Catherine Rusoff
The NCAA and the nation’s five largest conferences have agreed to pay nearly $2.8 billion to resolve a series of antitrust claims, a monumental decision that sets the stage for an innovative revenue-sharing model that could begin to drive millions of dollars. directly to athletes as soon as possible. fall semester 2025.
The Pac-12 became the latest conference to approve the proposal on Thursday when its university leaders voted to approve it, according to a person with direct knowledge of the results.
The presidents and chancellors of the Southeastern Conference unanimously approved the agreement on Thursday, another person with knowledge of the decision told The Associated Press. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement between the Pac-12, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Atlantic Coast Conference and NCAA was still being prepared.
The other organizations voted to approve earlier in the week, ahead of the Thursday deadline given by the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The settlement still needs to be approved by the federal judge overseeing the case and challenges could arise, but if the settlement holds, it would mark the beginning of a new era in college sports, where athletes are paid more like professionals and schools can compete. for talent using direct resources. payments.
Details of the plan signal the end of the NCAA’s fundamental model of amateurism, which dates to its founding in 1906. In fact, the days of NCAA punishments for athletes who drove boosted cars began to fade three years ago, when the organization suspended restrictions on supported endorsement deals. by the so-called money of name, image and likeness.
Now it’s not a stretch to look to the future, to seasons where a star quarterback or standout player on a college basketball team is not only cashing in on big NIL deals, but also has a $100,000 college payday in the bank to play .
There are still a number of details to be determined, but the settlement calls for the NCAA and conferences to pay $2.77 billion over 10 years to more than 14,000 former and current college athletes who say now-defunct rules held them back. to make money from endorsements. and sponsorship agreements dating back to 2016.
Some of that money will come from the NCAA’s reserve and insurance funds, but while the lawsuit specifically targets five conferences made up of 69 schools (including Notre Dame), dozens of other NCAA member schools will see smaller distributions from the NCAA to cover the mammoth payout. .
Schools in the Big Ten, Big 12, Atlantic Coast and Southeastern conferences will end up bearing the brunt of the deal at a cost of about $300 million each over 10 years, most of which will be paid to athletes going forward.
The Pac-12 is also part of the deal, with all 12 sharing responsibility, although Washington State and Oregon State are the only league members remaining this fall after the other 10 schools left.
Under the new compensation model, each school will be allowed, but not required, to set aside up to $21 million in revenue to share with athletes per year, although as revenue increases, the limit may also increase.
Athletes in all sports would be eligible for payments and schools would have the freedom to decide how that money would be divided among sports programs. Scholarship limits per sport will be replaced by roster restrictions.
It is unknown whether the new compensation model is subject to the Title IX gender equity law, as well as whether schools will be able to bring NIL activities in-house as they expect and squeeze out the booster-run collectives that have emerged in recent years to pay athletes. Both topics could lead to more lawsuits.
The federal class action lawsuit at the center of the settlement, House v. NCAA, was set to go to trial in January. The complaint, filed by former Arizona State swimmer Grant House and former Oregon basketball player and current TCU basketball player Sedona Prince, said the NCAA, along with the five richest conferences, improperly banned athletes from earning sponsorship money.
The suit also argued that athletes were entitled to a share of the billions of dollars the NCAA and these conferences earn from media rights deals with television networks.
Amid political and public pressure, and facing the prospect of another legal loss that some college athletes have claimed could reach $20 billion in damages, NCAA and conference officials have admitted what has been a fundamental tenet of the endeavor: that schools do not pay athletes to play beyond their scholarship.
This principle had already been undermined numerous times in the last decade.
Notably, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the NCAA in 2021 in a case related to education-related benefits. The narrow focus of the Alston case did not bring down the college sports system, but the strong rebuke of the NCAA’s amateurism model opened the door for more lawsuits. Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a former Yale athlete, said bluntly: “The bottom line is that the NCAA and its member colleges are suppressing the salaries of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenue for colleges every year. ”.
The settlement is expected to cover two other antitrust cases facing the NCAA and major conferences that challenge athlete compensation rules. Hubbard v. NCAA and Carter v. NCAA are also currently before judges in the Northern District of California.
A fourth case, Fontenot vs, NCAA, creates a potential complication as it remains in a Colorado court after a judge denied a request to match him with Carter. It’s unknown whether Fontenot will become a party to the settlement, and that’s important because the NCAA and its conferences don’t want to be held liable for more damages if they lose in court.
“We will continue to litigate our case in Colorado and look forward to hearing about the terms of a proposed settlement once they are actually released and presented to a court,” said George Zelcs, attorney for the plaintiffs at Fontenot. .
The solution agreed in the agreement is historic, but not surprising. College sports have been trending in this direction for years, with athletes increasingly receiving monetary benefits and rights that they say are long overdue.
In December, NCAA President Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who has been in office for 14 months, proposed creating a new level of Division I athletics where schools with the most resources would be required to pay at least half of its athletes $30,000 a year. year. This suggestion, along with many other possibilities, remains under discussion.
The agreement does not eliminate all of the problems facing college sports. There’s still a question of whether athletes should be considered employees of their schools, something Baker and other college sports leaders are wrestling with.
Some type of federal legislation or antitrust exemption will likely still be needed to codify the terms of the agreement, protect the NCAA from future litigation and preempt state laws that attempt to neutralize the organization’s authority. As it stands, the NCAA still faces lawsuits that challenge its ability to govern itself, including establishing rules that limit multiple transfers.
Federal lawmakers have indicated they would like to do something, but although several bills have been introduced, none of them have gone anywhere.
Despite the unanswered questions, one thing is certain: College athletics is about to become more like a professional sport than ever before.
