Over the years, the transfer portal and NIL have completely changed the landscape of college sports. The portal has become the professional sports version of free agency, while NIL funds have varied from school to school, something Virginia Tech has found out over time.

When it comes to rules and regulations surrounding NIL, fans have been paying close attention and listening to what has been going on with the house settlement, which brings rules regarding NIL and also supplies revenue sharing. It has been taking some time for a ruling to officially come down, and that decision came down late Friday night.

Judge Claudia Wilken officially signed off on the final approval to the proposed settlement.

The recent announcement on the NCAA settlement paving the way for players to be directly paid by schools has been met with mixed emotions already. Obviously, players who are in line to get a share of the $2.8 billion coffers are quite happy.

Georgia fans, however, are looking at it in a different light and see this as potentially damaging recruiting and roster building, putting unfair shackles on schools who have traditionally led the pack.

Beyond the settlement for former players dating back to 2016, current players can now be paid directly by the school, however there will be a cap on the amount allowed. That could mean that stacking a huge recruiting class of five and four-star players could be a thing of the past.

Some Georgia fans let their feelings be known.

Judge Claudia Wilken announced the approval of the House v. NCAA settlement Friday in the U.S. Northern District of California. It’s a landmark decision that’s likely to usher in a revenue-sharing era among college sports, effectively allowing schools to pay their athletes.

The ruling also created a clearinghouse for third-party NIL deals, which will have a say over NIL arrangements of $600 or more.

“Despite some compromises, the settlement agreement nevertheless will result in extraordinary relief for members of the settlement classes,” Wilken wrote in her 76-page opinion. “If approved, it would permit levels and types of student-athlete compensation that have never been permitted in the history of college sports, while also very generously compensating Division I student-athletes who suffered past harms.”

We still have a long way to go before we fully understand the impact on college sports, especially football. One person who is not optimistic is ESPN and SEC Network host Paul Finebaum.

“I couldn’t help but think back about 10 years ago, when Mark Emmert, then the President of the NCAA, essentially said college athletes will be paid over my dead body. He’s still alive, but the NCAA is dead,” Finebaum said during an appearance on SportsCenter. “It may still be in existence. We’re still having tournaments, such as the Women’s World Series and the Men’s Baseball Tournament, but the NCAA, as we know it, is gone. They literally have no jurisdiction whatsoever other than to be tournament directors.

“This was supposed to level the playing field. Everybody pays the same into the kitty and then divides it up, but it will do anything but. The big will get bigger, and the small schools will simply slip away… Other than maybe in in basketball-only conferences that can use all that money for basketball, as opposed to, like, Alabama and Georgia and Ohio State, where they have to split up $20.5 million.”

Starting July 1, schools will be able to share $20.5 million with its athletes. Football is expected to receive 75%, followed by men’s basketball (15%), women’s basketball (5%) and all remaining sports (5%). Power Four football programs will have between $13 to $16 million to spend on rosters during the 2025 season under the settlement agreement.

Finebaum, known for his devotion to SEC football, views this situation as one that could jeopardize the momentum of women’s sports and non-revenue sports.

“The real casualty of all this, I believe, is going to be the one part of college athletics that has grown so much,” said Finebaum. “We watched the Women’s World Series last night, a million-dollar pitcher, by the way, for Texas Tech. Women’s sports, I think, are going to suffer from this. If you’re one of these Ohio States or Alabamas, and you’re dividing up $20.5 million, you know where most of it’s going, it’s going to football. That’s really a major casualty.

“College athletics did this to themselves. They’re not really suffering for it, because it’s a billion-dollar industry, but it’s going to be very uneven in the future. I think, at some point, fans are going to start tuning out. There’s such an existential threat to what we grew up loving, and we still do. It’s not going to be the same anymore.”

Finebaum is one of several prominent voices who see player compensation as the end of college athletics as we know it. Others might say that’s only fair considering the severe imbalance in profits generated by those institutions on the labors of those players.

College sports are indeed changing and getting more professional. However, they’ve been professional for a long time; the people in charge are only now being forced to acknowledge it.

The DBR wants your help! We are partnering with our good friends on the Duke Basketball Roundup podcast for a fun summer activity. It is a Duke fan survey to gauge everything from how you became a Duke fan, to your favorite Duke player, to your feelings about NIL and the transfer portal, and much, much more.

It contains about 20 questions but shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to fill out. A word of advice — don’t ponder too much, go with your gut on each of these Qs.

The Duke Basketball Roundup will be revealing the answers on their podcast starting in a couple weeks and we will publish the results here too. This is a great way to talk about what we love about Duke and what maybe worries us too… And without you it won’t be complete.

So click here and tell us all about your relationship with Duke hoops!

BLOOMINGTON — Indiana basketball coach Darian DeVries basically had to start from scratch when putting together his roster for the 2025-26 season.

ESPN’s Pete Thamel got out in front of the College Football Playoff model that will not happen moving forward. Anything that has multiple autobids for certain conferences makes things a little more complicated for the average fan.

That’s what Thamel reported and could infer about where the College Football Playoff expansion is going. While there are rumblings of 14 or 16 teams, it’s likely going to be the latter.

Now how do you determine qualifiers? Well, keep it simple, stupid!

“The 4, 4, 2, 2-thing is not going to happen,” Thamel said on The College GameDay Podcast. “And certainly there’s some ways to go and things to figure out, especially the strength of schedule stuff … The point of the playoff expanding … College football is an unbelievable, regional sport that became national right around the BCS … For all its flaws, it did nationalize sport. So one of the challenges I’ve seen the sport have, trying to capture the I-95 sports fan, right? Boston, New York, Philly, you want to bring them in the same way you bring them in on the first Thursday of the NCAA tournament …

“You want to capture that casual fan, because you have the guy in Birmingham, you can’t get any more people to watch in Birmingham. And the idea of the 4, 4, 2, 2, 1, 3, if you’re sitting at the bar in Southie, trying to talk about Notre Dame’s playoff chances, it’s just like your head would explode, right?” 

Good luck trying to figure that out if you’re a casual football fan. The College Football Playoff, as Thamel describes it, is trying to appeal to those from non-traditional college football areas. If you can make it look like the NFL, you might have a chance.

“It’s not Good Will Hunting calculus, but it’s just not intuitive to a sports fan,” Thamel said. “So basically, five plus 11 is like, we’re gonna take the conference champions and the rest of the best teams, which to me, is just a lot smoother if you’re trying to explain this …

“We get so in the weeds sometimes, and we talk about these terms and we socialize them … But I just think, as this transitions to five and 11, which it appears on the trajectory to do so and probably for ‘26 but not certain, I just think for the sport in general, a clearer idea of where it’s going makes sense.”