NCAA’s Landmark Deal to Pay College Athletes on Hold After Hearing

On Thursday evening, a preliminary approval hearing to settle House v. NCAA — the antitrust case that could bring revenue sharing to college athletics — ended without anything resembling preliminary approval. Instead, Judge Claudia Wilken told the sides to “go back to the drawing board,” particularly over language regarding third-party name, image and likeness (NIL) payments from booster-funded groups known as collectives.

That could be a significant sticking point for the NCAA, one of six defendants in the case along with the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC and Pac-12 conferences. The first settlement draft calls for the NCAA and its members to pay $2.78 billion in damages to past and current athletes, who are suing over various restrictions on compensation. It also creates a landscape-altering model in which schools could directly share up to a certain amount of revenue with athletes starting in the fall of 2025. The cap would be somewhere between $20 million and $23 million that first year, then continue to rise.