OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — The final hearing for a landmark $2.8 billion settlement that will impact every corner of college athletics opened Monday with several athletes criticizing the sprawling plan for undervaluing them and leading to widespread confusion on whether to opt-in or risk being left behind.
U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken already has granted preliminary approval of the settlement involving the NCAA and the nation's five largest conferences and she gave no indication early during the hearing that anything has changed her mind. The changes would begin July 1, clearing the way for each school to share up to $20.5 million each with their athletes, but her final decision is not expected until later this month.
“I’m not going to rule from the bench,” Wilken said at the start of the hearing, which had about 100 people — including attorneys, past, present and future athletes, and reporters — in attendance.
The settlement hashed out last year by attorneys representing the defendants and those representing thousands of current and former athletes has its share of critics. Smaller schools say it will leave them behind deep-pocketed, donor-heavy programs and even the proposed guidelines are not expected to calm the huge spending now common across college sports.
LSU gymnast and millionaire influencer Olivia Dunne was one of four athletes to testify against the settlement. Three represented Olympic, non-revenue sports and Benjamin Burr-Kirven was from a big-money sport (football) as a former University of Washington linebacker.
Dunne said the settlement should not be approved. She specifically objected to the formula used to set athletes' name, image and likeness value, arguing that hers was estimated too low. In testimony over Zoom, Dunne described herself as “a Division I athlete, a businesswoman, and I've been the highest-earning female athlete since the NIL rules changed.”
She said the settlement doesn't acknowledge her true value and potential earning power.
“This settlement uses old logic to calculate modern value,” she said. “It takes a narrow snapshot of a still maturing market and freezes it, ignoring the trajectory we were on and the deals we lost and the future we could have had.”
She said the website where athletes could find their damage estimates didn't work at the time she was deciding whether to opt into the settlement or file a lawsuit on her own. When she was able to get onto the website on Jan. 31, she said, the data was not correct in her case.
“It didn’t match what I actually earned,” she said. She said she was required to opt into the settlement in order to submit accurate data and that she never heard back from settlement administrators.
The settlement also calls for replacing scholarship limits with roster limits. The effect would be to allow every athlete to be eligible for a scholarship while cutting the number of spots available. There will be winners and losers under such a formula, though some fear it could signal the end of the walk-on athlete in college sports and also imperil smaller sports programs that feed the U.S. Olympic teams.
Steven Molo, an attorney for a group of athletes objecting to the plan, told the judge that roster limits would unnecessarily limit opportunities. He noted that football teams would be capped at 105 players. The average roster size in 2024 was 128.
“In a free market,” Molo said, “a team should be able to have as many players as they want.”
Wilken said she understands athletes not chosen to be on a roster would be disappointed but that limiting number of athletes on a team is a matter of fairness.
“It could give some sort of competitive advantage if you get to have 50 people running around and sub them in every couple minutes,” she said. “That’s a different scenario than someone who’s got 25 people.”
Universities across the country have been busy making plans under the assumption Wilken will put the terms into effect.
“We're going to have a plan going into July 1, then we're probably going to spend the next year figuring out how good that plan is and how we need to modify it going forward,” said Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin, whose department is among the biggest in the country and includes a Gators men's basketball team playing for the national title Monday night against Houston.
The so-called House settlement, named after Arizona State swimmer Grant House, includes three similar lawsuits that were bundled into one. The defendants are the NCAA and the Southeastern, Big Ten, Atlantic Coast, Big 12 and Pac-12 conferences, all of whom have been touting the settlement as the best path forward for a college athletics landscape in turmoil.
“It's a huge step forward for college sports, especially at the highest level," said NCAA President Charlie Baker, whose organization continues to seek antitrust protections from Congress.
The most ground-shifting part of the settlement calls on schools from the biggest conferences to pay some 22% of their revenue from media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships — which equals about $20.5 million in the first year — directly to athletes for use of their name, images and likeness (NIL).
Still allowed would be NIL payments to athletes from outside sources, which is what triggered the seismic shift that college sports has endured over the last four years.
The settlement calls for a clearinghouse to make sure any NIL deal worth more than $600 is pegged at fair market value, which has appeared to be a challenging set of numbers to settle on. This is an attempt to prevent straight “pay for play” deals, though many critics believe the entire new structure is simply NIL masquerading as that.
The proposal would pay more than $2.5 billion in back damages to athletes who played sports between 2016 and 2024 and were not entitled to the full benefits of NIL at the time they attended schools. Those payments are being calculated by a formula that will favor football and basketball players and will be doled out by the NCAA and the conferences.
Plaintiffs’ counsel Jeffrey Kessler told the judge that 88,104 college athletes have filed claims to participate in the settlement and another 30,775 have indicated they will file claims.
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AP College Football Writer Eric Olson contributed. Pells reported from San Antonio.
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