Court settlement allows schools to pay athletes

[Cobra Mgr]

Sports media is making like this is a big deal. I personally don't see how.

Schools can pay players $20.5M per school. Not per team. Per school. Imagine you are an athletic dept like Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas, UNC or Michigan. You have programs at elite status in multiple sports. That $20.5M gets spread thin fast. And what about women's sports? Schools like SCarolina & UConn have women driving their flagship programs.

NIL $ is still going to be the driving force. How is an oversight committee going to determine what NIL deal is "legit"? How do they enforce the rules? What prevents someone from just giving a player X amount of dollars and not tie it to an NIL contract at all? And why would that need to be prevented?

I don't see how this is reform. Boosters and collectives are still going to be the major influencers in college sports. The schools are now just being allowed to leave a "tip".

Meanwhile, schools are still lobbying Congress to enact legislation to prevent "student-athletes" from being designated employees. They are afraid of unionization. Which I can see why the former blatant "cheaters" of college sports wouldn't want that. But for the majority, being able to sign a CBA would bring some control to the chaos college sports has become.

They also want antitrust exemptions. For what purpose? Article says to limit the players' earning power. Why? If schools are capped at what they can pay by the court, how is it that they are affected by players getting paid from bank accounts elsewhere?

[Syd Thrift]

Yeah, while I'm sure there will be "harm", I just don't see how making everything above the board hurts colleges. 20M is really not that much money for a modern athletics organization. If you don't want to pay out anything to anyone, you don't have to. You might lose out on some of the top athletes but that's the price you pay (and I imagine that if you're the Stanford rowing team you can still bring in plenty of good student-athletes with the allure of, you know, being Stanford).

Like, who are Alabama or Florida trying to fool here? Nobody's going to those schools for their world-class academic programs. They've always been plowing money into their athletic programs, the only difference now being that instead of automatically plowing it all into their coaches and facilities they have $20M they can also give directly to players (instead of trying to convince an alumnus to hand their 18 year old star lacrosse player an ad campaign for Frank's Delicious Butter or something).

The concept of the student-athlete has been dead since the 1910s. Will this "kill" college athletics in the sense that it will probably help exacerbate the tier system where some places act like a semi-pro league for 18-23 year olds and some keep their amateur athletics amateur? Yes, sure, probably. Does redistributing the wealth even just a teeny tiny bit towards the young people who actually bring the revenue back in for their athletic programs make more sense? Absolutely.

[Hrycaj]

The 20.5 million may not be a lot but you can bet they will find a way to make the students and the fans through talent fee’s (both tuition and tickets) cover as much as the cost as possible.