Since March Madness ended in early April, college sports talk has been dominated by stories of big-money promises to recruits and videos of Longhorns in Lamborghinis. Big Ten football media days on Tuesday and Wednesday in Indianapolis, should be something of a respite.

Instead of reading almost exclusively about the vague intricacies of name, likeness and image collectives, the vertical integration of conferences and how the NCAA will pay former athletes $2.8 billion over the next 10 years, Tuesday’s news will at least be peppered with familiar terms such as “depth chart,” “bell cow” and “undisclosed injury.”

It will be, as former President Warren G. Harding promised in his 1920 election slogan, “A return to normalcy.”

That, of course, didn’t last long. The “Roaring Twenties” might have been a blast, but they also were a little out of control, ultimately gifting us organized crime and a global economic collapse. But it was fun while it lasted, which brings us back to college sports.

The playing field for college athletics is changing so quickly, and becoming so expensive, that David Carter, a sports business consultant and professor at Southern California, said many schools currently fielding Division I football and basketball teams may have to reconsider.

“These schools,” Carter said, “have to have a very sobering discussion about whether they want to continue to be in the business of big-time athletics and the costs associated with paying players.”

The trigger for those talks will be the settlement of a post-NIL antitrust lawsuit brought against the NCAA demanding back pay for athletes who were left out of NIL. The NCAA has agreed to a settlement of $2.8 billion, and schools are waiting on pins and needles to see whether it will be approved by Judge Claudia Wilken of the U.S. District Court for Northern California and plaintiff lawyers.

That is expected to be decided, and likely approved, before next year’s recruiting classes sign on the dotted line. Under terms of the settlement, individual schools will be responsible for paying 60 percent of that $2.8 billion over the next 10 years, and Power Five schools, including Minnesota, will be responsible for 40% of that. That’s not an insignificant expense, but it gets more challenging.

As part of the settlement as written, and agreed to by the NCAA, member schools will henceforth be allowed to share their revenue — mostly from television deals — with student-athletes. That’s not NIL money, it’s school money.

“The decades-long strategy of the NCAA was to lose these lawsuits as slowly as possible, and they largely succeeded kicking the can down the road,” Carter said. “Now schools have to decide, considering athletes rights are on the ascension, whether they have the desire or the willingness to invest in college sports.”

Is Minnesota one of these schools? Probably not.

While the Gophers’ competitive challenges in the Big Ten have grown significantly with this year’s addition of Oregon, UCLA, Southern Cal and Washington, they A) see an opportunity to compete on a playing field that, theoretically, allows them to spend as much money as Michigan and Ohio State, and B) need the Big Ten television money to field the 22 teams they sponsor. Dropping out of the Big Ten in, say, just football, for instance, is a non-starter.

Minnesota can’t afford to not keep trying to compete in football and basketball.

One issue there, of course, is that Minnesota — and its collective, Dinkytown Athletes — has a more difficult challenge than many of its competitors. There is more money in the Twin Cities than, say, Tuscaloosa, Ala., but with NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA and MLS teams in town, athletics dollars spent by citizens and businesses go to more places in Minnesota.

“Tuscaloosa is a company town, and the company is called Alabama football,” Carter said. “In other regions, that’s not the case. In Los Angeles, we have UCLA and USC, and they’re important, but Los Angeles is not a company town. There’s too much other stuff going on here.”

Sound familiar?

Also consider that Alabama fields only the NCAA-minimum 16 teams, which leaves more revenue for the athletes that drive big-time athletics. That’s a recruiting disadvantage for a school like Minnesota right now; it becomes more of a challenge if the lawsuit settlement includes future revenue sharing. And Minnesota is loath to cut more sports after cutting men’s tennis, gymnastics and indoor track and field in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That puts more of an onus on the collective — and, frankly, you, if you care a lot about how good Gophers athletics are — to raise money. It’s a challenge that not all schools will be able to overcome.

“It looks a lot like big-time college sports are becoming like big-time professional sports,” Carter said, “and what’s going to develop over the next few years is the equivalent of the big leagues and minor leagues, even in college — big, power teams that are branded, and then everybody else.”

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