Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I hope all of your brackets are doing better than mine. I thought I had done a respectable job in the first round, but when I checked how I was doing in our Extra Points Bracket Challenge, brought to you by Short Courts…I appear to be in 97th place. Now, there’s 367 people in our group, so that’s not that bad, but nowhere near the top. Our top brackets appear to be split between Houston, Duke, and Florida winning it all.

I’ll keep you posted on how this all shakes out.

Last Friday, I had the privilege of participating in a discussion with The Ohio State University Sports and Society Initiative on “The Price of College Football.” This wide-raging conversation, featuring Armen Keteyian (an award winning reporter who co-wrote The Price: What it Takes to Win in College Football's Era of Chaos"), Andy Schwarz (the college sports economist who helped launch NIL in California) and Mark Pantoni (Ohio State football GM and longtime industry-leading player personnel figure), covered everything from conference realignment, to how roster management has changed over the various stages of the NIL era, to the House Settlement, and more.

Ohio State produced a video of the entire event, which you can watch here, if you’d like.

While our conversation touched on just about all of the main questions in the “where is college sports going?” type conversations, I came away from the event thinking even more than one of the very biggest questions, at the campus level, is going to be how everybody engages with direct athlete payments in the House era.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that the House settlement is approved sometime in mid-April (I keep hearing that there’s a pretty good chance this thing isn’t actually done and dusted the day of the April 7 hearing, although it could happen a few days after), and then institutions start cutting checks to athletes later in the summer, largely as currently structured.

How many schools are paying athletes? Which athletes are actually going to get paid? What kind of data will schools use to make this decision, and potentially make the decision to reallocate resources? How does this ruling, in practice, change the status quo for different college sports?

Based on my conversations in Columbus over the last few days, and my conversations over the last several weeks, here are a few key trends to monitor as we head into the home stretch of the pre-House era

Remind me…who is opting into this thing again? And why?

Every member of the power conferences will be participating in the House settlement, a framework that binds athletic departments to certain roster limits, while also permitting them to make direct financial payments to athletes. Every other member of D-I has the option to “opt-in” or not. Schools that do not opt-in are not bound to the roster limits…but also cannot increase their financial awards to athletes.

After chasing down dozens of ADs to hear what decision they made, and why they’ve decided to make that decision, I’ve come to realize that the decision on whether to opt-in now, next year, or maybe never, is a complicated one that has to do with way more than just the size of an athletic department or its ambition. Let me try to explain.

For a few schools, opting-in might actually save them money

The biggest reason your typical mid or low-major may be reluctant to opt-in to the settlement actually has very little to do with direct financial payments…it’s about the roster limits. If a school has 34 players on their baseball team roster, but only five scholarships, those other 29 athletes could be bringing in critical tuition dollars to an enrollment-starved institution.

But there are a handful of smaller schools who aren’t actually trying to grow enrollment. Thanks to their academic profile, local demographics or other factors, these schools don’t look to athletics as part of their enrollment management strategy. So a decrease in the roster size for various sports could actually mean savings. Fewer athletes mean you have to buy fewer hotel rooms, hire fewer academic specialists, and don’t need to buy quite as boxes of fruit snacks. Even if a school decides to pay a million or two directly to the athletes, they may still come out ahead. Potential examples of this principle may include institutions like UC Riverside, UC Irvine or Utah Tech.

Others are taking a wait-and-see approach

Until a last second memo, just about everybody in D-I understood that they needed to decide if they were going to opt-into the settlement this month, over a month before the April 7 hearing that would actually approve the dang thing. I heard a lot of frustration over this timing, as many athletic leaders felt like they didn’t have enough information to make an informed decision. One of the more vocal critics of the settlement timeline was North Dakota athletic director Bill Chaves, but he was certainly not alone in expressing frustration.

I’m aware of multiple other institutions that either plan to eventually become part of the settlement, or simply want to wait a year and see how the landscape changes. Those include schools like North Alabama, UT Chattanooga and William & Mary. A more conservative approach may be because that particular institution is worried about enrollment management, isn’t facing steep peer or conference pressure to opt-in immediately, or may simply be because they want time to ramp their rosters up or down, without having to process tons of walk-ons all at once.

Most schools, it appears, are going to participate in the settlement and assorted financial distributions.

