College sports has officially entered its revenue-sharing era, putting away the concept of amateurism for good. Schools can now pay millions of dollars a year directly to their athletes, thanks to the NCAA settling three antitrust cases, colloquially known as the House settlement.
Today — July 1, 2025 — is the first day that athletes can receive such payouts.
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“This and the day Title IX was adopted — those were, really, the two biggest days in college sports history,” Washington athletic director Pat Chun told NBC Sports. “Two landscape-changing days in the history of college sports.”
Football Saturdays will likely look and feel like they did before. Same with March Madness. But there will be significant structural changes to how athletic departments operate — and what and how athletes are paid. And even though those three major antitrust cases are now in the NCAA’s rear-view mirror, those were certainly not the last lawsuit we’ll see challenging the validity of rules and regulations regarding athlete compensation.
But, at least for the time being, there is a great deal of optimism accompanying the usual anxiety of change. After four years of name, image and likeness (NIL) deals being largely unregulated alongside unfettered player movement, there is structure tied to the settlement. Schools will operate with an annual cap on direct athlete compensation. NIL deals will be required to be submitted for approval by an outside entity, run by Deloitte, with the aim of ensuring that the compensation paid to each athlete is “commensurate with compensation paid to similarly situated individuals” — and not inflated to whatever amount a collective is willing to pay as a quasi-salary.
The new system is run by the College Sports Commission (CSC), an independent non-NCAA entity led by Bryan Seeley, who previously served as Executive Vice President, Legal & Operations at Major League Baseball, where he oversaw investigations. He’s in the process of building out his executive team and the new enforcement arm of the CSC. The organization is in charge of enforcing all rules related to the terms of the settlement, including rules regarding schools’ capped payments and the NIL clearinghouse.
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“What most people are interested in is having an environment that’s got some sense of structure and stability for a period of time,” Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski said. “These last couple of years have been unregulated, unstructured, ungoverned — everything. Everybody just kind of threw up their hands and said, ‘Hey, it’s a free for all.’ Getting back to an environment where we have some degree of certainty and an understanding of what the world is going to look like from semester to semester, season to season, year to year, for at least a good period of time is something that I think everybody will welcome, because we just haven’t had that, and that’s a hard way to go.
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“No industry of any scope or magnitude operates in a completely chaotic, unchecked, untethered and unregulated world because that is unsustainable. The way we were operating, in my opinion, was completely unsustainable. Now, we have a chance to regroup.”
Said Chun: “For college athletics, the rate of change is still at high velocity. Change is still going to continue to happen. But at least we’re going from an unregulated environment towards to an environment with some rules.”
How revenue sharing (and the new NIL clearinghouse) will work
Speaking in front of thousands of administrators last month, NCAA president Charlie Baker called the settlement and the revenue-sharing era “one of the biggest changes ever in college sports.” It also comes at quite a cost. Everyone in that room understood that the NCAA and its member schools were on the hook for nearly $2.8 billion dollars in back-pay damages, paid out over the next decade to athletes who were unable to monetize their NIL from 2016 to 2021. (NIL payments from third parties to athletes became legal on July 1, 2021.)
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But, Baker said, it could have been far worse had the NCAA taken the case to trial and lost.
“Blame whoever you wish to blame. But the simple truth is clear: College sports’ collective inability or unwillingness to change years ago put the entire enterprise at risk,” Baker said at the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics’ annual convention. “Is the settlement disruptive? Very much so. But it is an opportunity for the (Division) I community to pay for back damages over 10 years, instead (of) triple that amount all at once.
“It creates a future that comes with choices, instead of bankruptcy.”
The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC were named defendants in the House case, so their schools automatically opted into the settlement and its stipulations. Other Division I schools had to choose whether to opt in or opt out of the new model.
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Opting in means they will be able to pay their athletes up to $20.5 million per year. They will also be subject to rules, regulation and enforcement from the CSC, the entity tasked with determining that each school is in compliance with the cap — and that NIL deals athletes sign are for deals with a valid business purpose and tied to compensation in line with similar deals from other athletes and/or endorsers. An NIL clearinghouse, run by Deloitte and called NIL Go, must approve all deals worth more than $600.
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Learfield executive vice president Solly Fulp, whose company partners with and represents the multimedia rights for more than 100 schools, said he believes the next arms race in college sports will be around what he calls “real NIL.”
“Real NIL is the exchange of goods and services between a student-athlete and a brand partner,” Fulp said. “I think that that was what it was intended to be all along.”
A high-profile example of real star power leading to a valuable endorsement deal is Caitlin Clark’s deal with State Farm while playing at Iowa. But other examples are happening daily in college towns, from a gymnast who loves chocolate milk partnering with the state’s dairy association for social media posts to an athlete who lost a loved one who partners with an organ donation drive at a local hospital. Those are the types of deals Learfield (and other companies) can help facilitate for athletes at their partner schools.
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Fulp said Power 4 schools are interested in finding third-party NIL deals to compensate their athletes above the $20.5 million annual cap that they’re maxing out. He said Group of 5 schools are interested in finding third-party NIL deals to supplement whatever revenue sharing they can afford, in some cases well below that maximum of $20.5 million.
