Who is objecting to House, and why should I care? A primer, in Plain English:

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Sometimes, when you write as often as I do about off-the-field stuff in college sports, it’s easy to get too bogged down in the details. While tracking every tiny update in a massive story is valuable, sometimes it’s worth it to take a step back and try to translate everything into Plain English.

So for the folks who aren’t in the billable hours business, let me try to help you get up to speed on what’s happening with the House settlement and D1 college sports.

Okay, I probably should know better, but I don’t actually know what the House settlement is, and at this point, I’m afraid to ask.

That’s okay. This is a safe space.

When you see reporters or lawyers or ADs talking about the House settlement, they’re not talking about the US House. They’re talking about the proposed settlement to House v NCAA. The proposed settlement to this antitrust case would provide millions of dollars in back damages to athletes, permit schools to distribute up to $20.5 million directly to athletes, and create an entirely new system of rules for college sports governance, touching everything from roster limits to NIL deal monitoring.

A useful way to think of this settlement, I think, is that it would function as something similar to the Collective Bargaining Agreement that governs labor rules in most US professional sports. It won’t be a real CBA, since college athletes aren’t employees and had nobody bargain on their express behalf over the terms of the settlement, but it will function like a CBA.

I feel like I’ve been hearing about this settlement for months. Is it official yet? What’s the timeline here?

A fair question!

Judge Claudia Wilken granted preliminary approval for the settlement on October 7, 2024, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Anybody who wanted to object to the settlement terms had until Friday to do so. Now, Judge Wilken will review those objections before a fairness hearing scheduled for April 7.

Wilken could grant final approval of the settlement then, or take the arguments under consideration and issue an order several days (or weeks) later.

Okay, so the deadline to file objections was last Friday. Did anybody object?

Yup! Lots of people did. Specifically, more than 35 objections were filed. Generally, objections to the settlement center around three major concerns: roster limits, new antitrust concerns, and gender equity.

The gender equity argument, laid out in more detail here by Arthur J. Bryant, an expert in Title IX related litigation, centers around whether the proposed system of distributing back payments to athletes violates federal law. Via Bryant:

Title IX prohibits sex discrimination and requires equality, regardless of sport or revenues. If schools are providing money or treatment to men and women athletes, it has to be equal.

The proposed damages class distribution horribly violates that rule. When a group of women athletes objected at the preliminary approval hearing last September, class counsel said Title IX was not involved in the case, the settlement was not releasing any Title IX claims, and, “if there are damages claims for that, they should be asserted by someone in some other forum.”

…

And the proposed damages distribution violates Title IX. On Jan. 16, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which regulates Title IX, confirmed this fact. It announced that “compensation from a school for use of a student-athlete’s NIL qualifies as athletic financial assistance which, under Title IX, must be made available to male and female student-athletes in a manner that is substantially proportionate to the number of students of each sex participating in interscholastic or intercollegiate athletics at that school.”

Other objections pointed to the recent NIL guidance from the Biden administration as a reason to oppose the settlement.

Bryant also claims that the settlement violates existing antitrust laws, a claim made by others who filed objections. I am going to substantially paraphrase the antitrust objections here for our non-lawyer readers, and say that a core complaint raised is that the $20.5 figure essentially creates a new cap on athlete earnings that were not part of any collective bargaining process. Employers colluding to set a much higher cap than before is still colluding to set a cap, in their opinion.

Many athletes, as well as current D-I coaches, have also expressed major concerns over the roster limit portions of the proposed settlement. These limits would eliminate large swaths of walk-ons across the country, and even push other athletes off their current rosters. Over 150 athletes signed on to an objection to those roster limits here.

Athletes filed objections that came from all levels and athletic departments across D-I. The list includes track coaches in the Sun Belt, to LSU gymnast/mega influencer Olivia Dunne.

Also, a group of 60+ athletes who formally opt-ed out of the House settlement have filed their own antitrust suit against the NCAA. And finally, remember that big lawsuit in a Tennessee federal court about the NCAA’s ability to enforce NIL penalties on member schools? That lawsuit has apparently been settled.

Got all that? I know, it’s a lot. But TL;DR, many athletes, coaches, athlete advocates and lawyers are very concerned about the terms of the proposed settlement.

Okay, so what happens next?

