Catch up with CJ Kirst after Cornell's National Championship win
FOXBOROUGH, MA (WSYR) — The NCAA all-time leading scorer is now a national champion. CJ Kirst racked up seven points (6 goals and an assist) in the Big Red's 13-10 win over Maryland in the National Championship.
Sports Director Steve Infanti talked with the star following the win.
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American Press
22 minutes ago
- American Press
NCAA settlement fallout: McNeese has NIL plan as it enters new economic era
The term student-athlete died on Friday. For years, the NCAA has attempted to distinguish its players from professionals, emphasizing that they are students first. That mirage now seems lost forever. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken gave final approval to the landmark settlement in the House vs. NCAA antitrust lawsuit, which had been ongoing for five years, ending nearly a year of negotiations and revisions. The $2.8 billion, 10-year settlement will pay past players for missed name, image and likeness opportunities and allow colleges to pay current players directly starting July 1. As schools of all levels throughout the country scramble to figure out what's next, McNeese State officials say they are ready for the future. 'It's a new and exciting time for college athletics,' McNeese Director of Athletics Heath Schroyer said. 'My staff and I have been working for over a year to prepare. We've considered how these changes will impact McNeese athletics and also how we can best position ourselves.' Schroyer said McNeese will buy into the program, while other Football Championship Subdivision and Southland Conference schools will consider opting out. Houston Christian is likely one of those. 'We've decided to opt in and bring our collective/NIL in-house and participate in revenue sharing,' he said. 'We'll keep the same scholarship numbers this first year for each sport. During this first year, we will evaluate both our financial situation and the national landscape.' With the NIL becoming entirely in-house, the Ranch Collective, which previously ran the program, will transition into a new role, said Keifer Ackley, assistant AD for NIL and Student-Athlete at McNeese. 'This will allow us to streamline the process,' Ackley said. 'This will make us more transparent.' The Ranch Collective is likely to transition into a more marketing-focused tool for the university, he said. For now, it appears all programs will remain, but this is a fluid situation on all levels, and McNeese's goal, Schroyer said, remains to move up to the Football Bowl Subdivision level if the opportunity arises. There is also no telling what will come next as lawsuits are expected to be filed over a variety of concerns. 'Sometimes these decisions aren't popular with everyone, and that's OK,' Schroyer said. 'I get it. The only constant in life is change; college athletics have undergone significant changes in the last few years, and this trend is likely to continue.' NCAA President Charlie Baker wrote an open letter after the settlement: 'Approving the agreement reached by the NCAA, the defendant conferences and student-athletes in the settlement opens a pathway to begin stabilizing college sports,' Baker wrote. 'This new framework that enables schools to provide direct financial benefits to student-athletes and establishes clear and specific rules to regulate third-party NIL agreements marks a huge step forward for college sports.' Earlier this spring, Baker spoke to McNeese athletes about the future of college sports and seemed shocked by the number of players who had transferred to the school. As part of the settlement, McNeese, along with the other FCS schools, will be required to pay $180,000 this year and between $25,000 and $300,000, which the NCAA will deduct from the funds it provides to the school. Helping to pay for that will be a 12-game football schedule the FCS is expected to add in future years. The final decision on the extra game will be made in the last week of June. The settlement is a victory for power conference schools, which easily have the resources to cover the money and compete in what is now an unlimited bidding war. 'The approval of the House settlement agreement represents a significant milestone for the meaningful support of our student-athletes and a pivotal step toward establishing long-term sustainability for college sports, two of the Southeastern Conference's top priorities,' SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said. 'As the journey to modernize collegiate sports continues, we remain focused on identifying and implementing innovative opportunities for our student-athletes across all sports while maintaining the core values that make collegiate athletics uniquely meaningful.' While it's not clear how it will all play out, McNeese says it expects to pivot with whatever comes next.