I’m aware of a handful of leagues (like the OVC, Summit, SoCon and ASUN), where the current understanding among ADs is that some league schools will opt-in, some will opt-out, and others will shoot for participating in House in 2026+. A few other leagues, like the Horizon and American, have announced that all league members will share money, although not necessarily at the exact same level.

Outside the Ivy League, and perhaps the Patriot and/or NEC, I expect a majority of just about every other smaller conference to participate in the settlement this year and share at least some money….but the list of who decides to share or not share will not necessarily line up with budget size.

Which leads to the big question…how much money is going to get shared, and where?

First, a note which probably seems pedantic, but I’m gonna share it anyway. The payments that are going out from school to athlete via the settlement aren’t technically revenue sharing agreements, even though that is, by far, the easiest shorthand way to describe them.

The “salary cap” number of $20ish million might have been calculated using various formulas based on earned athletic revenue from major programs (TV money, ticket sales, etc). But any school is permitted to share up to the cap, regardless of how much revenue they actually earn.

Here’s an example. Wright State reported total athletic revenues in FY24 of $11,656,973. But even most of that money came from direct institutional support…more than $8 million. The school reported less than $4 million of what you and I might commonly consider to be revenue…stuff they earned from media rights, sponsorship sales, parking passes, tickets, etc.

But Wright State is not limited to sharing a percentage of their earned revenue. They could, hypothetically, decide that college sports is such a critically important marketing tool that the general university budget should just fork over $15 million to the athletic department to use for direct payments. That wouldn’t really be a revenue share. That’s just paying a salary.

Not suggesting Wright State is going to do that, by the way. That’s just an example. If Ohio State was allowed to share a percentage of revenue, they’d pay substantially more than $20 million to their athletes. For other schools, their “salary cap” might be $4,000. What schools will actually spend is less about dispassionate accounting formulas and more about political and practical decisions.

Let me give you an example

A few schools have already shared some high level breakdowns of how they plan to distribute their House money. Georgia, for example, projects at least $13.5 million for football, $2.7 million for men’s basketball, and women’s basketball getting $900,000. Texas Tech projects $15.1 million for football, $3.6 for men’s basketball, and the remaining 10%ish spread out among other programs.

Some have speculated that programs that don’t have football teams, like Dayton, VCU, and the non-UConn schools in the Big East, could have a significant advantage in basketball funding. Even if they don’t distribute anywhere near the full $20 million, they could potentially redistribute more of that pot to men’s and women’s basketball.

I’ve had a few agents tell me that where they see the disparities even more are in women’s basketball. A large athletic department like Wisconsin, for example, who has multiple elite women’s programs, (the Wisconsin women just won the hockey national title, and their volleyball program is one of the best in the country) may not have much money left over to distribute to women’s basketball. That means that a mid-major job in the A10 or WCC could actually be seen as a “better” job than a Big Ten or Big 12 gig in basketball or volleyball.

I’ve also been told from a few ADs that even sports like wrestling and lacrosse will be commanding some House settlement direct payments at some programs. A school hoping to maintain a Top 20 wrestling program, I’m told, will likely need to have at least $100,000 in the bank to share with athletes. Is that something West Virginia is prepared to spend? Wyoming? Northern Colorado? Should they?

I wouldn’t be surprised if more schools decline to share how they plan to allocate budgets until they absolutely have to…or are compelled to do so, perhaps by open records requests from nosy reporters.

There aren’t neat answers to any of this yet.

Nobody really knows to what extent the NIL deal clearinghouse and associated enforcement arms will actually be able to police NILs that are in excess of “Fair Market Value”, meaning nobody really knows how easily donors will be able to push spending above and beyond the “salary cap.” Nobody really knows to what extent any of these ruling terms will hold up against future litigation…and it’s a very safe bet that somebody is gonna try to sue this thing almost as soon as the proverbial ink is dry on the settlement papers.

How much this world will shape coaching budgets, player personnel decisions, conference affiliations and sport sponsorship decisions also isn’t clear. We can make reasonable assumptions, but “Man Plans, God Laughs” extends to college sports as well.

We’ll only really know once the rubber hits the road. That probably starts in a few weeks. I’ll do my very best to share what I learn once that happens.

A quick aside here. Later this week, I’m going to share the first part of what we hope is an extended series about how athletic departments can grow revenues and cut expenses…a series based on extensive conversations in the industry. I also hope to pay for some freelance stories this week, add additional documents to our Extra Points Library, and do reporting on other subjects.

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