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By Dan Murphy, ESPN staff writer
LAS VEGAS — NCAA President Charlie Baker said the settlement of the association’s pending antitrust lawsuit will put financial pressure on everyone in college sports but also give universities more certainty as they plan a new system that will allow them to distribute more money to athletes.
The NCAA announced last month that it had agreed to terms to settle three federal antitrust lawsuits that it sees as the most immediate, and perhaps greatest, threat to the association’s future. As part of the settlements, the NCAA will pay about $2.8 billion in damages to former players. In addition, schools will be allowed to share a significant portion of their revenues directly with players — about $20 million per year starting in 2025. In exchange, the plaintiffs agreed to drop the three lawsuits that some in the college sports world believe could bring the total damages to nearly $20 billion.
“There’s a lot of pressure on everybody,” Baker said. “I think it’s a lot better than the pressure we would have had if we had a potentially devastating loss, which would have taken a few more years. So we would just be spinning around for a few more years not knowing what was going to happen.”
In his first extended interview since the settlement was agreed, Baker told reporters he hoped the terms of the settlement would establish a way for schools to pay players fairly without making them employees.
The NCAA remains a defendant in multiple lawsuits arguing that college athletes should be considered employees of their universities and conferences, and while the settlement doesn’t resolve those issues, Baker and many others in the college sports world are hopeful that the plan to share revenue with athletes in the future will spur Congress to enact new laws barring athletes from becoming employees.
“If the court approves [the pending settlement]”Then we’ll be in a position to go to Congress and say, ‘One of the three branches of the federal government has approved this as a model for generating compensation without inducing jobs,'” Baker said Monday. “I think that’s a good place to start a conversation with Congress.”
The NCAA and conference leaders have spent the past few years lobbying politicians on Capitol Hill for new legislation to give college sports special status as an industry, but have made little progress. Baker said he has heard positive responses from several federal lawmakers since the settlement terms were made public.
Speaking at a conference of athletic directors in Las Vegas this week, Baker said he was inundated with questions about how the details of the settlement would affect the future of college sports. He said more answers would be available within the next 30 days, when lawyers for both sides in the antitrust lawsuit are scheduled to file settlement details with the court.
The detailed terms of the settlement must be approved by the federal judge overseeing the case, a process expected to take several months, which will include an opportunity for players to object to the terms and provide input.
“I’m a little hesitant to get too far ahead of ourselves,” Baker said. “People are starting to think about how to plan for it, and we certainly are, but we’re very conscious and understand that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done before it’s official.”
Some legal experts have questioned whether the judge in the case would object to a class-action settlement that would make it harder for athletes to sue the NCAA for antitrust violations in the future. Asked if he had concerns about approving the settlement, Judge Baker said the case involves key players on all sides of the debate over compensating college athletes that has been playing out for the past decade.
“If you think the players on the field are important, we have most of them,” he said.
As school officials prepare for new business models, the biggest unanswered questions are Title IX law and how sponsoring groups will share revenue with athletes in the future.
Title IX regulations require schools to provide equal benefits and opportunities to men and women in college sports on their campuses. The Department of Education, which oversees Title IX on college campuses, has not commented on whether schools must split athlete compensation equally between men and women to comply with the law.
“I’m going to see where the dust falls. [on the settlement] “We have to address the issue of race before we can have those conversations,” Baker said. “What we need to do here is not address the issue of race. We need to think carefully and trust the process.”
Multiple sources told ESPN that part of the settlement is aimed at reining in associations — groups of boosters with ties to specific schools who have served as de facto payrolls in some areas as the junior league market has developed over the past three years. Baker said he doesn’t expect associations to disappear as a result of the settlement, but he hopes the new revenue-sharing arrangement will make it easier for schools to maintain their “key relationships” with players.
The NCAA plans to pay $2.8 billion in damages over the next decade. Baker said at least $120 million of the annual settlement payments, or about 42 percent, will come from the NCAA’s national office budget. The remaining 58 percent will come from cuts to the money the NCAA normally distributes to its members: 33 percent from FBS schools, 13 percent from FCS schools and 12 percent from Division I schools without football programs.
Some smaller league athletic directors and conference officials have taken issue with the amount they will not receive in distributions from the NCAA over the next decade to help resolve issues that primarily involve the powerhouse conferences that make the most money from football.Baker said the back injuries have to do with a set of rules that are approved and maintained by all NCAA members, including the smaller conference schools.
Baker also said he believes a 10-year settlement period would act as “glue” to hold Division I schools together and avoid the possibility of powerhouse conferences forming separate entities with their own rules. Keeping all of Division I together would allow the NCAA to maintain the March Madness basketball tournament, which generates the vast majority of the money the association distributes to its member schools.
“We now have the ability to move forward with the assumption that going forward, we’re all going to be one big, maybe happy family,” Baker said.
Baker said the NCAA has pledged to potentially increase its contribution to the damages fund to more than $120 million if revenue from national tournaments continues to rise.
