College athletics are set for a seismic shakeup.
In less than three weeks, Division I athletic programs around the nation for the first time will begin directly paying players, transforming athletic departments and college leagues into semi-professional enterprises.
The change comes after a federal judge on June 6 approved the historic House v. NCAA settlement agreement, which resolves a trio of antitrust cases against the NCAA and its most powerful conferences.
The settlement establishes a new, capped revenue-sharing model that permits each athletic department in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Southeastern Conference to distribute up to 22% of income to players that’s generated from sources such as ticket sales and lucrative network TV deals.
In the 2025-2026 season, that equals around $20.5 million for each college to pay out as name, image and likeness (NIL) revenue. The cap will increase 4% over each of the next three years before a full revaluation in the fourth year.
Other Division I colleges outside of the power conferences can also opt into the revenue-share model, but associations such as the Ivy League have already said they would not join the agreement.
Former Division I student-athletes are also set to benefit from the settlement. The NCAA and the conferences, as defendants in the antitrust case, have agreed to pay nearly $2.8 billion in back damages to those who were not allowed to sign NIL deals, dating back to 2016.
NCAA President Charlie Baker admitted in an open letter that there will be “bumps in the road” as athletic departments transition to the new policies implemented in the agreement, but he argued those challenges will lead to major improvements to college sports.
“Opportunities to drive transformative change don’t come often to organizations like ours,” he said. “It’s important we make the most of this one.”
Winners, losers and lawsuits
But some sports analysts say the changes will create a setlist of winners and losers and will almost certainly lead to legal challenges that could fundamentally alter how the new agreement unfolds in the coming years.
Per the settlement, universities are free to pay athletes any amount they choose. Many schools have already announced that football programs will receive 75% of revenue, men’s basketball will get 15% and women’s basketball 5%, explained Jayma Meyer, a sports lawyer and law professor at Indiana University. The leftovers will be divvied up amongst the slew of other college sports.
“You can see that gross inequity in terms of where the money will go,” Meyer said. “In addition to the inequitable money going to women, it also means there will be less money for all the other sports, and I feel that particularly is going to hurt the Olympic sports.”
Eight female athletes have already filed an appeal to the settlement, arguing it violates Title IX, the federal law requiring colleges to offer equitable opportunities to women, including in sports.
The appeal only addresses the back damages portion of the settlement, most of which will go to former football and men’s basketball star players at the biggest schools, experts said.
Ashlyn Hare, one of the attorneys representing the students, said in a statement that the settlement “deprives female athletes of $1.1 billion.”
“Paying out the money as proposed would be a massive error that would cause irreparable harm to women’s sports,” she said. “This is a football and basketball damages settlement with no real benefit to female athletes.”
The appeal is set to delay payments to hundreds of thousands of athletes by a minimum of several months, according to a statement issued by the law firm representing the plaintiffs.
Some of the biggest-name college athletes could also end up making less money under the agreement, explained Steve Ross, co-director of the Penn State Center for the Study of Sport in Society.
Since 2021, when players were first permitted to earn income from outside NIL deals, school-affiliated donor collectives have, by some estimates, poured up to $1 billion into third-party NIL agreements to recruit top-tier talent.
Those collectives will likely be curtailed under the agreement, which now requires all outside NIL deals of more than $600 to go through the newly established College Sports Commission to determine whether the payments are for a valid business purpose and reflect fair market value.
Star players have been receiving multi-million-dollar payouts from donor-funded NIL collectives, but will now likely see less financial compensation under the new salary-cap model, explained Ross.
“I would estimate that the most elite athletes at the top programs are now worse off,” he said. “Athletes will be paid based on the revenue they are generating for the college, not based on the willingness of wealthy booster alumni to pay for their services.”
The revenue-share cap could also cripple large universities’ ability to attract elite student-athletes to bolster their teams, which could lay the grounds for states to challenge the House settlement, Ross noted.
“It’s clear that programs at Alabama and Auburn could get a lot better if they would just open the bank account and spend a lot of money to attract a really good recruiting class,” he said. “They can’t do that because of the salary cap in the house settlement.”
NCAA President Baker argued the revenue-share model will stabilize college sports following “a sense of chaos” that came from the former difficult-to-enforce NIL rules, which created “instability for schools, confusion for student-athletes and too often litigation,” he said.
Roster limits
The settlement agreement also fundamentally changes how NCAA Division I schools offer athletic scholarships, which for decades has been the go-to incentive to entice players to a university.
Under the new agreement, schools will be able to offer scholarships to every athlete on their roster. However, the settlement sets hard roster limits for each sport, which will lead to some students losing their spot on a team and force coaches to reconsider walk-on positions.
As an example, football rosters are now capped at 105, which will allow 20 more students to receive scholarships compared to the 85 before the agreement. Some high-profile programs carry as many as 140 players the roster, with dozens of walk-ons — players not on scholarship — filling out roster slots.. Baseball teams can now offer 22 more scholarships with a roster capped at 34.
Like with revenue sharing, colleges are free to determine how many, and which sports, receive scholarship funding.
Meyer, with Indiana University, said some schools are discussing more scholarships for baseball players. Still, Olympic sports such as women’s track, which can now offer 27 more scholarships, likely won’t see any increased funding despite more spots being available, she argued.
“There certainly are some schools that will offer more scholarship money … but overall, I don’t see this as a way to salvage the Olympic sports,” Meyer said.
Roster caps have received pushback from some in college athletics. James Franklin, football coach for Penn State, said he’s frustrated at the prospect of cutting players from his team loaded with 126 players.
“I don’t like it at all,” Franklin said in April during a press conference. “I’m a DII football player. I went to college on a $1,500 scholarship and a full Pell Grant … I’m fighting and scratching and clawing to hold on to what I believe college athletics is all about.”
But those traditional concepts of the student-athlete competing to build character and earn a degree will be radically redefined as the 10-year settlement rolls out on July 1, argued Ross with Penn State.
“It’s just a huge change from the traditional way that D1 athletic programs have operated,” he said. “And I estimate that compared to the way things used to be a decade ago, there are around 10,000 athletes who are much better off.”