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The $20.5 million for the 2025-26 academic year is no arbitrary figure. It is 22 percent of the average revenue of a Power 4 athletic department, including ticket sales and media rights distributions. It will be recalculated every three years (with the same formula), and in the years in between calculations, it will increase by four percent from the previous year to address inflation.
Schools must decide what they will pay their athletes and how they will divvy it up. The $20.5 million total for this year (which runs from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026) includes all sports. Many schools have said publicly that they plan to spend about 75 percent of that amount on football players, with most of the remaining amount spent on men’s and women’s basketball players. Some schools, such as Oklahoma, will distribute money to baseball players, softball players and gymnasts. Each athletic department must choose where to direct its money; anything spent on a dominant Olympic sport — like the dynastic Oklahoma softball program — takes away from the amount available to all others. But if it’s important to your school, your history and your community, it’s a sport that demands investment.
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“Where you allocate those dollars is going to dictate the present and the future of your program,” Chun said. “In the most recent environment, it seemed to reward the schools that spent the most money. In this new environment, it should reward the schools that spend money the smartest. … And there’s the market correction coming for all these sports, specifically football, men’s basketball — one that’s maybe a couple years in the making.”
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Front-loaded deals and anticipated future rule-breaking
NIL collectives have operated largely unchecked for the past few years, with very few penalties for deals with athletes that amounted to recruiting inducements and/or pay-for-play. So, football players could sign with the highest bidder in an uncapped system. And they could enter the transfer portal with immediate eligibility to play elsewhere, which allowed them to create a bidding war again. And again.
These contracts were called NIL deals because NIL deals were legal, but administrators now call that an inflated or false market. A backup offensive lineman’s name, image and likeness was not actually worth $100,000 in endorsement deals — because he wasn’t actually being paid for his influence, he was being paid to play football. But collectives, schools, coaches and players couldn’t call it that.
“For somebody to just slide you a few dollars because they want you to come to or stay at a certain school and call it NIL, that’s make-believe, that’s not a real thing,” Bobinski said. “That is the recruiting insanity that we’ve allowed to drive too many behaviors.”
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Said Chun: “We have to get out of this fraudulent world.”
In the months leading up to Judge Claudia Wilken’s final approval of the House settlement, that so-called inflated market reached new heights. Collectives began front-loading deals to pay players a lump sum ahead of the settlement approval and the implementation of the NIL clearinghouse — believing six- and seven-figure deals from collectives with few deliverables might not be approved by Deloitte.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Missouri’s collective Every True Tiger spent $25 million so far this year on NIL (with $10.3 million in early June alone, ahead of NIL Go’s launch). Ohio State booster Brian Schottenstein, co-founder of Buckeye collective THE Foundation, told the Wall Street Journal this week that Ohio State’s football payroll this year will be in the $30-35 million range, alongside the highest-paying football programs in the country. Schottenstein told the newspaper that he expects NIL numbers to decrease in the future because of “the new ‘fair market’ clearinghouse.” Payments count against the annual cap based on when they are paid out to the athlete.
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“What happened during March, April, May and June, leading up to the actual settlement implementation date was really a hangover from the last two and a half years of insanity,” Bobinski said. “People were like, ‘OK, this is my last chance before I go on that diet, so I’m going to go to that all-you-can-eat buffet one more time and really load up.
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“I’d like to think we’ve gotten that out of our system.”
Bobinski said he believes that college administrators and coaches who have been complaining about a lack of regulations have to agree to be governed moving forward. That includes the enforcement arm of the CSC; if a school skirts the rules by paying athletes more than the capped amount, it needs to be penalized.
“Someone is inevitably going to test the system and try to do things to gain some advantage,” Bobinski said. “Once that comes to light, I believe this entity has to be swift. They have to be efficient. They have to be really firm in their decision-making, and penalties have to be severe. They have to change behaviors, or else we’re all going to just evolve back to not trusting anybody else.”
Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said that he and his peers need to commit themselves to giving the new system a chance to work. They have to follow rules. They have to sign a document that requires schools to waive their right to pursue legal challenges against the CSC, which should prevent lawsuits over enforcement decisions. (There is an arbitration process for challenges to enforcement actions and also NIL Go deal denials.)
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“I do know that there are any number of people out there that don’t want this to work,” Castiglione said. “There will undoubtedly be challenges to both the process as well as what one entity deems as fair market value versus another entity thinking that it’s a fair market value agreement. We’re again expecting there to be some bumps.
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“Part of that is clarity in the process but also focus and discipline and following through on enforcement because people are still of a mind to believe it when they see it.”
A short-term solution
Castiglione did not mince his words when discussing the settlement and college athletics’ path forward.
“This is not, in its current form, a long-term solution. It’s not.,” he said. “It’s something that we have to make work now, as we work on a better path for exchanging rights and compensation to athletes that has a more durable element to it with contracts that can stand up to conflicts and pressure.”
