The judge’s approval of a settlement between the NCAA, as well as the Power 5 Conferences, and student athletes means the governing body will be paying $2.8 billion back to D-1 athletes in the lawsuit over the next 10 years.
Pay Up!
Judge Claudia Wilken approved the deal that saw the conclusion of three separate federal antitrust lawsuits vis-à-vis a $2.8 billion judgment that will see the NCAA paying former Division 1 athletes who competed in college beginning from 2016 through the present over the next 10 years. In addition, the colleges and universities must start paying their players, a demand that has been held hostage by the NCAA for decades.
The NIL (name, image, and likeness) deal that student-athletes were getting since 2021 likely paved the way for college kids getting paid. Each school has approximately $20.5 million in salary cap beginning this season and increasing annually over the 10-year time frame.
“It’s historic,” former college basketball star Sedona Prince, one of the co-lead plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, stated. “It seemed like this crazy, outlandish idea at the time of what college athletics could and should be like. It was a difficult process at times … but it’s going to change millions of lives for the better.”
From Dugouts to Depositions
The College Sports Commission (CSC) is a new agency born out of this agreement and will assist in providing regulation and enforcement of the new rules. Those rules are being crafted as we speak, and the CSC will be headed by Bryan Seeley, a senior MLB executive and a former federal prosecutor.
The attorneys involved in the lawsuits will be getting the lion’s share of the proceeds, reported to be anywhere between $425 million and $725 million over the next 10 years.
New Day Dawning
NCAA president Charlie Baker has been a pragmatist about the ruling and how it will change the nature of how colleges and universities do business regarding D-1 sports and the athletes representing those schools. Baker and the defendants had agreed to this resolution over a year ago, but it needed the blessing of a judge to make it legally binding.
Baker said he chose to settle for a variety of reasons but failed to articulate that losing these lawsuits would likely result in greater damages and open the door for a host of new lawsuits. In speaking to reporter Juana Summers last year, he detailed his rationale for accepting the deal and moving forward.
Baker remarked, “I think the status quo has created over the years, maybe even over decades, a lack of stability and predictability for just about everybody who’s involved in college sports, at least at the highest level.
“And I think for us, finding a way out of that status quo and creating what I would describe as some predictability — especially for Division I and for the schools — and also a better way, in our view, to support student athletes by establishing this kind of a legal framework that can be monitored and enforced, it basically gives the NCAA and its membership 10 years to pay off the back damages. And also, to some extent, it binds us all together over that 10-year period to work together, to follow through on it,” he said.
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