OKLAHOMA CITY — The final game of the 2025 season was one to forget for NiJaree Canady in the Texas Tech softball team’s Game 3 loss to Texas in the championship of the Women’s College World Series.

There was no immediate reaction from Gonzaga following court approval of the landmark House vs. NCAA lawsuit settlement on Friday evening.

No statement on the Bulldogs’ website. Nothing from athletic director Chris Standiford or basketball coach Mark Few on social media. Nothing but radio silence in Spokane, where it appears victors don’t gloat.

That’s right, folks. The Zags stand to become one of the biggest winners in the post-House world, where schools can share revenue with athletes starting July 1.

And they aren’t alone. Any school that values basketball and doesn’t compete in, or care about football could create for itself a substantial advantage in the talent-acquisition process.

Allow us to explain.

The revenue-sharing component features a cap of $20.5 million in the 2025-26 competition year, with annual increases expected. The power conference schools will undoubtedly max out in order to avoid blowback in recruiting, but there’s no requirement to do so.

Each athletic department will determine how to allocate the money, but the generally-accepted breakdown in the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC will result in about $15 million devoted to football rosters, roughly $3 million to men’s basketball and the rest to Olympic sports.

Schools with rich basketball traditions (UCLA, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and Duke) could exceed the average within the Power Four and share $4 million-to-$5 million with their basketball players, giving them an edge relative to intra-conference peers that prioritize football.

But schools without football don’t have to feed the beast. Gonzaga could plow as much as it wants into men’s basketball ($5 million, $7 million, whatever) as long as it doesn’t exceed the cap and makes the requisite commitment to Olympic sports.

It’s no different for the Big East. Whatever cash they muster can be earmarked for basketball. (Connecticut plays football but likely will prioritize basketball to the greatest extent possible.)

What’s more, the Zags can make use of third-party resources to supplement their revenue sharing.

The House settlement does not prohibit NIL. Instead, it attempts to eliminate pay-for-play funded by booster collectives and introduce a legitimate mechanism for compensating athletes for legitimate business opportunities.

The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12 — the five named defendants in the House lawsuit — have created an independent entity to track revenue sharing and enforce NIL payments. It’s called the College Sports Commission and will be led by Bryan Seeley, a former chief investigator for Major League Baseball and assistant U.S. attorney.

Athletes are required to report their contracts to ensure authenticity. If the deal is rejected, athletes can adjust the terms and resubmit or seek arbitration. Schools that allow athletes to compete with rejected deals could be subject to penalties assessed by the CSC.

Put another way: The more legitimate business opportunities available for athletes, the better.

Schools located in communities that are passionate about basketball will, in theory, have more avenues to compensate athletes with real NIL than schools in communities obsessed with football.

Combine the business opportunities in Spokane with the athletic department’s ability to disproportionately compensate its basketball team — as compared to the football-playing schools — and the Zags are extraordinarily well-positioned for the next era.

In the post-House world, it pays to not pay the football beast.

Other winners and losers from the lawsuit settlement …

Loser: The fans. Anything that increases expenses for athletic departments results in a greater burden placed on fans. Not only will direct donations be needed like never before, but constituents in the local business communities will be under pressure to provide NIL opportunities, as well.

Winner: Ed O’Bannon. The former UCLA basketball star started this decade-long economic transformation when he took the NCAA and EA Sports to court over the use of his likeness and image in a video game. His successful lawsuit led to NIL, which led to revenue sharing.

Loser: Administrative bloat. The budgetary pressures caused by $20.5 million in player compensation will cause schools to redirect all available cash. That could lead to staff downsizing and the elimination of mid-level managerial positions so pervasive in major college athletics. Expect to see fewer deputy senior assistant athletic directors for changing the water cooler.

Winner: Power Four bifurcation. It might take several years to determine the full implications of revenue sharing, but this much is immediately obvious: Schools with the deepest pockets and greatest commitment to winning will have an advantage. And those factors are absolutely not distributed equally throughout the power conferences. By the turn of the decade, it could be clear which schools covet the creation of a super league and which schools will be content downsizing their football programs.

The more fans who play as a specific college football team, the more revenue the school will receive.

PublishedJune 7, 2025 3:08 PM EDT•UpdatedJune 7, 2025 3:09 PM EDT

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In an eye-opening and major development in the ongoing world of NCAA and NIL deals, EA Sports has announced that schools will now be able to get paid based on the number of times gamers choose their team in the upcoming EA Sports College Football 26 video game.

According to Cllct’s Matt Liberman, schools will be compensated in the form of royalties by how often their team is “used in gameplay.” There are 136 colleges and universities that have opted into the partnership with the gaming company, with all now eligible to be part of the revenue royalty program.

“For each CFB product released by EA SPORTS, we (CLC Learfield) will provide a percentage for each institution based on the games played for that institution as a percentage of the total games played across all institutions. This percentage of games played will become the final allocation percentage for each school that will be applied to the total gross royalties for all institutions received,” Cllct media reports based on documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. 

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FANS CAN HELP MONETIZE THEIR FAVORITE TEAM

In other words, video gamers and fans will be able to have a direct impact on their school’s recruiting and NIL money. The possibilities are endless in what may turn out to be a brilliant strategic move by EA Sports. The gaming company clearly knows that college football has some of the most rabid fanbases in all sports – from the Vols to Bama to the Bulldogs and the Clemson Tigers. The possibilities for chaos (and a heck of a lot of video game sales) are massive.

“It’s a fascinating incentivizer from EA Sports standpoint,” one high-level gaming source told me while adding that he expects more games to be sold and more teams and schools to be committed to building their EA relationships and marketing efforts. 

THERE ARE SOME CONCERNS THOUGH

As with all things related to NIL these days, there are some important questions that need be answered. The first one involves the compensatory system itself. The public needs to know what, or more importantly, how long a game must be played in order to count towards the school’s NIL program.

My bigger concern, however, is bots. 

Who is to stop bots and automatic gaming systems from just racking up games throughout the night from all over the globe? There has to be some sort of technological oversight, otherwise, the legitimacy of the royalty program would come into question, similar to what happened with Spotify after it was found that some third parties were being hired by labels, or artists, in order to utilize automated streaming systems to boost a particular song or album. The result not only brought in more compensation and royalties, but also attention and more popular playlist adds. Both the NCAA and EA Sports need to make sure this doesn’t happen.

“There are ways to monitor for that sort of thing and also the community itself can help police that with reports and what not,” the gaming source continued. “Although we still don’t know what counts as ‘games played’, my guess would be online games only, which would be easier to track for bots and other nefarious activity.”

Regardless, the EA Sports / NIL / NCAA development is another gamechanger as schools will look to bring in as much additional revenue as they can. On Friday, a judge upheld the House Settlement ruling that essentially allows schools to pay college athletes, which is expected to change the landscape of college sports forever.

Between that ruling and EA Sports’ latest royalty program, everything we once knew about college sports continues to be dismantled. 

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE CURRENT COLLEGE FOOTBALL NIL LANDSCAPE? TWEET ME: @TheGunzShow

A federal judge has approved terms of a sprawling $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). 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 athletes 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% of their revenue from things such as 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” always have been part of the deal for many Division I athletes, and there is certainly value to that, especially if athletes earn their degree. The NCAA says its member schools hand out nearly $4 billion in athletic scholarships every year.

How college sports are preparing for ‘seismic change,’ including revenue sharing and new roster limits

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 fight to land top talent and then keep them on campus.

In a big-money era, University of Illinois shrugs off rules on athletes’ NIL deals

Top quarterbacks are reportedly getting paid around $2 million a year, which would eat up about 10% 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 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 such as March Madness).

Q: Who will get most of the money?

A: Because 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.

Originally Published: June 7, 2025 at 2:17 PM CDT