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Wait, isn't this a college sports salary cap? What to know about House-NCAA for now
Until Saturday Newsletter 🏈 | This is The Athletic's college football newsletter. Sign up here to receive Until Saturday directly in your inbox. Today in college football news, the 28-minute electronic album 'Revelation' by The Knocks and Dragonette is on loop. 'We crafted the term student-athlete, and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations as a mandated substitute for such words as players and athletes.' That was Walter Byers, writing in his 1995 book 'Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes.' Forty-four years prior, he'd been named the first executive director of the rapidly expanding NCAA. (Obviously, his mind had changed along the way.) Why'd the NCAA concoct 'student-athlete'? Because those are just college students who happen to play sports, not people employed by athletic departments as revenue generators … your honor. ('South Park' was all over this in 2011, months after an Auburn student named Cam Newton paused his studies to seek full-time employment.) Years later, Byers' confession remains one of the starkest reasons to mistrust the NCAA's favored jargon. And lately, another term has appeared a lot in college sports contexts. It strikes me as curious, the way it's being used right now: 'Revenue sharing.' The term has emerged as the most important part of the long-awaited legal settlement that will greatly reshape college sports, following its approval late last week. This is that House v. NCAA thing that'd been drip-dripping in the news forever, the Colleges Can Now Pay Their Athletes Actual Money thing. Except technically, according to the people who define what 'technically' means, these transactions amounting to as much as $20.5 million per school aren't payments. Technically, they're merely revenue being shared. The term 'revenue sharing' makes total sense to me when we're talking about 32 teams in a professional league pooling their money as veritable equals. But when we're talking about powerful humans passing portions of money along to the less powerful humans who are doing the heavy labor that is the core attraction? That's 'sharing'? Jeff Bezos 'shares' with delivery workers? To make a little more sense of this, let's turn to The Athletic's Justin Williams, who's been on the House beat for a long time now. He will maybe soon be free to write about things besides courtrooms. But not yet, because for now, he has been turned to by us. Why is this called 'revenue sharing,' and who was it that decided 'salary cap' is a dangerous pairing of words that must never be uttered? Was it the NCAA? The courts? Doctor Strange? The answer, as usual: lawyers. It's helpful to remember that the House settlement was born out of the NCAA and power conferences attempting to avoid yet another high-profile defeat in court — and the financial ruin that could have come with it. Some of this is about progress, sure, but a lot of it is about the top stakeholders in college sports trying to mitigate the onslaught of legal battles in recent years. It's 'revenue sharing' because the pool of money that can be paid directly from colleges to athletes under the settlement is calculated using the revenue that power conference athletic departments generate through television contracts, ticket sales and sponsorships. The reason it's a 'revenue cap' and not a 'salary cap' is because 'salary' would imply that the athletes are being paid for their services — or as employees — which remains taboo for the leaders of college sports. The settlement has ripped away the facade of amateurism, but the NCAA and power conferences still want to classify athletes as students, not employees. Got it, thank you. I'll keep calling it a 'salary cap' until I am sued. (Since, after all, the NFL's salary cap is also calculated based on that league's revenue.) Speaking of lawyers, surely this was the last court battle on the subject of college athlete compensation, right? Unlikely. Even the settlement's most ardent supporters acknowledge that it is not a fix-all. There are still plenty of unresolved questions about things like Title IX, conflicting state laws, athlete employment status and whether the settlement's efforts to curb third-party NIL deals violate antitrust laws. This is why the NCAA and power conferences continue to lobby Congress for antitrust exemptions and federal legislation that will preempt state laws and help set the settlement terms in stone. What that congressional intervention looks like — or whether it's even a realistic option — remains to be seen. Until then, expect more lawsuits. Billable hours remain undefeated. Thank you to Justin. For more from him, try out his full story on how college sports money works now, which is packed with details like this: 'The top (football) teams are going to cost $40-50 million a year,' said one power conference personnel director. 'That's where this is going. Anyone who thinks different is nuts.' Okie dokie. Below, we have plenty more House ramifications, after a quick break for non-House news. (Side note. Now that I think about it, the term 'revenue sharing' feels OK, on one condition: The NCAA's most powerful member schools admit the sharing of revenue is exactly how employer-employee relationships have worked since many thousands of years ago, when one caveperson first paid another caveperson in berries to go trade an axe for a hammer.) 💎 Women's sports just keep cooking: 'A record 2.4 million watched Texas' win over Texas Tech in Game 3 of the Women's College World Series.' 📺 TNT will keep paying ESPN in order to air some ESPN-produced College Football Playoff games. Need to keep this going until your good friends at The CW are airing a thoroughly fried meme of a burned DVD-R of the Fenway Bowl. 🦬 From this newsletter's poll late last week, the first in our 2025 season countdown: Reader Sarah R. proclaims, 'I'm going to go out on a limb and say a team from the Dakotas without the word State in their name,' while Joe believes in 'Villanova's pope-fueled title run.' (And yes, the mysterious figure who always casts one vote for Thanasis Antetokounmpo in every poll by our NBA newsletter wrote in to reveal Giannis' brother will somehow cause South Dakota State to win it all.) One: The Power 4 conferences suddenly have their own mini-NCAA in addition to the NCAA that is basically already theirs. Two: Prepare for 'the NIL clearinghouse' to be a non-stop punchline. Three: Politicians. Four: After one of the biggest changes in college sports history, college sports will remain college sports. Ready, break! Friday, we'll talk about things that might happen on actual football fields. Email me at untilsaturday@ Last week's most-clicked: Never any doubt about this one: Grace Raynor's ranking of every No. 1 recruit since 2000. Travis Hunter, No. 2!
NBC Sports
an hour ago
- NBC Sports
NCAA says online abuse related to sports betting declined during this year's March Madness
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Online abuse related to sports betting decreased during the NCAA's March Madness basketball tournaments compared with the prior year, but people involved in the competition still received more than 3,000 threatening messages, the NCAA said Tuesday. The NCAA hired Signify Group to monitor messages directed at athletes, coaches, game officials, selection committee members and others with official roles in the tournament. Signify used both artificial intelligence and human analysts to confirm the threats and, when necessary, report them to law enforcement. Overall, abuse related to sports betting was down 23%, the NCAA said in a news release. The men's March Madness bracket was notable this year for the scarcity of upsets, with all four No. 1 seeds advancing to the Final Four and Florida, a popular pick to win it all, claiming the national title. On the women's side, three top seeds made the national semifinals and No. 2 seed UConn, among the pre-tournament favorites, won the championship. The NCAA's analysis found that overall, abusive statements directed at people involved in the men's tournament increased by 140% — much of it directed at the selection committee and coaches — while abuse related to sports betting was down 36%.
