They're going to pay the players

Here's what to know about the House v. NCAA settlement. There are still battles to be fought, but the war is over.

It can be tough to keep track of all the changes in college sports—realignment news, adjustments to NIL laws and enforcements, news about revived video games and returned Heisman Trophies, etc.—so maybe you’re unsure how to weigh the news about the proposed settlement in House v. NCAA. Maybe it snuck up on you. So I want to be clear: This is the big one.

Even as the ass-kickings in court piled up and public sentiment shifted, the NCAA and its schools have tiptoed around accepting the concept of pay-for-play. NIL payments for marketable athletes? Sure. Bigger grants to athletes to offset academic expenses? Yeah, of course that’s a good thing, please forget that we fought it all the way to the Supreme Court!

Direct deposits to the athletes playing in the games whose broadcast rights were being sold for billions? No. That’s not OK. For reasons. It was a line that could never be crossed, and now, they’ve crossed it.

The failure to pay players was the original sin of college sports. Everything we love about our sports and our teams has always been slightly tainted thanks to this glaring lapse, unethical, and indefensible. And now nobody has to defend it anymore. (Not even the NCAA’s lawyers! Congrats on that.)

The deal can essentially be explained in two parts, one righting past wrongs and one setting groundwork for the future. The “past” part is a massive payout for the 10,000-ish past and current NCAA athletes who were illegally deprived of the ability to earn NIL payments due to NCAA regulations. The NCAA and its schools have agreed to pay $2.8 billion to these athletes over the next decade, with a formula determining individual payouts to athletes based on how much they should have earned from NIL.

The “future” part is the biggie: An agreement which enables schools to share some of the revenue they earn from sports with the athletes. They’ll be allowed to spend about $20 million per school per year, but it’s optional—schools that don’t have the funds can try competing without spending.

The first thing to know about the settlement: It is an absolutely incredible deal for the power conferences.

You can tell because they all eagerly signed up and issued press releases patting themselves on the back about the “progress” and “opportunities” provided by this milestone decision, as if they didn’t fight it for years. They’re going to be fine.

This is a group dinner where the Big Ten and SEC ordered 6 margaritas each and got steaks while everybody else ordered house salads. Now the bill is at the table and they’re generously agreeing to pay a little bit more than everybody else.

The Power 5 (as constituted when the suit was brought, RIP Pac-12) have agreed to pay 24 percent of the $2.8 billion. That leaves 36 percent to other Division I conferences (10 percent from non-power FBS conferences, 14 percent from FCS, and 12 percent Division I schools without football programs.) 40 percent will come from the NCAA itself. That’s nowhere near a fair split, considering the money will primarily go to power conference college football players, who the largest group harmed by the lack of past NIL deals.

They’re also getting a great deal on the proposed revenue sharing agreement. Pro sports CBAs generally split league revenue roughly equally between the teams and the players—NFL players get 48 percent of league revenue, NBA players get 51 percent, etc. The proposed $20 million per school is nowhere near an even split between the athletes and the schools. It’s not even half of the TV deals for the Big Ten and SEC, and the TV deal is not their lone source of income. They’ll be fine.

The second thing to know about the settlement: The unfair split should preserve the status quo of college sports for a bit

There has been an ominous sense the past few years that the power conferences were eager to break away from the riff-raff. There’s been talk about The Super League or a college basketball tournament without all those pesky mid-majors. It makes a certain amount of sense: The biggest programs in college sports are, in millions of ways, different from everybody else.

But now, Everybody Else has agreed to pay. So the big guys aren’t going anywhere. You guys wanna have the same group dinner next week? We found another place with great margs!

It’s messed up. And they’re griping about it, rightfully. But it keeps the ship afloat. The ideal scenario has always been a world in which colleges can pay athletes for playing sports, but the general competitive structure we love remains in place. We should get something close to that, even if gaps between programs that can afford to pay players and those cannot continue to grow.

The dream of Kentucky losing a first-round game in the 2032 NCAA Tournament lives on. And isn’t that priceless?

The third—and most important thing—about the settlement: everything is subject to change, except one thing.

The settlement is not official. Athletes can still object or opt out and the judge in the case can reject it if she determines it to be unfair or illegal. There are also other lawsuits about revenue sharing and there could be more in the future.

It can feel like a fool’s errand getting the details of the most recent development in college sports, because everything is changing every day. Remember the first time you heard the letters “NIL” in the context of college sports? That was only four years ago. The tectonic shifts in the world of college sports happen at light speed, and the firm ground you’re standing on right now might be ocean or mountains in a week.

But one thing is clear. The liquid is not going back in the bottle.

The college sports infrastructure has spent decades arguing that paying players is fundamentally incompatible with college sports. They said that it would kill off fan interest; that it would kill off programs that could not afford to pay; that it would destroy the concept of the student-athlete. They argued these things not because they were true, but because doing so made them a lot of money. And for some reason, the public generally agreed, and the American legal system carved out a highly questionable loophole for college athletics, even though this system existed nowhere else in the world—not in pro American sports, not in international sports. The NCAA argued that there simply had to be a system where someone called an “athletic director” could make $2 million per year while a running back with ruined knees would just kinda have to figure out how to pay for a life of physical pain with a degree in general studies. And until maybe five years ago, I thought they would argue these things forever.

Now, colleges have acknowledged that paying players is part of the path forward. They can’t backtrack. There is no way to say this settlement is a big whoopsie, and they would like to go back to the arguments they made for the last 100 years. The idea that the amateurism is essential to the survival and existence of college sports is fully dead, and cannot be brought back to life.

The settlement is imperfect, and there is no clear vision for how things will work. There are more battles to fight. But the war is over, and the bad guys lost.