Pat Chun’s only been on the job at Washington for six months, but the college sports world has changed plenty.
Chun, for one, jumped from one side of the Apple Cup to the other. The potential House settlement, too, remains in flux after Judge Claudia Wilken voiced concerns over restrictions on third-party NIL collectives, among other pieces to the proposal.
Still, Chun and the Washington athletic department are preparing for a world where revenue sharing becomes a reality.
“The nice thing for me is I started at the end of March, and the discussion [around] revenue share started happening a couple weeks after that,” Chun said. “That kind of forces all of the niceties to go away, because we needed to come up with some real solutions. In terms of just trying to get to know an athletic department better, nothing helps build relationships and trust like when you have real problems to solve.”
Washington’s financial situation is certainly less murky than its cross-state rival these days. The school is expected to receive a half-share of the standard Big Ten membership distribution, which still should significantly outpace what Washington would’ve received in the Pac-12 media deal with Apple that was proposed by George Kliavkoff prior to the conference’s functional dissolution.
Smaller cut of the pie aside, the Huskies, too, have shown they can be competitive at the highest levels in revenue generation. Washington’s $145.1 million in total revenue ranked 25th nationally among schools with publicly available financial records during the 2023 fiscal year, per USA Today’s college athletic department financial database. That would’ve ranked ninth among Big Ten schools last year but within about $6 million of Iowa, which slotted sixth in the conference.
Washington has seen its share of turnover in the last two years between a conference move, a new AD and a change in football coaches from Kalen DeBoer -- who left to replace Nick Saban at Alabama -- to Jedd Fisch. But if history serves as a reminder, the Huskies should be competitive quickly in their new home.
“I remind everyone we're in the Big Ten and the Big Ten and Washington have always been at the highest levels of benefits and services for student athletes,” Chun told SBJ when asked how much UW might contribute toward revenue sharing. “That will not change.”
