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College amateur hour is dead. Long live the revenue-sharing arms race.  

Starting this fiscal year, colleges and universities are now able to directly pay their student athletes thanks to the so-called House settlement. The multibillion-dollar settlement ended three antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA that claimed the organization was limiting the earning power of college athletes. 

Along with the 2021 name, image and likeness changes that allowed players to be compensated by third parties for their personal brand, the House settlement is helping to address the historic exploitation of the talents of college athletes. CU Boulder made nearly $35 million in football ticket sales during the 2024 season — that’s not possible without these student-athletes. 

But for all the positives that NIL and the House settlement are bringing to college athletics, they have also opened a financial can of worms. Running an athletics department was already an expensive endeavor; now, if schools are keen to compete, they must rustle up tens of millions of dollars to pay their players. 

In other words, the cost of glory just got a lot more expensive. 

So, as we hurtle into this new frontier, CU Boulder must refrain from throwing caution to the wind. There may be money to be made and bowl games to win, but our state’s flagship university must remember that, first and foremost, its mission is one of education. 

Schools that opted into the House settlement’s revenue sharing can now spend up to $20.5 million paying athletes this year. That figure will increase annually by 4% until it hits $33 million in 2035. 

That $20.5 million cap is designed to prevent wild overspending by the richest schools in order to maintain the semblance of fair play. But there is no obligation for a school to spend that much paying its players. For its part, Colorado State University says it is going to ramp up to the cap. CU, though, is planning on going all in.  

For an athletic department that has run a deficit for five of the last seven years, that is a big ask. 

It is worth pausing here for a moment to make clear that CU’s revenue sharing will include all of its sports. The school’s revenue-sharing equation will align with how much revenue a given sport generates. As such, football is likely to get 77% of all revenue sharing money, with basketball claiming another 11%. 

So, while CU will be paying athletes from all sports, it is worth focusing specifically on the lucrative — but costly — football program. 

CU made its ambitions clear when it hired Deion “Prime” Sanders. His name brought record donations ($35 million in FY 2025) and a national spotlight. ESPN came to Boulder and the Buffs started playing in primetime games. That money and attention made it possible to make statement recruitments and bring some of the best players to Colorado, including Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter. 

But for a school striving to level up, this is a precarious balancing act. 

Right now, CU needs Prime to keep the money flowing and the recruits coming. And it needs star recruits who can help win games to keep Prime and the money. If CU can’t compete financially, the players could stop signing. If the best players stop signing or stop winning, Prime — and the spotlight he brings — could leave. (He will, of course, inevitably leave at some point, no matter how successful CU becomes.) 

Keeping all these plates spinning comes at a cost. Despite record donations and ticket sales, the CU athletic department required direct institutional support of $54.9 million over the last two years. Between 2017 and 2022, the department required just $49.3 million. The Prime Effect, for all the good it has done for CU, has been extremely expensive. 

The hope, of course, is that CU’s drastic increase in investment in the department will help the school level up so that it can compete with the best schools in the country — and make money. 

But for now, the House settlement has only added to the cost of staying competitive. 

For its part, the school says it is going to get creative to cover its new $20.5 million expenditure to pay athletes. 

“(That $20.5 million) will come from the different things that we do,” CU athletic director Rick George told the Denver Post, “like concert revenue, our multimedia rights partner, our conference distributions, our donors that support our program.”

Astroturf was installed at Folsom Field to make it easier to have concerts and events there. The school’s student athletic fee for undergraduates was tripled to $90. And, of course, there will be a push for more donations. 

What CU won’t do, according to George, is cut any sports. Nor will ticket prices see any “big increases.”

Whether or not the department will be able to cover this new expenditure without direct institutional support will likely tell us a lot about how CU’s journey into this new financial frontier will go. 

Naturally, we hope to see the school be able to fairly compensate its athletes, compete on the big stage, and become financially self-sustaining. Watching Buffs football compete these past two years has been a welcome reprieve from years spent in the wilderness of mediocrity. A winning team that can keep the limelight on CU and raise the school’s profile is ideal for everyone. Not only can success on the football field provide financial incentives, it can also drive school pride and give prospective students a little extra incentive to enroll. 

But the price of winning can be steep. And CU must approach this new frontier with reasonable expectations and responsible decision-making. Direct institutional support of athletics must have a limit — and CU must approach all decisions with its mission as an educational institution at the fore. 

We want to see the Buffs succeed as much as any fan. But more important than that, we want to see CU students succeed. That goal must remain top of mind, no matter how fierce the competition gets on the field. 

— Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board

You’re not supposed to cry on vacation, but what else can you do when you fear the boy will be killed by his abusive father? That’s when I switched over to falling in love with the rival author in the beach house next door. And spending time with the magical children who live on an island with a Phoenix for a guardian.

Related: The Book Club: Elizabeth Strout’s latest (an Oprah pick) and a Sherlock Holmes classic

I was on a reading retreat, and the only reason I know that phrase is because I’ve been seeing it everywhere this summer. Reading retreats, or book camps, are a hot travel trend, where friends or strangers get together somewhere beautiful and peaceful to read and bond over books. Except I wasn’t with a group on an organized retreat. I was completely alone, on my own self-imposed, two-day vacation from reality.

I needed a break. I’d had a summer of death, job loss and a brand-new sort of stress that somehow rivals the first two. I’d also had a summer of love, joy and an “American Pie” singalong with my kids in a California rental car that just might have been the best 8 minutes and 42 seconds of my life. Still, I think my summer scale tipped in the direction of the stressors, and after seeing Camp Unwritten, Reese’s Book Club’s glamping retreats, light up my Instagram, I decided I wanted in.

But Camp Unwritten was booked (no pun intended), not to mention a little out of my price range with the job loss and all. Which is how I got to Winter Park’s A-Frame Club, four books in hand, all by my lonesome.

How to do a reading retreat with yourself

Once I’d locked down my location — idyllic river/mountain/forest setting with all the comfortable amenities (read: in-room bathtub) I’d need — I planned the time. I was not going to rush down Interstate 70 on a Friday after work just to rush back to start working again. No, this was going to be a legit vacation. I booked Tuesday and Wednesday nights, smack dab in the middle of the week when I should have been working and child-rearing.

Next, I Googled what to do at book camp, but I didn’t get much help there because no matter how much I insisted that I truly meant book camp, Google wanted to fill me in on what to do at boot camp.

Before I left, I bought two books, and if you knew me and the anxiety I feel over my library hold list, you’d understand that this is an indulgence akin to staying at the Ritz-Carlton for a normal person. (My other two books were, indeed, library books, because a lifetime of scarcity mindset can’t be undone in a day.)

I also brought snacks: beef jerky, s’mores makings and a tray of cinnamon rolls for good measure. I was all set.

Reading is like riding a bike (sort of)

Before 2025, I hadn’t read a book in years. I blamed it on exhaustion from the kids, but really I think it was my own mental laziness. Instead of turning on my brain to new characters, scenarios and ideas, I turned it off, playing mindless games on my phone that didn’t require stepping into anyone else’s shoes.

But now, I think, I need to experience life – fact or fiction – as someone else. I need to explore those other characters, scenarios and ideas. (Maybe we all do.)

And so, I vowed to read more. “More” could have been a mere book or two, but something happened that I didn’t expect. I fell in love with reading novels again. From “The Paris Wife” to “All Fours” to “The House in the Cerulean Sea,” I devoured it all. I caught up on the authors I’d heard about but hadn’t read during my reading drought – Sally Rooney, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Fredrik Backman. I made up for lost time.

Typically, I only read at night, after my work is done and the kids are ready for bed. But here at my book camp, I could do nothing but read no matter the hour, and, in fact, at all hours.

Real, organized book camps do things like make friendship bracelets and sing “Kumbaya” around the fire. My version included my own craft hour of making bookmarks from dried flowers and contact paper while singing along to Richard Marx. I may not have done trust falls or sunrise yoga (yeah, right), but I did do activities like “try unsuccessfully to nap on the couch,” “eat a $13 pistachio pastry” and “yank the curtains and rod out of the wall when trying to close them.”

I had book discussion groups, albeit with myself. I considered why I’m comforted by Emily Henry’s romance trope of going somewhere else — somewhere not home — to fall in love, reconnect with family, write a book, fill-in-the-blank good thing. Isn’t that what I was doing there at book camp? I was using somewhere else to try to improve some aspect of my life.

And what aspect was that exactly? To better deal with death, job loss and the new stressor? To hit reset on my stress level so I could go back to real life and not feel so exhausted and burned out all the time? The escape is the appeal of both Henry’s books and of vacations like this, but what happens when the book is finished, when those escaping characters go back to real life?

Time to read. And read

I read and read, in a quiet frenzy because I knew this was my chance to devote not-quite-48 hours to myself. I read on my porch, at restaurants, in the bath, in bed, in a hot tub. I read more pages in two days than I’d read in two months.

