(The Center Square) – University of Wisconsin-Madison Athletics Director Chris McIntosh is leaving the school less than a week after a name, image and likeness bill was signed into law by Gov. Tony Evers that will send $15 million annually to the athletic department along with creating a broad public records exemption for any spending or revenue.
McIntosh will join the Big Ten Conference office May 1 as the deputy commissioner for strategy, the conference announced onMonday.
McIntosh pushed the bill as necessary to save women’s and Olympic sports at the university. While lawmakers said that 32 states had NIL state laws in place, no other public university has a sweeping exemption to public records like the Wisconsin law and no other state has passed a bill that would send $15 million of general taxpayer money annually a public university related to NIL.
“In the event that this legislation is not passed, we will be forced to reconcile our revenues with our liabilities, like we always have,” McIntosh told a Senate committee. “And that will come through a series of painful reductions, further emphasis on increasing our revenues.
“And, what I fear is, that through those reductions in support of our sport programs, all of our sport programs, all 23 of our sport programs, we’ll be left in a situation in which it will be difficult to say the least, for us to be competitive in the sports that generate in excess of 80% of the revenues. And it will also be difficult to be competitive.”
Part of the argument from McIntosh and lawmakers supporting the bill came from a report from a 2022 marketing report from eConsult Solutions that claimed each UW-Madison football game brings $19 million of economic impact to Dane County.
A later report from UW-Madison’s CROWE Center for Research said that continued losing by the football program could cost the athletic department $20 million in profit, but that report also cited and relied upon the numbers from eConsult Solutions.
The type of hired marketing reports that eConsult Solutions provides are consistently rejected by sports economists who point out the flaws in the math used and how they do not factor in items such as diverted spending, crowding out effects and the costs related to large events and facilities.
Sports teams and athletic programs then use those marketing reports to justify public spending, the UW-Madison athletics officials are doing with AB 1034, which does not have a fiscal estimate attached yet.
UW-Madison athletics operated with a $4.3 million surplus in its most recent annual NCAA financial report covering the financial year that ended in June 2025.
Athletic department officials told the Assembly Committee on State Affairs on Wednesday that football is responsible for 80% of the athletic department’s revenue. That was $113.6 million last fiscal year, according to the NCAA report, which showed the football program brought in $72 million in excess during the year.
