Landmark House Settlement Approval is Only the Beginning

What should’ve happened a long time ago is finally happening.

Colleges and universities, the ones benefitting from multi-billion dollar television contracts, will be allowed to directly pay athletes (in all sports), beginning on July 1.

There are limitations and an enforcement body will be formed, but the people who actually play games that earn conferences (and by extension its schools) billions of dollars through TV contracts alone will finally get a piece of that pie.

This is a historic moment in college sports, but don’t rest easy. This is only the beginning.

Here are the main highlights of the settlement approval:

• Schools will be allowed to offer full scholarships to all athletes;

• Schools are limited to paying no more than $20.5 million to athletes next year (and increasing in further years), plus $2.7 billion over the next decade to thousands of former players who were barred from participating in revenue sharing since 2016;

• Each school will get to decide how to distribute that money amongst its athletes, but many schools are expected to put most of that money towards football and men’s basketball;

• A College Sports Commission will be created to serve as the enforcement arm of this new era in college sports and will be led by MLB’s executive vice president, legal & operations Bryan Seely; and

• A NIL clearinghouse, called “NIL Go” will be formed to enforce new restrictions. Any third-party NIL deals paying more than $600 will have to be approved by the clearinghouse.

Some of those points will lead to legal challenges, including some federal antitrust lawsuits which the NCAA is hoping the federal government will bail them out of.

Then there’s a question of are athletes school employees? Could there be a Title IX lawsuit if women’s sports hardly receive any money? Do student-athletes need to form a union (which can’t be done unless they’re employees)? Will the CSC actually be able to enforce rules?

Finally, the biggest question of them all, how will people attempt to cheat the system?

We know it’s going to happen. Right now, it’s too murky to guess how, but someone will try and, more than likely, succeed. The CSC will be the entity responsible and stopping that all of that, but good luck.

Vanderbilt Commodores On SI: