Dan Butterly sat inside a large conference room inside Orlando’s World Center Marriott Resort and listened as Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork and select members of the Settlement Implementation Committee explained how the newly-approved House v. NCAA settlement would change college athletics as we know it during the first panel of last week’s National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) convention.
Bjork is part of a 10-person working group made up of two ADs from each of the five defendant – known colloquially as the “Power” – conferences that have been developing ways to implement the terms of the House v. NCAA class-action settlement approved late June 6 by California district court judge Claudia Wilken.
And while the NACDA panel was certainly educational, especially for ADs and administrators from the more than 300 Division I schools that weren’t defendants in the groundbreaking House case, which combined three separate lawsuits against the NCAA, it left many in the room with more questions than answers.
“In some ways it felt like they were trying to educate us, but at the same time talking down in some ways,” Butterly, the Big West Conference commissioner, told On3 after emerging from that panel Tuesday morning, “just because of the lack of information that’s available to the rest of us in the room.”
A week after Wilken’s approval, the NCAA and defendant conferences jointly released a 36-page question-and-answer document late Friday that provided some clarity on an array of questions provided to the NCAA over the last year. But there still remain several key issues that have non-defendant Division I conferences and schools raising concerns about the expedited pace at which these groups are being asked to opt-in to the new world order, even after the original June 15 deadline was extended to June 30.
Butterly described it as creating “frustration and confusion” for schools from outside the defendant/Power conferences – i.e. the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC.
“Now we know where the goalposts stand, and rather than being in a defensive stance and not know which way the ball is going to go, now we know where the ball is going and you have to adjust to it,” Butterly said. “But we just don’t know the playing rules yet, and it’s really about trying to get clarification beyond the stuff we see posted (in the media).”
NEW WORLD ORDER
The new House settlement formally ends the NCAA’s long-standing “amateurism” model in favor of revenue-sharing that allows Division I schools to provide direct financial payments to student-athletes beginning July 1. At least for the 2025-26 academic year, Division I programs are able to share up to $20.5 million, or 22-percent of the Autonomy/Power conferences’ aggregate revenue from media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorships.
There is also nearly $2.8 billion in back damages to be paid out over a 10-year period to former NCAA student-athletes who competed between 2016-24 that were either fully or partially unable to take advantage of NIL or rev-sharing. A significant portion – more than 85-percent – is expected to go toward athletes who participated in the highest revenue-generating sports: football and men’s basketball. Before Wednesday’s Title IX appeal was filed, putting back damages on pause during the appeal process, the first back payments were set to be paid within 45 days of the settlement’s finalization – July 21.
The House settlement also facilitated the creation of the College Sports Commission, a new enforcement entity that will implement the settlement’s rules around revenue-sharing, NIL and roster limits, as well as Deloitte’s “NIL Go” clearinghouse, which will regulate and approve third-party NIL deals above $600 between athletes and non-institutional entities based on an algorithm that determines an athlete’s fair-market-value within an established “range of compensation” based on similar NIL deals.
As NCAA president Charlie Baker explained at a May 20 panel set up by the Knight Commission, the College Sports Commission and NIL Go will serve as “the vehicle through which most of the so-called ‘money issues’ get addressed.”
But while all those new innovations are generally seen as welcomed changes across what had become an almost unchecked marketplace in college athletics, it’s the general lack of transparency about what the next stage will look like, including yet-to-be-finalized specifics – including legal contract language – about the College Sports Commission and NIL Go.
“It was very alarming and frankly discouraging that institutions that had a choice of whether to opt-in or not felt an urgency to make that decision, and there was a huge vacuum of information about how the terms will be implemented and what the impacts could be,” Knight Commission CEO Amy Perko told On3. “This plane is being built while it’s in the air.”
According to Butterly, the non-defendant conferences have yet to receive any indication whether they’ll be required to sign the same “participation agreements” the Power Five programs must sign with the College Sports Commission that not only codifies the settlement terms but binds all parties against taking legal action to settle disagreements.
Michael Cross, the Southern Conference commissioner, also raised similar concerns about a yet-to-be-revealed financial charge associated with joining the CSC – much like there’s a cost to be a part of the NCAA – or to utilize Deloitte’s NIL Go clearinghouse.
“None of those entities are doing their work for free, but there’s been no suggestion or clarity about where and how the costs and expenses to run these entities are going to be assigned,” Cross told On3.
And given the lack of transparency with those outside the defendant conferences, there is concern those legally-binding agreements could be forced on institutions just prior to the new June 30 deadline, not allowing time for each institution to best evaluate the full legal scope of the agreement.
“That’s the $20.5 million question,” Butterly said. “Once this information is released, … if they require as part of the opting in … that you have to agree to this contract as an opt-in institution, that takes some time. You can’t just as an AD or commissioner sign off on behalf of your membership or institution. That has to go through a legal process.”
Added Cross: “Nobody would run a business this way, nobody would say: ‘Oh yeah, we’ll write you a blank check and send me the bill later.’”
MONEY MATTERS
While most of the defendant/Power conference institutions are expected to take full advantage of the new rev-sharing cap, which allows programs to dish out up to the $20.5 million annually to student-athletes as they see fit, that figure is simply unreasonable for many institutions outside the Power Five conferences.
Not that it’s stopping them from opting in. All 11 Big West programs, which includes Hawaii for all non-football sports until the Rainbow Warriors officially join the Mountain West in 2026, already opted into the House settlement. But that doesn’t mean those Big West programs will be able to take full advantage of all the same financial benefits as their Power conference peers.
“We’re not going to be at the $20.5 million level, I’m just being blunt,” Butterly said of the Big West, a non-football conference. “One of my institution’s athletic directors said, ‘Our budget is $20.5 million and we’re not going to be able to double our budget to pay student athletes.”
Facing similar financial limitations, the Southern Conference (SoCon) is split 50-50, with five of its 10 schools opting in to the House settlement and five opting out for the first year while the dust settles, preferring to take a wait-and-see approach before reevaluating their options prior to the 2026-27 academic year.
“At our level, I don’t have anybody that’s going to go to $20.5 million, and that’s OK,” Cross said. “It doesn’t prevent us from meeting on the playing field, it doesn’t prevent us from meeting on the basketball court.”
Even at a Power program like Alabama, which produced an annual revenue of nearly $235 million but posted a roughly $28 million overall deficit in FY 2023-24, money remains a concern. Especially when, like most other Division I programs, its two revenue-generating sports – football and men’s basketball – often help to subsidize its 19 other non-revenue-generating sports.
“Our smallest net financial losers – from a financial standpoint, they’re all important programs – are men’s and women’s tennis, each lose about $1 million, and everybody else is more than that. … And from a financial standpoint, we’re in a pretty good position compared to most schools out there,” Byrne said on Tuesday’s episode of McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning with Greg McElroy and Cole Cubelic. “But it’s still challenging the new model because now we have a $20.5 million line item from a rev-share standpoint, which I think is the right thing to do, we’re going to fully fund it, but we’ve got to have that money come from somewhere. So, it’s a bit of a tight rope you’re walking right now.”
In addition to rev-sharing restrictions, all 32 Division I conferences are responsible to sharing in the $2.8 billion in back damages paid out over the next decade. The Big West is responsible for approximately $31.5 million – “a significant impact,” Butterly said – with the NCAA expected to withhold more than $3 million annually from the conference’s annual revenue distribution figure.
“That’s a direct impact on what we can do for conference championships and what we can do for our student-athletes at an institutional level,” Butterly said.
While he declined to provide a specific number, Cross indicated the SoCon’s financial responsibility for back damages is “millions of dollars annually, and at our level, those are real dollars.” In an effort to better manage their finances, at least in this first year, the SoCon ruled it will not expand scholarship limits beyond the previous NCAA standards prior to the House settlement ruling, even though the settlement allows for increased scholarship opportunities.
“All of our schools want to be competitive, they want to be competitive at the highest level, and they all operate within budgets,” Cross said, “but the order of magnitude is different and understanding what those costs might be is a real factor in the decision-making.”
And while the Power conferences are pushing to expand the College Football Playoff even further to add additional games – and revenue opportunities – to help offset the cost associated with paying both back damages and future revenue-sharing, the non-defendant conferences don’t currently have that option to generate new revenue.
“Those dynamics haven’t changed (for non-defendant schools), the pie hasn’t grown, and we’re going to spend a lot more money for our slice of pie,” Cross said. “And it isn’t going to look a whole lot different in size.”
WHAT’S NEXT WITH COLLEGE SPORTS COMMISSION, NIL GO
While the College Sports Commission and NIL Go are effectively taking over enforcement and regulation of the monetary side of college athletics, the NCAA will continue to manage other aspects such as academic eligibility and performance, as well as working to continue to govern rules around recruiting, sports betting, and other fraud and safety violations.
Within that vein, the NCAA plans to overhaul its own governance model to better align with the terms and conditions of House settlement and College Sports Commission. That includes deleting more than 150 previous bylaws and rules, many of which restricted direct payment to student-athletes – which is now legal, of course.
But what’s more concerning to the non-defendant conferences is a move to grant the Power conferences as much as 65-percent weighted voting authority in future committees, thus giving the four most powerful leagues even greater influence to reshape collegiate sports as they see fit.
“The CFP (Power) Four will have 59 institutions (between) four conferences with potentially 65-percent of the weighted vote in Division I governance moving forward,” Butterly said, “and many of us may not even have a representative in the room where it’s going to happen.”
Of course, that’s not sitting well with the 28 other conferences and more than 300 Division I institutions that are not a part of the Autonomy/Power Four leagues.
“That’s just not a way we should be governing a 370-member Division I governance group moving forward,” Butterly said.
The Division I Board of Directors will vote on that proposal in their June 23 meeting, which is just a week before the newly extended June 30 opt-in deadline.
In the meantime, as non-Power conference programs continue to weigh their options on whether or not to fully embrace the new post-House world of college athletics, the majority simply want to be included in the conversation and then be afforded the necessary time to make informed decisions at an institutional and conference level.
“There are legitimate questions. Get us some answers, and then give us some time to digest it. Don’t say, hey, you’ve got two weeks,” Cross said. “I’m not saying we need six months, but geez, is 30 days with the Fourth of July intervening and everything else (going on) really that difficult? Is the world going to collapse if July 1 comes and goes and not everybody’s opted in yet? What’s the big deal? Nobody’s playing games until August.”
