After nearly five years of litigation, a federal judge on the night of Friday, June 6 granted final approval to a settlement of three athlete-compensation antitrust cases against the NCAA and the Power Five conferences that is now set to fundamentally change college sports.
Unless altered on appeal, the arrangement will allow — though not require — schools to directly pay their athletes for the use of their name, image and likeness (don’t call it pay for play), subject to an annual cap based on a percentage of a defined set of Power Five athletics department revenues. These payments could begin July 1.
Current and former athletes, over a 10-year period, will receive shares of $2.8 billion in damages (as will the lawyers who represented them).
For schools that opt in to paying their athletes, the NCAA’s current system of sport-by-sport athletic scholarship limits will be scrapped in favor of sport-by-sport roster limits. However, after U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken initially refused to approve the settlement because implementation of the limits starting with the 2025-26 school year would have resulted in thousands of athletes losing their spots on Division I teams, the deal was revised in a fashion that effectively could delay full implementation of the limits for several years. The elimination of the scholarship limit will result in new athletic scholarships being awarded.
