When it comes to the settlement of House vs. NCAA, there is a lot of legal language to sift through to fully understand the scope of a complicated settlement process, which will means billions in backpay to former college athletes. But here's the overarching through line that will alter college football's future forever: Revenue sharing is here.
That's it. That's the rub. Players will no longer be paid in McDonald's bag or through wink, wink name, image and likeness deals. Soon, perhaps in the fall of 2025, schools will directly pay their student athletes with a pool of money that's expected to be around $20 million a year.
How much of that will go to football players? How will these changes impact roster sizes? What happens to collectives? Let's dig into all those questions with a brief FAQ:
How Much Will Football Players Get Paid?
Welcome to the salary cap era of college football.
It won't be a true salary cap on paper, but that's thereadof what will occur talking to sources around the sport. How schools choose to distribute revenue is expected to be at the discretion of each school, which means athletic departments will have to figure out how to best split the around $20 million in distributed revenue. Do you funnel it all toward the money-making sports of football and basketball? Do schools protect themselves from potential Title IX lawsuits and split the revenue evenly between women's and men's sports? Do they choose to spread the revenue creatively n an attempt to be more competitive in different sports?
That's all an unknown at this point.
"If there's no sport-specific cap ... that'll be telling on who cares about winning in what," said one Power Four General Manager.
But given that football is the big cash cow of college athletics, I'd expect most P-4 schools to funnel much of that around $20 million to its football program. Right now, an upper-end football roster in the P-4 costs more than $10 million a year. That floor could double come 2025.
Will There Still Be NIL?
Yes. But probably not to the degree we've seen in this chaos era of college athletics.
Players will still be allowed to utilize their NIL rights and make money by striking brand deals. It also would not be a surprise to see schools distribute the revenue by striking a contract that allows them to purchase exclusive use of a player's NIL rights.
Will Collectives Still Exist?
Yes, but this is where the idea of "NIL" – at least the pay-for-play version of NIL fans have come to know – becomes more complicated.
Collectives aren't going to go away. In some ways, their role may become even more important. Let's say a school is capped at distributing $20 million in revenue. How do you get ahead in that scenario at a donor-rich, competitive school? You offer more to players on top of the revenue split via NIL. That's where collectives can still play a role, allowing aggressive schools to go above and beyond that $20 million number.
Some schools are already raising 10-plus million a year. That could mean some schools are working with a salary cap of $30 million instead of $20 million.
"Collectives aren't going to go away if there's a salary cap," The Collective Association President Russell White told CBS Sports. "Universities will continue to want to compete above and beyond (the base revenue shares)."
There is, however, a question of how NIL will be enforced in this new era.
I'd expect many schools to bring their collectives in-house, which should circumvent some of the, ahem, craziness we've seen in recent years; think a $13.85 million promise to a high school quarterback that's led to a very prominent lawsuit.
But will the NCAA have more teeth in terms of enforcement given the new rules? Will another enforcement entity arise? We'll see. It seems like the NCAA would have more legal standing to do so after this settlement. But this is also a different sort of problem to solve. Previously, the NCAA was enforcing amateurism. This is monitoring a salary cap. Very different jobs.
What Happens To The Transfer Portal?
It likely becomes less important. Currently, the portal is a critical piece of roster construction. Most Power Four schools are signing 10-plus players every cycle in an effort to improve their rosters and plug holes.
That could change under this new system.
With schools able to sign deals with players directly, we're much more likely to see schools ink players to multi-year, binding contracts. That is much different than the current system where collectives have no real recourse if a player wants to transfer away from the program. Sure, a player might miss out on some dollars remaining on their deals. But those NIL contracts don't lock a player and prevent them from choosing to transfer.What contracts between schools and players will look like is a mystery at this point. Though, Yahoo's Ross Dellenger reports there have been discussions of buyout clauses.
Either way, the era of revenue distribution is expected to bring more stability to the sport and bring dollar values more in the open. That gives players far less leverage than they have now, when they can hop in the portal and force other schools to all but negotiate in blind faith.
The combination of longer contracts and bigger dollars at every school is likely to create a slightly more stable transfer portal environment.
How Big Will Rosters Be?
Roster sizes are one of the biggest remaining questions that stems from this settlement.
CBS Sports' Brandon Marcello reports the Power Four conferences are expected to re-design their governance structure, which will include the ability for programs to provide unlimited scholarships and restructuring roster limits. That could mean many more scholarships for sports like baseball – currently baseball is limited to only providing 11.7 scholarships per year – but also will likely mean a reduction in the amount of football players per team. Right now, schools are allowed to have 85 scholarship football players but an unlimited number of walk-ons. The new rules could greatly limit the number of football players per school, perhaps down to 85 or 90.
Will that impact the talent distribution of the sport? I doubt it. If anything, every school working with a similar salary cap floor could even the playing field a bit. The haves will always out-spend the have nots, and this is where extra NIL dollars would come into play. But if every P-4 school can manage to get up to $20 million each a year then most schools will at least have the ability to competitively negotiate against each other.
