On April 30, reports surfaced of substantial progress in settlement talks between the NCAA and Jeffrey Kessler and Steve Berman, the lead attorneys in House v. NCAA and Carter v NCAA cases. The result of those settlement talks could be a revenue-sharing model that would drastically alter the landscape of college sports.
Former Arizona State swimmer Grant House is the lead plaintiff in the House v. NCAA case, which was opened in 2020.
The revenue share is reported to be around a 10-year settlement of three ongoing cases (House/Carter/Hubbard v. NCAA) and could total $2.9 billion in back-pay damages as well as an athlete compensation model that also expands NCAA scholarship limits, according to Yahoo Sports.
The settlement talks include a cap on the total amount schools would be permitted to pay their athletes. That number is reported to be around $17-22 million annually, but will include language that allows the cap to increase over the years as revenue increases. The cap is 22% of an average power conference school’s revenue streams, which mostly come from TV and ticket sales according to Yahoo Sports. In 2022, the Big Ten inked a new seven-year, $8 billion deal with CBS and the SEC agreed to a deal with Disney/ESPN that will give the conference $300 million in revenue annually starting for the 2024 season and running through the 2034 season.
Neither the revenue-sharing agreement nor expanding scholarships will be mandatory for any school. However, as has been the case with NIL, schools that choose not to embrace the new model will quickly fall behind their peers.
There are plenty of questions as to how the back-pay damages will be funded. Will the money come from the NCAA, conferences, schools, or insurance policies? The House case has more than 14,500 men and women who played D1 sports going back to 2016. How will the damages be spread amongst them?
The earliest he new model could be adopted would be the start of the 2025-26 season. Once the parties come to terms on a final settlement agreement, they will return to U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken for final approval.
Any settlement agreement will only end claims in House and/or Carter. It will not insulate the NCAA from other antitrust or employment-related claims. The NCAA still faces battles in the NLRB hearings involving Dartmouth and USC student-athletes as well as in Johnson v. NCAA. All three matters turn on whether athletes should be classified as employees of their respective schools.
Conference realignments, this court case, and the potential of categorizing athletes as employees will certainly hurt swimming immensely in the long run. Not to mention the NIL gold rush and subsequent reverberating effects. The long-term outlook for collegiate swimming and diving is not good. It’s hard to say what the future will hold and to what extent, but the pot of money for swimming and diving is certainly trending downward and will continue to do so. I don’t blame House for going after a large payday, but this is just another nail in the collegiate swimming coffin.
Why shouldn’t we blame him for going after a large payday?
Because it’s going to be a ton of money.
This is an incredibly awkward spot for the athletes too. The class action suit is such that we would be crazy to not sign on because if we don’t we very clearly will miss out on potentially life changing amounts of money (I don’t know about y’all but I was certainly not on a full ride so have plenty of loan debt). At the same time, this puts such a significant strain on the finances of the NCAA, schools, whoever potentially putting our entire existence at risk within the context of college sports. It’s not like the sport itself would disappear, but the opportunity to officially represent your school and have all of the benefits being a student-athlete comes with… Read more »
This is going to kill olympic sports at mid-majors.
it’s going to kill Olympic sports at some power 5 schools too
So just screw anyone who graduated before 2016?
I’ll just leave this here for Grant to read and realize what he did
https://247sports.com/college/alabama/article/greg-byrne-discusses-threats-to-19-sports-at-alabama-that-lose-40-million-annually-228515138/amp/
Yep, Grant single handedly got 14,500 to sue over this. The suit definitely would not have happened if he wasn’t involved. The 14,499 others never would have done it without him. He totally deserves all the blame for the NCAA assuming the law doesn’t apply to it.
When he is the name on the suit, yes.
Sedona Price and Tymir Oliver are the other two named plaintiffs. So do they each get 1/3 of the blame? What about the named plaintiffs in the six other suits that were consolidated into this one? Their names were “on the suit” but are now subsumed in the “et al.” I guess they’re absolved?
Women’s basketball brings revenue and is not in jeopardy of being cut from college sports probably ever. We all know that swimming is the first to go.
In my opinion all of these student athletes are being selfish. Read the article from Greg Byrne. He actually articulates very well that situation and how absurd this is.
I understand the sort of legal conundrum here. No business anywhere is really allowed to base who it pays and who it doesn’t based on whether their team/unit makes money. So if you’re going to pay one set of athletes, you’ve gotta pay another. And I also totally understand this idea of college sports revenue continuing to climb and the athletes not getting any of it.
But I agree with the fact that paying them in a “fair” way might crumble the system. The athletes right now want 50%. That 50% has to come from somewhere, and there aren’t enough salaries to cover it (and even if there were…you can’t run an athletics department of 700 athletes without administrative personnel.… Read more »
An interesting part that I hadn’t previously considered was the tax implications. What if an athlete doesn’t want the income?
The biggest departments can almost make it happen without cutting anything except the most ridiculous coach salaries. If it’s going to be 20 million a year that is required to go to athletes. How much of that can be made up by taking 10 million a year coaches down to 1 million a year? Then you add up the 93000 and change that Alabama athletes are already getting (total value of perks) and you are almost there.
There is a model to preserve it all and make it fair if the cooler heads can prevail.
I know this isn’t likely to happen, but it should. Instead of taking resources from other athletes, they should be coming from other areas.… Read more »
While $20 million is the number cited here, the athlete ‘representatives’ who are emerging are demanding 50% of revenue. That’s $100 million at Alabama based on traditional measures that say Alabama pulls in $200 million a year in revenue. Ain’t no way to find $100 million out of that budget without big impactful cuts to programs and/or student-athlete services.
There are some big accounting questions. The average college football coach’s salary is paid for primarily by booster dollars. Will those booster dollars be counted as revenue that athletes have to get a piece of?
Alabama has 783 varsity athletes. If the athletes were ready to count the perks they already receive as part of that $20 million…$93,000 * 783 athletes… Read more »
Now do division 2 and 3.
This will end the athletics-driven educational opportunities of 500,000 people. A handful of schools will outright close.
$HOW ME THE MONEY!
This is why I got out of college coaching kids these days are so greedy and can’t see a bigger picture
Can someone just tell me whether or not House is going to take any of this money home with him or not? Is this all volunteer work or something?
Usually the named party (lead plaintiff) in a class action suit gets a higher cut of the payout for their time and effort. I haven’t seen House’s cut announced yet.
how much do the lawyers get? A billion?