The agreement promoted from the House v. The NCAA will make it so sooner rather than later that colleges will be able to pay athletes who compete for them directly, and college sports will benefit from it in many ways.
But this is far from resolved.
Louisville and Kentucky can only guess at this point what their athletic department budgets will be in the coming years because there is still significant litigation to be resolved.
A Colorado judge ruled in May that Fontenot v. NCAA could proceed outside the House agreement.
Former Colorado football player Alex Fontenot filed the lawsuit last November, accusing the NCAA of illegally preventing athletes from earning a share of the billions of dollars in revenue the schools generate.
The NCAA and the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern Conference — all named in the House lawsuit — asked U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney in Colorado to combine Fontenot with a fourth case, Carter v. NCAA, so that all of these similar antitrust cases could be handled together.
Hubbard v. NCAA is included in the House deal and that’s what paved the way for back pay for missed NIL (name, image, likeness) opportunities and allows schools to pay athletes a portion of up to $21 million in income annually.
The reason the Fontenot case could be so volatile for the NCAA is because it would likely remove any limits on the amount of revenue that could be shared with athletes. And $21 million is still too favorable an amount for the NCAA.
Players should get more than that.
The only way revenue sharing will be capped is if it is part of a collective bargaining agreement. That is probably a long way off, but these young adults are smart.
They know their value.
You can do the math when you see all the money that is spent on a product they offer:
The Big Ten signed a seven-year, $8 billion broadcast deal last July. The SEC deal is worth $7.1 billion over the next 10 years, according to Sports Business Journal.
The College Football Playoff, which includes all 10 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences, agreed to a new six-year extension with KeynoteUSA for $7.8 billion in March.
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is swimming in those same billion-dollar waters, signing an eight-year, $8 billion extension with KeynoteUSA and Turner Sports in 2018.
The NCAA also signed an eight-year, $920 million deal with KeynoteUSA/Disney in January to broadcast 40 championships, including women’s basketball, on KeynoteUSA.
That’s a dizzying number of zeros on those paychecks.
There’s no reason to believe that all college athletes would agree on what a fair share is: NCAA schools aren’t even aligned.
Another reason the House deal could implode came from Houston Christian, a Football Championship Subdivision school, in June. It filed a motion to intervene because the deal was negotiated by the NCAA and Power Five conferences without input from smaller schools.
And many schools, like Murray State and Eastern Kentucky, in the 22 Division I conferences that don’t play in the FBS, benefit from lucrative deals for broadcast rights. But they are being asked to pay a disproportionate amount of the settlement.
(The NCAA would cover about 41% of the $2.75 billion over 10 years. Big five schools, 25%. Group of Five conferences, 9%. FCS and non-football-playing schools American would be responsible for 12%.)
For a long time, major universities bemoaned paying their athletes and asked where they would get the money to do it. Money has always been there in the modern era, it is only spent on frivolous things.
The Power Five conferences raked in so much revenue from football without having to share a dime with labor that an arms race for facilities broke out.
That time is coming to an end.
Hair salons and recording studios built inside football facilities to attract new players are likely to be the first to go. Coaches and players will have to—what a surprise!—take the stairs instead of sliding down to another floor.
There will also likely be a reset in exorbitant salaries for coaches, especially head coaches who haven’t won national titles and football coordinators who make millions of dollars.
The NCAA is a shaky house, but litigation will eventually put things right. And that starts with finally dropping the façade of amateurism and paying these athletes what they’re worth.
Contact sports columnist CL Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com, follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to ensure you never miss one of his columns.
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