Nothing is easy in college sports.
And with the Power 5 conferences and the NCAA Board of Governors voting Thursday to accept the settlement of three antitrust cases that create a new structure for the sport, the moment is rife with historic change and looming ambiguity.
The more than $2.7 billion in back damages and a new revenue-sharing model that come with the House v. The NCAA and two related antitrust cases mark a distinctive turn for college sports. Amateurism, long a fragile and fleeting notion in the multibillion-dollar college sports industry, is officially dead. College sports, long a fractured group of fiefdoms, came together in an attempt to save itself, with the discordant vision of five powerhouse leagues and the NCAA coming together in a press release.
This is a necessary and important week for the business of college athletics, but not a week of celebration for its leaders. It's a promising day for future athletes who are being compensated with a revenue share expected to exceed $20 million per school.
And it's also a confusing week for coaches and leaders on campus, who have no idea what specific rules of engagement will be followed.
There should be no trips to the chiropractor for self-congratulatory pats on the back for taking this step, as the business of college sports will continue to be difficult. No one should be applauded for paying billions just to avoid paying additional billions.
The peace that the NCAA and conference leaders hope to buy with their billions in settlement money appears tentative. While the settlement will make it more difficult for plaintiff attorneys to pursue the threat of multimillion-dollar damages in the future, athletes will have options to continue challenging any restrictions or caps on how they are paid. As the final votes in favor were being collected this week, a separate federal case in Colorado, Fontenot v. NCAA, continued to move forward on its own path, leaving open the possibility that NCAA lawyers may not have time to catch their breath. before fighting the next battle to limit athletes' compensation.
The games on the fields and arenas of college sports are still wonderful, the television ratings for college football and the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournament are all successes. And the NCAA, behind the decisive leadership of President Charlie Baker, appears to have become more relevant in the coming years by finding enough consensus to avoid a catastrophic financial loss from another court decision that goes against it.
But the reality of the culmination of Thursday's votes, which still need the approval of Judge Claudia Wilken, is that university leaders made the best and bad option. Pay billions now and share the proceeds or, as lawyers predicted, you'll lose a series of lawsuits, declare bankruptcy, and start over.
How we got here is simple. As college sports went from a regional passion to a national obsession during the 1990s and into this century, NCAA leaders and university presidents clung to a business model that didn't pay talent. (The coaches, not coincidentally, were compensated at significant levels because the players never took a salary.)
Just three years ago, the NCAA fought all the way to the Supreme Court against the idea of paying athletes the now quaint $6,000 in academic awards. So it's hard to overstate how drastic the change in tenor is around college sports.
Somewhere along the way, when conference television networks were formed, commissioner salaries rose to $5 million a year (for former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, of course) and television contracts rivaled With professional sports, there was never a way to cut directly into the athletes. Until this week.
So what does this mean for college sports when revenue sharing arrives as early as fall 2025? Where does this lead us?
We have outlined the outstanding issues that will need to be resolved. Most decisions up to this point have been guided by the NCAA, attorneys and commissioners, and there will come a time when the actual participants in sports (athletic directors and coaches) will have a say in the process. Or at least they hope so.
In addition to making it less financially attractive for plaintiff attorneys to challenge the NCAA in antitrust cases, university leaders also hope to lay their new agreement at the feet of Congress as a show of good faith. In turn, they hope to build some momentum for a federal law that would give them greater protection against lawsuits in the future. However, there are no guarantees that the deal will free up votes on Capitol Hill, which has so far been deadlocked on NCAA-related legislation and will have most of its time taken up by the November elections.
Without help from Congress, it will continue to be a bumpy road for the NCAA to enforce the type of rules it believes are necessary to restore stability to college sports.
How does Title IX influence the financial calculation? That seems to be the biggest concern on campus. How will the lists be built? Soccer coaches who have 130 players on their team (85 scholarship players and 45 walk-ons) are wondering if they need to cut a third of their roster with the expected inclusion of roster caps.
“This is all well-intentioned, but I'll believe it when I see it,” an industry source told ESPN. “There are three big questions looming that will determine how this plays out: the Title IX strategy for implementing income sharing, the enforcement issues around residual NIL, and how roster limits work. “.
If NIL remains out of sports departments, as expected, who will keep an eye on it? The NCAA's law enforcement record is almost as poor as its legal record. Could there be someone (perhaps a magistrate or a special judge appointed by Judge Wilken) to be an arbiter of the agreement's interpretations?
“A new group will be needed to handle NIL enforcement,” another industry source said. “Not the NCAA, because the system is going to be completely different. An entity that looks like the NFL or NBA league office, because the issues that matter are different from the NCAA's previous regulatory approach. It was all about of amateurism. Now “It's going to be very different, you actually have a salary cap.”
The problem with controlling NIL is that separating deals based on endorsements from those that are thinly veiled payments for performance remains as subjective a process as it has been over the past three years. It is unclear how the terms of the agreement will provide the tools schools need to close a thriving NIL market that is outside their direct control.
Athletic directors face the most important decisions of their careers: how do they find the money and distribute it? The only certainty is that there will be discontent on campus, as the value of equipment to its administrators will now include a dollar sign.
And that will cause a lot of consternation, including the possible cutting of Olympic sports to help fund the financial cow list.
Be prepared for a few months of ambiguity as formal federal approval looms and then the real work of finalizing the details begins.
These are the questions that almost everyone in the industry is asking themselves today. Coaches don't know how to recruit the Class of 2025, as recruiting rules (down to how many players can be on the roster) have yet to be determined.
Football players will be taking official visits this month before their senior seasons and won't know what to expect. Schools won't even know basic details like roster spots and available money.
So while history will come with the expected formalization of this deal, the immediate future of what it will look like remains unclear. Which is appropriate, since solving decades of problems was always going to be a difficult task.
Because it remains true that nothing is easy in college sports.
