NU Athletic Director Osborne says $2,000 NCAA-approved stipend conflicts with Title IX

Student athletes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will not receive the financial support of recent NCAA changes any time soon, according to Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne.

On the radio show "Sports Nightly" on Nov. 8, Osborne said it's a waiting game for the athletic department as administrators figure out how to implement the $2,000 student-athlete stipend approved by the NCAA Division I Board of Presidents on Oct. 27. The stipend would give full-scholarship athletes, as well as those on partial scholarship who receive institutional aid, up to $2,000 to cover living expenses outside of room, board, books, tuition and fees.

In the coming weeks and months, Osborne and other athletic department staff will have to decide the best way to distribute the stipend while adhering to Title IX, which would require aid distribution be proportional to the student-athlete population.

With 98 men and 47 women on full scholarship at UNL, Osborne said it's not as easy as cutting all full-grant and aid athletes a check.

"We can't give twice as many men a stipend as we do women," Osborne said, indicating that it would violate Title IX. "Therefore we would have to select 47 men out of 98 to give the $2,000 or we give every one of our 98 maybe a little less than $1,000."

But the situation the athletic department has found itself in is one few could have expected, according to Osborne and other athletic department officials.

"This is something that was unintended and was something no one had figured on," Osborne said.

Before the NCAA rule changes, talk circled about a prorated stipend, he said, where student athletes would receive a proportional amount of the stipend based on their athletic scholarship.

For example, a student athlete on a 50 percent scholarship would receive $1,000 of the $2,000 stipend, he said.

Osborne said the idea of a pro-rated stipend likely died because it would cover a larger percentage of the student-athlete population at each university and incur higher costs for athletic departments.

And like Osborne, Laure Ragoss said the stipend should be expanded.

"There's more than just the full grant and aid athletes that have living expenses," said Ragoss, the associate director of compliance.

Ragoss said she wishes the new rule did more to help the athletes not covered in the current legislation, who experience the same difficulty full-scholarship athletes do in covering miscellaneous expenses like transportation and groceries.

Stipend-coverage expansion could still happen, Osborne said, if other presidents and athletic directors open up those talks.

In the meantime, a recruit-signing period for every sport except track, cross-country, soccer, football and basketball has begun. Coaches have been instructed not to make any stipend-related promises at the request of Osborne.

When it comes to the stipend's implementation, Osborne said UNL will follow the most "affluent schools" and any guidelines the NCAA hands down.

Because the rule changes happened more quickly than expected, Ragoss said the evaluating process will wait until the athletic department figures out its approach to full stipend implementation, which is supposed to take effect in August 2012.

"We're all just waiting until the dust settles," she said.

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