Judge Claudia Wilken announced the approval of the House v. NCAA settlement Friday in the U.S. Northern District of California. It’s a landmark decision that’s likely to usher in a revenue-sharing era among college sports, effectively allowing schools to pay their athletes.
The ruling also created a clearinghouse for third-party NIL deals, which will have a say over NIL arrangements of $600 or more.
“Despite some compromises, the settlement agreement nevertheless will result in extraordinary relief for members of the settlement classes,” Wilken wrote in her 76-page opinion. “If approved, it would permit levels and types of student-athlete compensation that have never been permitted in the history of college sports, while also very generously compensating Division I student-athletes who suffered past harms.”
We still have a long way to go before we fully understand the impact on college sports, especially football. One person who is not optimistic is ESPN and SEC Network host Paul Finebaum.
“I couldn’t help but think back about 10 years ago, when Mark Emmert, then the President of the NCAA, essentially said college athletes will be paid over my dead body. He’s still alive, but the NCAA is dead,” Finebaum said during an appearance on SportsCenter. “It may still be in existence. We’re still having tournaments, such as the Women’s World Series and the Men’s Baseball Tournament, but the NCAA, as we know it, is gone. They literally have no jurisdiction whatsoever other than to be tournament directors.
“This was supposed to level the playing field. Everybody pays the same into the kitty and then divides it up, but it will do anything but. The big will get bigger, and the small schools will simply slip away… Other than maybe in in basketball-only conferences that can use all that money for basketball, as opposed to, like, Alabama and Georgia and Ohio State, where they have to split up $20.5 million.”
Starting July 1, schools will be able to share $20.5 million with its athletes. Football is expected to receive 75%, followed by men’s basketball (15%), women’s basketball (5%) and all remaining sports (5%). Power Four football programs will have between $13 to $16 million to spend on rosters during the 2025 season under the settlement agreement.
Finebaum, known for his devotion to SEC football, views this situation as one that could jeopardize the momentum of women’s sports and non-revenue sports.
“The real casualty of all this, I believe, is going to be the one part of college athletics that has grown so much,” said Finebaum. “We watched the Women’s World Series last night, a million-dollar pitcher, by the way, for Texas Tech. Women’s sports, I think, are going to suffer from this. If you’re one of these Ohio States or Alabamas, and you’re dividing up $20.5 million, you know where most of it’s going, it’s going to football. That’s really a major casualty.
“College athletics did this to themselves. They’re not really suffering for it, because it’s a billion-dollar industry, but it’s going to be very uneven in the future. I think, at some point, fans are going to start tuning out. There’s such an existential threat to what we grew up loving, and we still do. It’s not going to be the same anymore.”
Finebaum is one of several prominent voices who see player compensation as the end of college athletics as we know it. Others might say that’s only fair considering the severe imbalance in profits generated by those institutions on the labors of those players.
College sports are indeed changing and getting more professional. However, they’ve been professional for a long time; the people in charge are only now being forced to acknowledge it.