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Asked whether he meant Congressional help (in the form of a narrow antitrust exemption) or collective bargaining with athletes directly, Castiglione said both. He is no lawyer but has spoken to enough in recent years to believe there may be a way to collectively bargain with athletes even if they are not employees (or unionized). But college athletes will move forward to a different model at some point, whether that is five, 10 or 15 years from now “that may or may not include athletes being employees,” Castiglione said.
That doesn’t mean college sports leaders are giving up on creating and enforcing rules in the meantime.
“I’d like to think that people that have a longer view, as opposed to just sort of the immediacy of, ‘How can I get an advantage or get an edge today?’ ” Bobinski said. “Thinking about the long-term viability of the enterprise, you have to, you have to be willing to buy into some sort of a rule package and rule structure. That’s how businesses and entities and organizations are regulated. Everybody lives within some framework.”
Chun hopes that multi-year contracts between athletes and schools end up being enforceable; he believes that would help stabilize the transfer portal. If buyout provisions (like those that exist for coaches’ contracts) exist for players, that would also add some heft to a school’s decision to take a transfer (and it would impact the school’s budgeting strategy). It might make more financial sense to prioritize the development of players already on one’s roster.
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It’s also possible that revenue-sharing contracts lead to a total overhaul of the recruiting process, Chun said. He thinks college sports will eventually end up with a rolling signing period because schools will be allocating a certain amount of money to a certain recruit. There can’t be National Signing Day surprises and hat-picking if you don’t know if you have money available for that prospect. Perhaps the system evolves into one in which an athlete can sign his or her written offer from a school at any time; right now, high school athletes can receive the offer at any point during their senior year of high school, but they cannot sign until the applicable signing dates.
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Challenges still to come
The ripple effects from the House settlement will be far-reaching. New roster limits for various sports has both paved the way for additional scholarships at some schools and hard decisions elsewhere, bringing cuts to funding programs a school deems not nationally competitive. Already, citing the increasing costs of a new collegiate athletic model, some Olympic sport programs have shuttered at universities like Louisiana-Monroe and Washington State.
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And there are other issues on the horizon for the enterprise at large, too. Experts expect imminent legal challenges on two fronts — Title IX in the revenue-sharing era, and NIL compensation restrictions and/or the annual cap for school payments.
“Attorneys in this space have been pretty vocal that they can’t wait to go after this clearinghouse if and when they start turning down deals,” said lawyer Kristi Dosh, the author of The Athlete’s NIL Playbook. “There’s a pretty good argument that this is an antitrust violation.”
“There’s not a good rationale for having it because we don’t see this in any other space. The university isn’t monitoring what sponsorship deals a YouTube influencer is getting. We don’t see pro sports monitoring what their athletes are getting. What argument can the NCAA or schools go make in a court of law about why it is necessary in this space when we don’t see it anywhere else? That’s going to be really tough for the NCAA to defend, and so I expect we will see some legal action around that.”
But Dosh is even more interested to see the inevitable Title IX lawsuits. Multiple appeals have already been filed to challenge the gender breakdown of the House settlement’s backpay damages. But she is not alone in expecting lawyers to take up the cause on behalf of current and future female athletes, too.
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“We are waiting to see which school or schools are the first ones sued — not whether or not colleges will be sued, over their revenue sharing plans,” said Alexis Trumble, an associate attorney at Parker Poe in Atlanta, focused on advising colleges and universities on Title IX issues, gender equity, and college athletics.
A Title IX lawsuit would need to be filed against an individual school, arguing against the way that school decided to divide its revenue-sharing money. Some schools are using the same formula lawyers used to calculate damages by sport to divide up revenue-sharing money, which could be a weak legal argument, Trumble said.
If a school’s distribution formula is tied to revenue production or media exposure, it would have a stronger case, she added. But until a court decides, Trumble said no one will know exactly how Title IX’s provisions will govern the revenue-sharing era. Would it be provisions related to proportionality, like those that govern scholarships, or those that govern other forms of financial assistance, like summer school financial assistance, that are made available to athletes of both genders but are not mandated to be proportionally paid out? That could affect whether total money paid out to athletes or the number of revenue-share deals need to be more equal between the genders on a campus. Or perhaps not.
These are the questions that do not yet have answers, even as more structure and regulation returns to the collegiate athletic environment. It’s true for Title IX and it’s true for capping compensation in any capacity: There may not be real certainty until the courts have a say.
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“At a certain point, schools have to consider what their risk tolerance is — how much legal exposure they’re willing to withstand, and how to balance that potential legal exposure as large or as small as it may be, depending on what level schools decide to compensate student athletes for their name, image and likeness,” Trumble said. “For some schools that risk tolerance is going to be pretty high because they want to be as competitive as the powerhouse down the street. There are other schools that are going to play it extremely by the books, take a wait and see, approach and figure out who’s getting sued and for what, so that they can pivot quickly.”
Schools know which approach they’re taking. They know there are lawsuits still to come that will continue to shape the college landscape. Athletic directors and coaches alike know it’s all going to be messy, but they hope it’s better than how it’s been the last four years.
“Yes, it’s going to be awkward,” Chun said. “Yes, there’s going to be a lot of tension in the system because of it, but now that we have rules, regulations, a new governance model, and enforcement. Things are going to have to change, and it’s going to be for the overall health the college sports.”