While P4 schools have to follow the settlement’s terms, everybody else in D-I can decide if they want to opt in or not. Schools can change their decision every year, so opting out for this year doesn’t mean that you can’t opt in for next year (in fact, I have heard directly from a few schools that plan to do precisely that). Opting in allows a school the ability to share funds directly with athletes, although they are not obligated to share the full $20ish million dollars. Opting out means schools are not beholden to the roster size limits that everybody else needs to follow.

Why is the NCAA requiring schools to make a decision before the settlement is even approved? Great question. If you know, shoot me an email, because none of the ADs of Serious Professional Legal Minds I’ve asked seem to have any idea.

Besides the P5…P4…Pwhatever…who else is opting in?

I haven’t launched a formal tracker or anything, unless that’s the sort of thing you folks would actually find useful.

But I do know enough, from my own conversations with school leaders, and what I’ve read, to expect that the majority, if not a very strong majority, of D-I institutions plan to opt-into the settlement.

The specific rationale will vary from school to school, but broadly, many ADs are concerned that they simply won’t be able to be competitive on the recruiting trail if the majority of their conference peers are opting-in. It doesn’t matter if your conference rivals are only sharing a few million bucks, or that nobody’s recruiting profile is actually changing. Perception, in recruiting, is very often reality.

There will be exceptions. North Dakota State, for example, appears to be planning on opting out for this coming year, with North Dakota AD Bill Chaves telling InForum that he’s “leaning” towards opting out. For schools that are concerned about student enrollment numbers, the roster limits associated with opting in may be a cost that the school simply can’t swing at the moment.

But other strong FCS football programs are making different decisions. The CAA put out a statement last week saying every member institution will opt into the settlement. The Montana schools will reportedly opt in, as will Sacramento State.

While leagues will follow the CAA’s lead and make a decision as a group, I’m told other mid and low-major conferences will likely have a mix of teams opting in and out. The SoCon, for example, will include teams who are planning on opting in, planning on opting out, and planning on opting in for the 2026 season, according to multiple sources familiar with the thinking of member institutions.

The only league that I’ve seen that is completely out is the Ivy League. The gossip I’ve been hearing from coaches and junior administrative staffers is that multiple schools in the NEC and MAAC are leaning towards not participating, but I don’t know if there will be any conference-wide proclamation or anything. Schools that heavily rely on athlete tuition to meet institutional enrollment goals are going to have a harder time justifying following any new roster limit rule, in my informed opinion.

On some level, these decisions are academic. I FOIA for every public school’s budget each season, and there’s going to be a bunch of schools that are planning on opting into this settlement that do not actually generate $20 million bucks in revenue, let alone generate enough revenue to share $20 million dollars. You’re going to see many schools decide to adhere to roster limits, but only share two, three, or four million bucks across their department. That number isn’t likely to dissuade many athletes from transferring to an FBS school.

Okay, last question. Do you think this settlement will be approved?

It’s hard for me to say. Despite reading enough about antitrust law over the last year to satisfy any number of CLE requirements, I’m not actually a lawyer. Even if I find some of the arguments from the objectors to be persuasive, that doesn’t have any impact on whether Judge Wilken will change her mind.

I haven’t heard from many industry folks who expect the whole settlement to be shot down, nor have I read analysis from anybody who doesn’t have skin in the game suggesting the settlement is in jeopardy. Michael McCann seems to think the objections likely won’t be enough to force any changes, and I’m not sure if there will be much in those objection PDFs that Wilken wasn’t already familiar with.

But I do think it is reasonable to assume that whether the settlement is approved or not, many schools are planning on directly compensating their athletes. I also think it’s reasonable to assume that antitrust litigation will continue…both targeting this specific settlement, and future NCAA actions. The hope in Indianapolis is that House will represent an end to the association’s constant legal troubles. I…do not believe that.

The joke has gone from “insightful” to “completely beating a dead horse” at this point, but it’s still true. The biggest winner in college sports isn’t my Ohio State Buckeyes, or SEC basketball, or Going Pro In Something Other Than Sports. It’s billable hours.

We’re gonna have a whole bunch over the next few weeks….and they’re not gonna stop, no matter what happens in April.

I wasn’t kidding about FOIAing all those budgets, by the way.

We currently have over 100 FY24 itemized budgets from DI institutions (with DII coming very soon), and hundreds more from the last two years. We’re also adding coaching contracts, pouring rights deals, apparel contracts, recruiting software contracts, and much, much more. With new documents added nearly every day, the Extra Points Library already has close to 6,000 PDFs in it.

If you want an affordable way to get the most accurate college sports industry data, check out Extra Points Library today.