MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Many months may pass before the final details are confirmed in the legal maneuvering that will pave the way for NCAA student-athletes to receive revenue sharing money for the first time.
On Friday, the NCAA and its major conferences and lawyers representing certain Division I student-athletes filed terms of an antitrust lawsuit. Per Dan Murphy of ESPN.com, new details outline how past student athletes will share $2.78 billion in damages.
“It is a very complicated and complex settlement. It is a very all-encompassing settlement. I suspect it is going to take [Judge Claudia Wilken] quite some time, certainly months, but it wouldn’t be unusual for it to stretch deep into months,” said WVU Director of Athletics Wren Baker. He was a guest on Monday’s edition of Citynet Statewide Sportsline.
“I think those of us that are practitioners with boots on the ground have said all along that this is going to be very difficult to implement by the fall of ’25. The problem is that you have major cases pending with two sides. On the plaintiff side, they were saying, ‘Hey, you have deferred long enough. We want this to start in the fall of ’25’. We’ll see what happens.”
In addition to damages that will be awarded to past student athletes, revenue sharing parameters will be set up and previous scholarship limits will be removed and replaced by roster limits. For example, football teams currently work with a limit of 85 scholarships. Under the proposed agreement, a new roster limit of 105 would be put in place. Baker doesn’t necessarily believe that athletic programs will immediately raise their number of scholarships beyond the current limits.
“I saw a lot of speculation that means that would be a whole lot of additional scholarship opportunities. I am not so sure institutions are going to rush into adding a bunch of scholarships there. For one, most institutions are still trying to figure out the revenue share proportion. And two, anything you do in those new scholarships counts against your cap. So that’s new money you would have to be able to compensate student athletes for their name, image and likeness.”
NEW: The NCAA’s historic expansion of scholarships to extend to full rosters means that roughly 790 new scholarship spots are available across the 40-plus NCAA sports listed in the settlement, per a @YahooSports
calculation. https://t.co/MGD0SHm1Y8 pic.twitter.com/dEPrGDDd71— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) July 26, 2024
The proposed legislation could limit walk-on opportunities for incoming student-athletes with schools being able to offer scholarships to every player on the roster.
“I think college athletics has been sued so much and they knew the next round of lawsuits was probably going to be about these arbitrary scholarship limitations that don’t really have a lot of science and reason to them. They were put in place, to be honest, for cost containment and to balance Title IX.
“The reason that is codified in this proposed settlement is because individuals in the NCAA can set roster limits. But setting those scholarship limits is becoming problematic.”
For most major college athletic programs, football and men’s basketball are the only programs that generate a profit on an annual basis.
“I think people will try to make sure that they will give their revenue sports the best opportunity to be successful first. That’s a good, sound business decision. Whether we like it or not, college athletics is headed to a more professionalized model. We can sit around and talk about the days of yore. But that’s not where we are at right now. I think people will figure of what we have to do to be competitive in those sports. And then they’ll try to provide the very best experience they can for the other sports and maintain competitiveness there as well.”
While student-athletes have been able to benefit from name, image and likeness deals through collectives that operate independently from athletic departments, schools could now facilitate NIL deals more directly. Baker says that regardless of the final details that come through the settlement, creating additional revenue streams at WVU will be a top priority.
“What I have continued to tell our staff and our coaches, and we are going to meet and talk about it with our head coaches in the next few days again, is that we are still trying to wait, see and determine how this will all be implemented, how it will be impacted by Title IX, how it will be impacted by the judge’s final ruling and any other things that come out. But what we know is that there is going to be a significant price tag associated with revenue sharing.
“I have really tried to focus my energy on new ways to create additional revenue so that we are prepared to participate as fully as possible in that revenue share. We know that is going to be a competitive point when we are out recruiting.”