoint, really excited with, again, the vision that Commissioner [Kevin] Warren had with that deal, making certain that we really still have the linear networks that we’re partnering with in terms of FOX and CBS and now adding NBC and then certainly our partnership with BTN.”
When asked if the new media rights deal will lead to any facilities upgrades or budget expansion, Dolson said the deal is backloaded and a lot of details are still to come. He also noted a student-athlete scholarship that was announced this summer.
“The reality is that the way things are changing and the way that our budget is just – like many of your budgets are increasing, I feel like we’ve already kind of spent it in a way,” Dolson said. “We announced this summer the Alston Award, which is an academic award that we’ll award to any student-athlete who qualifies for it this year, and that’s about a $3 million hit to our budget, so in a way, as the media rights details come out and as that grows over time, I feel like that will allow us to really keep pace and to be able to do things we need to do to support our student-athletes, but I really don’t look at it as a real windfall. The staff that are here, they were at our all-staff meeting this past Wednesday, that was part of my message was, because what you just asked or I think what a lot of people started thinking is that it’s going to be a huge uptick at one time, and again, it’s a steady stream over time, mainly backloaded, and again, a lot of that is already taken into consideration in what we’re planning for the future to support our student-athletes.”
