The NCAA and the nation's five biggest conferences announced Thursday night that they agreed to pay nearly $2.8 billion to settle a host of antitrust claims, a monumental decision that sets the stage for a groundbreaking revenue-sharing model that could start directing millions of dollars directly to athletes as soon as the 2025 fall semester.
NCAA President Charlie Baker along with the commissioners of the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern Conference released a joint statement saying they agreed to the settlement terms. They called the move "an important step in the continuing reform of college sports that will provide benefits to student-athletes and provide clarity in college athletics across all divisions for years to come.โ
The deal still must be approved by the federal judge overseeing the case and challenges could arise, but if the agreement stands it will mark the beginning of a new era in college sports where athletes are compensated more like professionals and schools can compete for talent using direct payments.
โThereโs no question about it. Itโs a huge quantum leap,โ said Tom McMillen, the former Maryland basketball player and congressman who has led an association of collegiate athletic directors the past eight years.
Terms were not disclosed, though some details emerged in the past few weeks. They signal the end of the NCAAโs bedrock amateurism model that dates to its founding in 1906. Indeed, the days of NCAA punishment for athletes driving booster-provided cars started vanishing three years ago when the organization lifted restrictions on endorsement deals backed by so-called name, image and likeness money.
Wisconsin's Traevon Jackson dribbles past the NCAA logo during practice at the NCAA men's college basketball tournament March 26, 2014, in Anaheim, Calif.
Now it is not far-fetched to look ahead to seasons where a star quarterback or top prospect on a college basketball team are not only cashing in big-money NIL deals but have a $100,000 school payment in the bank to play.
โThis landmark settlement will bring college sports into the 21st century, with college athletes finally able to receive a fair share of the billions of dollars of revenue that they generate for their schools,โ said Steve Berman, one of the lead attorneys for the plaintiffs. โOur clients are the bedrock of the NCAAโs multibillion-dollar business and finally can be compensated in an equitable and just manner for their extraordinary athletic talents.โ
There are a host of details still to be determined, but the agreement calls for the NCAA and the conferences to pay $2.77 billion over 10 years to more than 14,000 former and current college athletes who say now-defunct rules prevented them from earning money from endorsement and sponsorship deals dating to 2016.
โEven though it was only because of the overwhelming legal pressure, the NCAA, conferences and schools are agreeing that college athletes should be paid,โ said Ramogi Huma, a former UCLA football player and longtime advocate for college athletes. โAnd thereโs no going back from there. Thatโs truly groundbreaking.โ
Some of the money will come from NCAA reserve funds and insurance but even though the lawsuit specifically targeted five conferences that are comprised 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 settlement at a cost of about $300 million each over 10 years, the majority of which will be paid to athletes going forward.
The Pac-12 is also part of the settlement, with all 12 current schools sharing responsibility even though Washington State and Oregon State will be the only league members left by this fall after the other 10 schools leave.
Paying athletes
In the new compensation model, each school will be permitted but not required to set aside up to $21 million in revenue to share with athletes per year, though as revenues rise so could the cap.
Athletes in all sports would be eligible for payments and schools would be given the freedom to decide how that money is divvied up among sports programs. Scholarship limits by sport will be replaced by roster restrictions.
Whether the new compensation model is subject to the Title IX gender equity law is unknown along with whether schools will be able to bring NIL activities in-house as they hope and squeeze out the booster-run collectives that have sprouted up in the last few years to pay athletes. Both topics could lead to more lawsuits.
The case
The class-action federal lawsuit at the center of the settlement, House v. the NCAA, was set to go to trial in January. The complaint, brought by former Arizona State swimmer Grant House and Sedona Prince, a former Oregon and current TCU basketball player, said the NCAA, along with the five wealthiest conferences, improperly barred athletes from earning endorsement money.
The suit also made the case that athletes were entitled to a piece of the billions of dollars the NCAA and those conferences earn from media rights agreements with television networks.
Amid political and public pressure, and facing the prospect of another court loss that some in college sports claimed could reach $20 billion in damages, NCAA and conference officials conceded on what has long been a core principal of the enterprise: That schools don't directly pay the athletes to play beyond a scholarship.
That principle had already been dented numerous times over 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 didn't collapse the collegiate sports system, but the strong rebuke of the NCAA's model of amateurism flung the door open to more lawsuits. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a former Yale athlete, put it bluntly: "The bottom line is that the NCAA and its member colleges are suppressing the pay of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges every year."
The other cases
The settlement is expected to cover two other antitrust cases facing the NCAA and major conferences that challenge athlete compensation rules. Hubbard vs. the NCAA and Carter vs. the NCAA are also currently in front of 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 combine it with Carter. Whether Fontenot becomes part of the settlement is unknown and it matters because the NCAA and its conferences don't want to be on the hook for more damages should they lose in court.
"We're going to continue to litigate our case in Colorado and look forward to hearing about the terms of a settlement proposal once they're actually released and put in front of a court," said George Zelcs, a plaintiffs' attorney in Fontenot.
College athletics overhaul
The solution agreed to in the settlement is landmark, but not surprising. College sports has been trending in this direction for years, with athletes receiving more and more monetary benefits and rights they say were long overdue.
