College GameDay addresses need for buy-in to new college landscape after House settlement

Late last Friday, California district judge Claudia Wilken gave final approval for the landmark House v. NCAA settlement that officially ends college sports’ long-standing “amateurism” model and ushers in revenue-sharing that will allow Division I schools to provide direct financial payments to student-athletes.

Beginning July 1, Power conference schools — and non-Power conference programs that opt into the settlement by June 30 — will be able to share as much as $20.5 million with athletes, with football expected to receive approximately 75%, followed by men’s basketball (15%), women’s basketball (5%) and the remainder of sports (5%). The amount shared in revenue will increase annually.

Power conference football programs are expected to have an additional $13-16 million to spend on rosters beginning with the 2025 season, according to On3’s Pete Nakos. Many schools have front-loaded contracts ahead of the settlement’s approval, allowing them to skirt the new rules and take advantage of contracts not vetted by the newly-formed Deloitte clearinghouse NIL Go before June 7. NIL Go will approve all future third-party NIL deals over $600 moving forward while the new College Sports Commission will enforce the settlement’s terms and regulate revenue-sharing, third-party NIL deals and roster limits.

There has obviously been some initial pushback, especially from non-defendant/non-Power conferences as well as from Title IX defenders and employment advocates, prompting the ESPN College GameDay crew to discuss how much actual buy-in college sports can expect with the new post-House world order.

Rece Davis on College Sports Commission enforcement: ‘Don’t kill the ant with a sledgehammer but punish it appropriately’

“I do think it has a chance, but like anything else in life, business, the world, it depends on the people doing it and whether they will – enough of them, all of them won’t. Some of them will make a 100-percent whole-hearted effort to make this work and abide by the outline created,” College GameDay host Rece Davis said on Wednesday’s episode of the College GameDay Podcast. “Most will be somewhere in the middle, they’ll mostly try as long as everybody else is trying. And then there will be a few over on the side that will not care, think it’s not going to work, think it doesn’t behoove them to follow it, think they can’t win under those circumstances and will try something else.

“That’s the way every business in the world operates, and the idea is can you limit that and punish that when it’s discovered appropriately. Don’t kill the ant with a sledgehammer but punish it appropriately when it happens.”

ESPN insider Pete Thamel then questioned the motives for any detractors of the House settlement, citing nearly two years of background work done by the Settlement Implementation Committee made up of select Power Five athletic directors.

“I think it would be a good Rorschach test to ask are you more skeptical of the rules or the people following the rules. Now there’s reason to be skeptical of the rules, they’re new and there’s this entirely new system and you’re not going to create a perfect system,” Thamel added. “We’ve seen a billion of these committees – committees to pick committees, committees on this and that – and they all largely fail. This committee is full of smart people – the implementation committee – that are good, well-meaning people that put together the best idea they could. But the actors have earned a lot more skepticism than the rule-makers.”