I cycled among all four books during my retreat, but I finished “My Friends” by Fredrik Backman. That’s the book that made me cry — first from sadness, then from fear for a young character, and then, in true Backman fashion, from happiness and joy. He breaks our hearts and puts them back together again, and it’s the putting back together that makes us cry the hardest.

But here’s the thing. It didn’t feel as good as I’d thought to cry over someone else’s story, or even to fall in love with the fictitious rival author next door. I enjoyed my escape, but I craved home, my real life, stressors included.

And so I packed up and returned to my own story, ready to step back into my own shoes.

Allyson Reedy is a freelance writer, a former Denver Post staffer, and an author, most recently of “Mrs. Wilson’s Affair,” coming in October from Union Square & Co. publishers.

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President Donald Trump gave two reasons for why he is stripping Space Command from El Paso County in Colorado and moving the headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama – neither of which was true.

First, he said voters in Alabama supported his re-election in 2024 by 47 points.

Second, he said that Colorado’s mail-in ballots allow election fraud.

The president of the United States held a press conference on a major decision and told Americans that it was based on his political popularity in one state and a gross lie that he has perpetuated since he lost his first bid for re-election and tried to illegally remain in office.

So we will set the record straight.

Trump won Alabama by almost 31 points in 2024.

Funny thing is that he also won El Paso County in 2024 – by almost 10 points.

Guess that wasn’t enough to sway the president’s decision as he callously explained.

“We love Alabama. I only won it by about 47 points. I don’t think that influenced my decision, though, right? Right?” Trump quipped with Alabama Sen. Katie Britt standing to one side and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth standing on the other, sharing in a laugh because we all know the answer to that rhetorical question.

We’ve detailed all the ways that keeping the Space Command in El Paso County at Peterson Space Force Base makes sense. It would save time and money by not moving the temporary headquarters out of state. It allows for vast efficiencies because of its proximity to other key military bases in Colorado Springs – the National Space Defense Center, the U.S. Northern Command, North American Aerospace Defense Command, Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station, and the U.S. Air Force Academy.

The Air Force Academy is producing new cadets for the Space Force every year, and Space Force also has a significant presence at Aurora’s Buckley Space Force Base.

Trump isn’t the first president to make a politically motivated decision like this, but he is the first to gloat openly about using his power to punish a state for not supporting his re-election. The message the president is sending is clear — get on board with team Trump or he will try to hurt your state. Trump could have instead lauded Huntsville’s infrastructure or mentioned “Rocket City’s” low cost of living (the main reason Huntsville was selected as the new home for the command during his first term in office). Trump highlighted the political reasons to move the command to send a warning.

And this is par for the course. Since taking office, Trump has flouted long-held ethical standards meant to protect the American people from a president who is full of anger and wrath, and to prevent corruption of our great nation.

We hope this decision and his attack on Colorado will help sway voters in places like El Paso County when Trump tries to retain office in just a few short years.

“The problem I have with Colorado — one of the big problems — they do mail-in voting. They went to all mail-in voting so they have automatically crooked elections and we can’t have that. When a state is for mail-in voting that means they want dishonest elections,” Trump said. “That played a big factor also.”

Colorado’s mail-in ballots are secure, and despite Trump’s claims, repeated audits done by hand have shown that the 2020 election results in Colorado were not fraudulent. The list of voters who participated in the election is public, and despite hours of scouring the list, there is no evidence that any of those voters are fake.

Ballots are tied to individual voters and were audited in counties across the state.

There is simply no evidence that Colorado’s mail-in elections allow widespread fraud, and certainly no evidence that the ballot machines were rigged as Trump continues to claim, supporting his unconstitutional bid to remain in the White House after he lost in 2020.

But Coloradans should not despair at the unfortunate turn the executive branch has taken.

This bad decision has at least united our entire congressional delegation. Our Republican elected representatives, Jeff Hurd, Jeff Crank, Lauren Boebert and Gabe Evans, joined our Democratic representatives, Diana DeGette, Joe Neguse, Jason Crow, and Brittany Pettersen, in denouncing the move.

U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet also joined the letter, making the sentiment unanimous.

“We are united in fighting to reverse this decision,” they wrote. “Bottom line – moving Space Command headquarters weakens our national security at the worst possible time. … Colorado Springs is the appropriate home for U.S. Space Command, and we will take the necessary action to keep it there.”

Well done.

Such a united front gives us hope that, as President Donald Trump continues to exceed his constitutionally granted authority, our elected representatives will stand strong. For now, it is about Space Command, but soon we will need both the House and the Senate to affirm that states are allowed to hold their elections as they see fit without dangerous federal meddling.

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