In December, NCAA President Charlie Baker, the former Massachusetts governor who has been on the job for 14 months, proposed creating a new tier of Division I athletics where the schools with the most resources would be required to pay at least half their athletes $30,000 per year. That suggestion, along with many other possibilities, remain under discussion.
The settlement does not make every issue facing college sports go away. There is still a question of whether athletes should be deemed employees of their schools, something Baker and other college sports leaders are fighting against.
Some type of federal legislation or antitrust exemption is likely still needed to codify the terms of the settlement, protect the NCAA from future litigation and pre-empt state laws that attempt to neuter the organization's authority. As it is, the NCAA is still facing lawsuits that challenge its ability to govern itself, including setting rules limiting multiple-time transfers.
Federal lawmakers have indicated they would like to get something done, but while several bills have been introduced none have gone anywhere.
Despite the unanswered questions, one thing is clear: Major college athletics is about to become more like professional sports than ever before.
In the interest of profits, female student-athletes get left behind more than 50 years after Title IX
In the interest of profits, female student-athletes get left behind more than 50 years after Title IX
Updated
Despite female sports viewership reaching record-breaking highs, and more than 50 years after the passage of Title IX, collegiate female sports programs are still grossly underfunded compared to male athletics.
To better understand the landscape of unequal treatment across gender in collegiate sports, Bold.org used data from the Department of Education to examine disparities in funding and treatment for collegiate female sports programs in the U.S.
A comparison of university expenses for men's athletic teams versus women's teams yields a widely disparate funding picture: Across NCAA schools, men's teams routinely are funded at higher rates than women's teams, sometimes at triple the rate.
These funding discrepancies don't reflect the revenue or viewership these women's teams garner. Take the University of Iowa, for example. Despite a highly watched women's basketball season in 2022, the women's team received only 79% of the funding than the men's team.
Even at the championship level, women's teams are enormously undervalued.
The final NCAA tournament game in women's basketball this year was the most watched basketball game of among men's or women's and college or professional teams since 2019. But the final four teams in the 2024 NCAA men's basketball tournament earned $10 million each for their conferences, while the women's teams received nothing for the same championship performance.
Title IX, passed in 1972, is a federal civil rights law implemented to correct gender discrimination in educational programs, specifically unequal opportunities in collegiate sports. Universities that receive federal student aid funding are covered by Title IX, ensuring all students are provided an equal opportunity to participate in school athletic programs, at the club, intramural, and intercollegiate levels. Many have challenged Title IX since its passage.
Title IX also protects students, including student-athletes, against sexual harassment and sexual violence. In 2016, the DOE and DOJ issued guidance on protecting transgender students, clarifying that schools are permitted to operate sex-segregated athletic teams but cannot adopt requirements based on stereotypical assumptions.
Yet, the Women's Sports Foundation estimates that 80-90% of all educational institutions do not comply with Title IX. A 2021 report by New York law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink found that the NCAA has underfunded and undervalued women's programs, noting various instances of systemic gender inequity in the NCAA's treatment of women's teams.
Differences in expenses often tied to differences in revenue
Updated
Critics often note that women's teams earn less than men's to justify funding discrepancies. Yet, the Department of Education data shows that revenue matches expenses for both men's and women's teams.
In other words, women's teams yield the same revenue as men's teams do relative to their funding. Even when women's teams yield the same financial turnout relative to their expenses, they are still allocated less funding, most notably among basketball teams.
Across Division I basketball teams, schools spent a whopping $93 million more on men than women, for equipment, recruiting, and travel expensesโa 60% funding disparity, according to a USA Today analysis published in 2022. Funding disparities are glaring among NCAA single-gender sports, like beach volleyball and wrestling, where the NCAA spends over $2,000 more per student-athlete for men's championships than women's, according to Kaplan Hecker & Fink's report.
The problem with revenue determining budgets in college athletics
Updated
Expenses for recruiting, game day needs, and travel, which differ immensely across sports, also reflect unequal allocation across gender differences, even when comparing the same sports. USA Today's analysis found universities spend 62 cents on travel-associated costs for women's basketball games for every dollar they spend on men's games.
The University of Louisville spent $754,265 on its men's basketball team and $24,157 on its women's teamโa funding ratio of 31 to 22. The inequality is even more apparent when you consider that Louisville's women's basketball team has qualified for the NCAA tournament for the past 13 years, while the men's team only qualified seven times in the same time frame, most recently in 2019.
Recruitment budgets also diverge by gender for Division I schools
Updated
Schools in the football division have the highest disparities in funding between their male and female athletic recruiting spending.
Recruiting disparities remain even when accounting for football. USA Today points out that female athletic programs in basketball, softball, soccer, tennis, and golf are all experiencing recruitment underfunding compared to male teams. The amount universities across the NCAA spend on recruiting male athletes is up to quadruple the amount they do on women athletes. However, it's not due to lack of interest. A 2022 report from the NCAA found participation in girls' high school sports is more than 10 times greater than it was when Title IX passed, reaching 3.4 million student-athletes in 2019.
Story editing by Elena Cox. Copy editing by Kristen Wegrzyn.
This story originally appeared on Bold.org and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
In the interest of profits, female student-athletes get left behind more than 50 years after Title IX
Updated
