Colleges Pay Athletes Now
Just like that, the war is won
The biggest things can happen in the smallest rooms.
I chose the image above because it captures how I imagine this all going. A bunch of relatively anonymous figures, who — sorry — are really only significant in this instance because of the interests they represent, making a decision.
Those figures are the powers that be in college sports: the aptly named Power Five conferences, as well as the suits out in front, the NCAA. The decision they’ve made goes against just about every other decision they’ve made in their modern history. It is not one they wanted to make. But together, in a room, they decided on a change, and it’s an awfully big one.
In one voice, they voted to settle a massive lawsuit and usher in a new era for the business — yes, the business — they trade in. We can call it that now.
Remember amateurism? That long-held mantra, masquerading as pseudo-legal doctrine when convenient? Yeah, so, that’s done now.
Major universities will start directly paying college athletes come 2025, and it’s hard to overstate what that means. After decades of saying they could never afford it — not all of which was just a lie, but much of which was at the very least a self-interested, unexplored half-truth — they’re doing it. This is really happening.
Arch Manning will be paid a salary before he reaches the NFL. Not by an NIL sponsor, like Panini America (which is somehow a trading card company rather than a sandwich conglomerate; missed opportunity), but by the University of Texas. Guess he didn’t need that $600 from EA Sports after all.
Permission to speak freely? That is fucking crazy. It shouldn’t feel this way, and someday it won’t, because this has been the right thing to do for a long time now. But here and now, at the end of a long and winding road, it’s nothing short of revolutionary. It is, without question, the single biggest change in the history of college sports.
It’s not everyday that we see systems of this scale disrupted in such a fashion. It’s unusual that we see them even meaningfully inconvenienced. The system that has governed college sports for generations is now upturned, and I don’t think it’s coming back.
A significant sum of the money generated by this popular enterprise will now make its way to the people that power the engine: the players. Imagine that.
How significant a sum? Under the terms as we currently understand them, the outlay will be somewhere around $20 million per school, per year. How will that sum be divided? Unclear. Not evenly, I think we can safely say. Expect some drama there. The NCAA and its member schools do still cling to at least one tradition, that being a “we’ll figure it out later” approach to big decisions.
Settlement does not mean settled, you could say. The reason this is all happening, for those who still haven’t listened to our docuseries on this, The Option — for shame! — is because of a class action antitrust lawsuit called House v. NCAA.
Essentially, athletes who were competing in college prior to the legalization of NIL argued that they should be compensated for the money they could’ve made in the course of their careers had NIL been a thing sooner. They accused the NCAA of illegally barring them from potential earnings.
Athletes were seeking quite a bit in damages. They’ll now receive $2.8 billion.
As is so often the case in the American legal system, resolution came not from a trial, but from the defendants’ realization that they would not be best served to let a trial happen. The NCAA and co. ran the numbers, saw they were screwed, and coughed up a couple billion smackaroos.
It’s worth noting that the NCAA — as ever, on the behalf of schools like Texas — fought hard in the Alston case to avoid paying athletes a figure of $5,980. That was the amount at issue in the case that the NCAA brashly took to the Supreme Court and penned its own upheaval.
Intransigence had been their approach for so long. For decades, they gave no quarter. Now, they’ll be handing out a good deal more than that.
Many, many, many questions remain.
What’s the system? I heard the first part. Schools are paying athletes. Got it. But uh… how? How do we do this without submarining athletic budgets, as administrators have long warned would happen? Will this further undermine the enforcement of Title IX? What’s the fallout for everyone else outside of the Power Five? Don’t know. No one does.
What becomes of the NCAA? If nothing else, this deal ties the conferences into their superstructure for another decade, so there’s a lot of self-preservation at play there. They just want to still be in charge, you know? Relatable.
Will Congress still have a say in how this turns out? Possibly. To quote myself — my favorite source — if it’s federal legislation that you need, I sure hope you’re not in a hurry. It is an election year, I’m told. Big as it is, this doesn’t top anyone’s list in Washington at the moment.
But it’s been at the top of my list for a good while now, and I gotta say. It’s a good reminder. Things can get better.
They just did.
Also, This
🏠 I think I might do some reporting to write a longer piece on all this, so let me know if that’s something you’d like to see. Until then, if you feel like playing catch-up on the docuseries, now would be a great time to steep yourself in the healing waters of context:
🏌️ I do still have a LIV-PGA piece coming, which has now been pushed to next week on account of this college sports #bombshell. But I can’t just not comment on Scottie Scheffler’s kerfuffle with the Louisville PD, now can I? I’m prepared to say that the video of the incident does not appear to match the arresting officer’s story. He’d described being dragged by Scheffler’s car, and I’m sure not seeing that. In fairness, there were clues that this might have been exaggerated. For instance, this cannot ever be a line in a story I’m meant to take seriously:
🐺 The Wolves came back from 20 down (in the second half) to win a Game 7 in Denver’s building, a game in which Ant shot 6/24. Remarkable to down the defending champs despite that. We’re having a pretty good playoffs in the West, despite all the injuries in the East, as Tyrese Haliburton now joins the ranks of the fallen. Dallas looked pretty sharp on Wednesday, so here’s hoping we get another series to remember.
📺 Charles Barkley isn’t pulling punches with the writing on the wall for Inside the NBA. He didn’t call Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav a “knucklehead” verbatim, but I feel that’s what he meant. On the bright side, he also mentioned a contingency plan: having everyone, including Ernie, sign on with his production company and licensing the show so they can keep making it even if (read: when) TNT officially loses NBA rights. There’s a thought. Wouldn’t you love to swoop on in and have that if you’re one of the new guys? Amazon? NBC? Interested?
⚜️ I’m coming around on the Cardinals’ recently unveiled City Connect jerseys. They’re pretty inoffensive, and I support a Nelly reference wherever it can be made. They won’t get a ton of points for creativity — they’re the batting practice jerseys with river squiggles, more or less — but I’ve warmed to putting red in the rotation. It’s tough to watch a hype video for a bottom-five squad, but at least we got new shirts. So there’s a Winn:
