Athletes express concern over NCAA settlement's impact on non-revenue sports
Sydney Moore and Sabrina Ootsburg were surrounded by hundreds of college athletes at AthleteCon when news broke that the $2.8 billion NCAA settlement had been approved by a federal judge. In a room full of college athletes, they felt like the only two people who understood the gravity of the situation.
'I'm about to get paid,' Moore said a Division I football player told her.
'Yes, you are about to get paid, and a lot of your women athlete friends are about to get cut,' she responded.
Moore acknowledged that her response might be a stretch, but the sprawling House settlement clears the way for college athletes to get a share of revenue directly from their schools and provides a lucky few a shot at long-term financial stability, it raises genuine concerns for others.
Schools that opt int will be able to share up to $20.5 million with their athletes over the next year starting July 1. The majority is expected to be spent on high-revenue generating sports, with most projections estimating 75% of funds will go toward football.
So what happens to the non-revenue-generating sports which, outside of football and basketball, is pretty much all of them?
It's a query that's top of mind for Ootsburg as she enters her senior year at Belmont, where she competes on track and field team.
'My initial thought was, is this good or bad? What does this mean for me? How does this affect me? But more importantly, in the bigger picture, how does it affect athletes as a whole?' Ootsburg said.
'You look at the numbers where it says most of the revenue, up to 75% to 85%, will go toward football players. You understand it's coming from the TV deals, but then it's like, how does that affect you on the back end?' Ootsburg asked. 'Let's say 800k goes toward other athletes. Will they be able to afford other things like care, facilities, resources or even just snacks?'
Moore has similar concerns. She says most female athletes aren't worried about how much – if any – money they'll receive. They fear how changes could impact the student-athlete experience.
'A lot of us would much rather know that our resources and our experience as a student-athlete is going to stay the same, or possibly get better, rather than be given 3,000 dollars, but now I have to cover my meals, I have to pay for my insurance, I have to buy ankle braces because we don't have any, and the athletic training room isn't stocked,' Moore said over the weekend as news of Friday night's settlement approval spread.
One of the biggest problems, Ootsburg and Moore said, is that athletes aren't familiar with the changes. At AthleteCon in Charlotte, North Carolina, they said, perhaps the biggest change in college sports history was a push notification generally shrugged off by those directly impacted.
'Athletes do not know what's happening,' Ootsburg said. 'Talking to my teammates, it's so new, and they see the headlines and they're like, 'Ok, cool, but is someone going to explain this?' because they can read it, but then there's so many underlying factors that go into this. This is a complex problem that you have to understand the nuances behind, and not every athlete truly does.'
Some coaches, too, are still trying to understand what's coming.
Mike White, coach of the national champion Texas softball team, called it 'the great unknown right now.'
'My athletic director, Chris Del Conte, said it's like sailing out on a flat world and coming off the edge; we just don't know what's going to be out there yet, especially the way the landscape is changing,' he said at the Women's College World Series in Oklahoma City. 'Who knows what it's going to be?'
What about the walk-ons?
Jake Rimmel got a crash course on the settlement in the fall of 2024, when he said he was cut from the Virginia Tech cross-country team alongside several other walk-ons. The topic held up the House case for weeks as the judge basically forced schools to give athletes cut in anticipation of approval a chance to play — they have to earn the spot, no guarantees — without counting against roster limits.
Rimmel packed up and moved back to his parents' house in Purcellville, Virginia. For the past six months, he's held on to a glimmer of hope that maybe he could return.
'The past six months have been very tough,' he said. 'I've felt so alone through this, even though I wasn't. I just felt like the whole world was out there – I would see teammates of mine and other people I knew just doing all of these things and still being part of a team. I felt like I was sidelined and on pause, while they're continuing to do all these things.'
News that the settlement had been approved sent Rimmel looking for details.
'I didn't see much about roster limits,' he said. 'Everyone wants to talk about NIL and the revenue-sharing and I mean, that's definitely a big piece of it, but I just didn't see anything about the roster limits, and that's obviously my biggest concern.'
The answer only presents more questions for Rimmel.
'We were hoping for more of a forced decision with the grandfathering, which now it's only voluntary, so I'm a little skeptical of things because I have zero clue how schools are going to react to that,' Rimmel told The Associated Press.
Rimmel is still deciding what's best for him, but echoed Moore and Ootsburg in saying that answers are not obvious: 'I'm just hoping the schools can make the right decisions with things and have the best interest of the people who were cut.'
___
AP Sports Writer Cliff Brunt contributed.
___
AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
7 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Athletes express concern over NCAA settlement's impact on non-revenue sports
Sydney Moore and Sabrina Ootsburg were surrounded by hundreds of college athletes at AthleteCon when news broke that the $2.8 billion NCAA settlement had been approved by a federal judge. In a room full of college athletes, they felt like the only two people who understood the gravity of the situation. 'I'm about to get paid,' Moore said a Division I football player told her. 'Yes, you are about to get paid, and a lot of your women athlete friends are about to get cut,' she responded. Moore acknowledged that her response might be a stretch, but the sprawling House settlement clears the way for college athletes to get a share of revenue directly from their schools and provides a lucky few a shot at long-term financial stability, it raises genuine concerns for others. Schools that opt int will be able to share up to $20.5 million with their athletes over the next year starting July 1. The majority is expected to be spent on high-revenue generating sports, with most projections estimating 75% of funds will go toward football. So what happens to the non-revenue-generating sports which, outside of football and basketball, is pretty much all of them? It's a query that's top of mind for Ootsburg as she enters her senior year at Belmont, where she competes on track and field team. 'My initial thought was, is this good or bad? What does this mean for me? How does this affect me? But more importantly, in the bigger picture, how does it affect athletes as a whole?' Ootsburg said. 'You look at the numbers where it says most of the revenue, up to 75% to 85%, will go toward football players. You understand it's coming from the TV deals, but then it's like, how does that affect you on the back end?' Ootsburg asked. 'Let's say 800k goes toward other athletes. Will they be able to afford other things like care, facilities, resources or even just snacks?' Moore has similar concerns. She says most female athletes aren't worried about how much – if any – money they'll receive. They fear how changes could impact the student-athlete experience. 'A lot of us would much rather know that our resources and our experience as a student-athlete is going to stay the same, or possibly get better, rather than be given 3,000 dollars, but now I have to cover my meals, I have to pay for my insurance, I have to buy ankle braces because we don't have any, and the athletic training room isn't stocked,' Moore said over the weekend as news of Friday night's settlement approval spread. One of the biggest problems, Ootsburg and Moore said, is that athletes aren't familiar with the changes. At AthleteCon in Charlotte, North Carolina, they said, perhaps the biggest change in college sports history was a push notification generally shrugged off by those directly impacted. 'Athletes do not know what's happening,' Ootsburg said. 'Talking to my teammates, it's so new, and they see the headlines and they're like, 'Ok, cool, but is someone going to explain this?' because they can read it, but then there's so many underlying factors that go into this. This is a complex problem that you have to understand the nuances behind, and not every athlete truly does.' Some coaches, too, are still trying to understand what's coming. Mike White, coach of the national champion Texas softball team, called it 'the great unknown right now.' 'My athletic director, Chris Del Conte, said it's like sailing out on a flat world and coming off the edge; we just don't know what's going to be out there yet, especially the way the landscape is changing,' he said at the Women's College World Series in Oklahoma City. 'Who knows what it's going to be?' What about the walk-ons? Jake Rimmel got a crash course on the settlement in the fall of 2024, when he said he was cut from the Virginia Tech cross-country team alongside several other walk-ons. The topic held up the House case for weeks as the judge basically forced schools to give athletes cut in anticipation of approval a chance to play — they have to earn the spot, no guarantees — without counting against roster limits. Rimmel packed up and moved back to his parents' house in Purcellville, Virginia. For the past six months, he's held on to a glimmer of hope that maybe he could return. 'The past six months have been very tough,' he said. 'I've felt so alone through this, even though I wasn't. I just felt like the whole world was out there – I would see teammates of mine and other people I knew just doing all of these things and still being part of a team. I felt like I was sidelined and on pause, while they're continuing to do all these things.' News that the settlement had been approved sent Rimmel looking for details. 'I didn't see much about roster limits,' he said. 'Everyone wants to talk about NIL and the revenue-sharing and I mean, that's definitely a big piece of it, but I just didn't see anything about the roster limits, and that's obviously my biggest concern.' The answer only presents more questions for Rimmel. 'We were hoping for more of a forced decision with the grandfathering, which now it's only voluntary, so I'm a little skeptical of things because I have zero clue how schools are going to react to that,' Rimmel told The Associated Press. Rimmel is still deciding what's best for him, but echoed Moore and Ootsburg in saying that answers are not obvious: 'I'm just hoping the schools can make the right decisions with things and have the best interest of the people who were cut.' ___ AP Sports Writer Cliff Brunt contributed. ___ AP college sports:
Toronto Star
a day ago
- Toronto Star
Trump's big bill also seeks to undo the big bills of Biden and Obama
WASHINGTON (AP) — Chiseling away at President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. Rolling back the green energy tax breaks from President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. At its core, the Republican 'big, beautiful bill' is more than just an extension of tax breaks approved during President Donald Trump's first term at the White House. The package is an attempt by Republicans to undo, little by little, the signature domestic achievements of the past two Democratic presidents. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW 'We're going to do what we said we were going to do,' Speaker Mike Johnson said after House passage last month. While the aim of the sprawling 1,000-page plus bill is to preserve an estimated $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that would otherwise expire at year's end if Congress fails to act — and add some new ones, including no taxes on tips — the spending cuts pointed at the Democratic-led programs are causing the most political turmoil. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said this week that 10.9 million fewer people would have health insurance under the GOP bill, including 1.4 million immigrants in the U.S. without legal status who are in state-funded programs. At the same time, lawmakers are being hounded by businesses in states across the nation who rely on the green energy tax breaks for their projects. As the package moves from the House to the Senate, the simmering unrest over curbing the Obama and Biden policies shows just how politically difficult it can be to slash government programs once they become part of civic life. 'When he asked me, what do you think the prospects are for passage in the Senate? I said, good — if we don't cut Medicaid,' said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., recounting his conversation last week with Trump. 'And he said, I'm 100% supportive of that.' Health care worries Not a single Republican in Congress voted for the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, in 2010, or Biden's inflation act in 2022. Both were approved using the same budget reconciliation process now being employed by Republicans to steamroll Trump's bill past the opposition. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Even still, sizable coalitions of GOP lawmakers are forming to protect aspects of both of those programs as they ripple into the lives of millions of Americans. Hawley, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and others are wary of changes to Medicaid and other provisions in the bill that would result in fewer people being able to access health care programs. At the same time, crossover groupings of House and Senate Republicans have launched an aggressive campaign to preserve, at least for some time, the green energy tax breaks that business interests in their states are relying on to develop solar, wind and other types of energy production. Murkowski said one area she's 'worried about' is the House bill's provision that any project not under construction within 60 days of the bill becoming law may no longer be eligible for those credits. 'These are some of the things we're working on,' she said. The concerns are running in sometimes opposite directions and complicating the work of GOP leaders who have almost no votes to spare in the House and Senate as they try to hoist the package over Democratic opposition and onto the president's desk by the Fourth of July. While some Republicans are working to preserve the programs from cuts, the budget hawks want steeper reductions to stem the nation's debt load. The CBO said the package would add $2.4 trillion to deficits over the decade. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW After a robust private meeting with Trump at the White House this week, Republican senators said they were working to keep the bill on track as they amend it for their own priorities. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said the president 'made the pitch and the argument for why we need to get the bill done.' The disconnect is reminiscent of Trump's first term, when Republicans promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, only to see their effort collapse in dramatic fashion when the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, voted thumbs down for the bill on the House floor. Battle over Medicaid In the 15 years since Obamacare became law, access to health care has grown substantially. Some 80 million people are now enrolled in Medicaid, and the Kaiser Family Foundation reports 41 states have opted to expand their coverage. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to all adults with incomes up to about $21,500 for an individual, or almost $29,000 for a two-person household. While Republicans no longer campaign on ending Obamacare, advocates warn that the changes proposed in the big bill will trim back at access to health care. The bill proposes new 80 hours of monthly work or community service requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients, age 18 to 64, with some exceptions. It also imposes twice-a-year eligibility verification checks and other changes. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Republicans argue that they want to right-size Medicaid to root out waste, fraud and abuse and ensure it's there for those who need it most, often citing women and children. 'Medicaid was built to be a temporary safety net for people who genuinely need it — young, pregnant women, single mothers, the disabled, the elderly,' Johnson told The Associated Press. 'But when when they expanded under Obamacare, it not only thwarted the purpose of the program, it started draining resources.' Initially, the House bill proposed starting the work requirements in January 2029, as Trump's term in the White House would be coming to a close. But conservatives from the House Freedom Caucus negotiated for a quicker start date, in December 2026, to start the spending reductions sooner. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has said the changes are an Obamacare rollback by another name. 'It decimates our health care system, decimates our clean energy system,' Schumer of New York said in an interview with the AP. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The green energy tax breaks involve not only those used by buyers of electric vehicles, like Elon Musk's Tesla line, but also the production and investment tax credits for developers of renewables and other energy sources. The House bill had initially proposed a phaseout of those credits over the next several years. But again the conservative Freedom Caucus engineered the faster wind-down — within 60 days of the bill's passage. 'Not a single Republican voted for the Green New Scam subsidies,' wrote Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, on social media. 'Not a single Republican should vote to keep them.' 'REPEAL THE GREEN NEW SCAM!' reposted Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a Freedom Caucus leader.
CTV News
a day ago
- CTV News
A $2.8 billion settlement will change college sports forever. Here's how
A U.S. federal judge has approved terms of a sprawling US$2.8 billion antitrust settlement that will upend the way college sports have been run for more than a century. In short, schools can now directly pay players through licensing deals — a concept that goes against the foundation of amateurism that college sports was built upon. Some questions and answers about this monumental change for college athletics: Q: What is the House settlement and why does it matter? A: Grant House is a former Arizona State swimmer who sued the defendants (the NCAA and the five biggest athletic conferences in the nation). His lawsuit and two others were combined and over several years the dispute wound up with the settlement that ends a decades-old prohibition on schools cutting checks directly to athletes. Now, each school will be able to make payments to athletes for use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). For reference, there are nearly 200,000 athletes and 350 schools in Division I alone and 500,000 and 1,100 schools across the entire NCAA. Q: How much will the schools pay the athletes and where will the money come from? A: In Year 1, each school can share up to about $20.5 million with their athletes, a number that represents 22 per cent of their revenue from things like media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne famously told Congress 'those are resources and revenues that don't exist.' Some of the money will come via ever-growing TV rights packages, especially for the College Football Playoff. But some schools are increasing costs to fans through 'talent fees,' concession price hikes and 'athletic fees' added to tuition costs. Q: What about scholarships? Wasn't that like paying the athletes? A: Scholarships and 'cost of attendance' have always been part of the deal for many Division I athletes and there is certainly value to that, especially if athletes get their degree. The NCAA says its member schools hand out nearly $4 billion in athletic scholarships every year. But athletes have long argued that it was hardly enough to compensate them for the millions in revenue they helped produce for the schools, which went to a lot of places, including multimillion-dollar coaches' salaries. They took those arguments to court and won. Q: Haven't players been getting paid for a while now? A: Yes, since 2021. Facing losses in court and a growing number of state laws targeting its amateurism policies, the NCAA cleared the way for athletes to receive NIL money from third parties, including so-called donor-backed collectives that support various schools. Under House, the school can pay that money directly to athletes and the collectives are still in the game. Q: But will $20.5 million cover all the costs for the athletes? A: Probably not. But under terms of the settlement, third parties are still allowed to cut deals with the players. Some call it a workaround, but most simply view this as the new reality in college sports as schools battle to land top talent and then keep them on campus. Top quarterbacks are reportedly getting paid around $2 million a year, which would eat up about 10 per cent of a typical school's NIL budget for all its athletes. Q: Are there any rules or is it a free-for-all? A: The defendant conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12) are creating an enforcement arm that is essentially taking over for the NCAA, which used to police recruiting violations and the like. Among this new entity's biggest functions is to analyze third-party deals worth $600 or more to make sure they are paying players an appropriate 'market value' for the services being provided. The so-called College Sports Commission promises to be quicker and more efficient than the NCAA. Schools are being asked to sign a contract saying they will abide by the rules of this new structure, even if it means going against laws passed in their individual states. Q: What about players who played before NIL was allowed? A: A key component of the settlement is the $2.7 billion in back pay going to athletes who competed between 2016-24 and were either fully or partially shut out from those payments under previous NCAA rules. That money will come from the NCAA and its conferences (but really from the schools, who will receive lower-than-normal payouts from things like March Madness). Q: Who will get most of the money? A: Since football and men's basketball are the primary revenue drivers at most schools, and that money helps fund all the other sports, it stands to reason that the football and basketball players will get most of the money. But that is one of the most difficult calculations for the schools to make. There could be Title IX equity concerns as well. Q: What about all the swimmers, gymnasts and other Olympic sports athletes? A: The settlement calls for roster limits that will reduce the number of players on all teams while making all of those players – not just a portion – eligible for full scholarships. This figures to have an outsize impact on Olympic-sport athletes, whose scholarships cost as much as that of a football player but whose sports don't produce revenue. There are concerns that the pipeline of college talent for Team USA will take a hit. Q: So, once this is finished, all of college sports' problems are solved, right? A: The new enforcement arm seems ripe for litigation. There are also the issues of collective bargaining and whether athletes should flat-out be considered employees, a notion the NCAA and schools are generally not interested in, despite Tennessee athletic director Danny White's suggestion that collective bargaining is a potential solution to a lot of headaches. NCAA President Charlie Baker has been pushing Congress for a limited antitrust exemption that would protect college sports from another series of lawsuits but so far nothing has emerged from Capitol Hill. Eddie Pells, The Associated Press
