Excuse St. John’s athletic director Ed Kull if he’s highly skeptical of the suggestion that the Big East is poised to become men’s college basketball’s big-budget bully.

Kull can’t fathom a scenario where the sport’s deep-pocketed traditional powers allow Big East programs to outspend them for top-tier talent.

Advertisement

“Unless you’re telling me their collectives are all folding and shutting down, I can’t see how that’s going to happen,” Kull told Yahoo Sports.

The idea that Big East basketball is among the big winners from last Friday’s House vs. NCAA settlement stems from the structure of college sports’ new revenue-sharing rules. Schools can directly distribute a pool of up to $20.5 million to athletes in year 1 (July 2025 to June ‘26) and can give out even more money subsequently as the annual cap escalates.

SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC schools are preparing to spend most of this year’s sum on football in an effort to remain competitive in the sport that rakes in the most money and bankrolls the rest of an athletic department. The University of Georgia earlier this year revealed that football players will receive 75% of the available money, compared to 15% for men’s basketball, 5% for women’s basketball and 5% for the school’s remaining teams. Texas Tech has previously earmarked 74% to football. Other power-conference football programs are expected to gobble up 70 to 80%.

Those projections leave most Power Four men’s basketball programs with pools of about $2 to $4 million to pay their players. Schools with richer tradition in basketball than football — a Kansas, Kentucky, Duke or North Carolina for example — could conceivably exceed that and distribute up to $5 million to men’s basketball players in an effort to stay ahead of the competition.

Advertisement

The calculus is very different for schools who don’t have to feed the football beast, schools that either don’t have FBS football programs or don’t have realistic aspirations of competing for titles at that level. Big East schools, as the theory goes, can invest heavily in basketball with however much cash they can raise. In the Big East, only UConn has an FBS football program. Butler, Georgetown and Villanova compete in football at the FCS level.

“Basketball is in fact our priority sport here, so that’s where the money’s going first,” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman told Yahoo Sports.

“We’re lucky that all our members are focused on one sport,” Kull added.

The same goes for Gonzaga, perennially men’s college basketball’s best program that doesn’t hail from a power conference. Gonzaga athletic director Chris Standiford acknowledged the “structural advantage” of Gonzaga being able to distribute a higher percentage of its revenue sharing pool to men’s basketball players, but he also deemed the idea that the Zags could now outspend SEC and Big Ten programs a “false narrative.”

Advertisement

Whereas schools from the Power Four conferences are all gearing up to pay their athletes the maximum $20.5 million they’re allowed to, neither the Big East schools nor Gonzaga are likely to even approach that cap figure. They may not have the financial burden of football, but they also don’t have the revenue that comes from massive football media rights deals, sponsorships and ticket sales.

How close to the $20.5 million cap will Big East schools get? There are Big East schools “approaching half,” one source told Yahoo Sports. Another source estimated that Big East schools will ultimately pay athletes anywhere from $7 million to $12 million in revenue-share money, with the majority going to men’s basketball. Both sources noted that Big East schools are raising this money through pleas for alumni donations and corporate sponsorships.They can’t simply rely on existing revenue streams.

Standiford declined to estimate how much Gonzaga will pay men’s basketball players, but he made it clear that without the benefit of football revenue, the Zags also won’t come close to the $20.5 million mark. Gonzaga, Standiford said, is “committed to being competitive.” That doesn’t mean always being the highest bidder. It means raising enough money to make competitive offers to priority recruits and hoping that Gonzaga’s winning track record and history of player development prove persuasive.

“When our coaches are out recruiting, we want to be in the conversation financially with student-athletes that our coaches see as a good fit for our program,” Standiford said.

Advertisement

While Gonzaga and the Big East schools may be able to directly allocate more money to men’s basketball players than their Power Four peers, they’re not naive enough to think that an SEC or Big Ten juggernaut is just going to concede a recruiting battle. They expect Power Four schools to try to make up for any financial disadvantage via third-party and booster-backed name, image and likeness deals.

The House vs. NCAA settlement calls for the establishment of a new enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission (CSC), which oversees the rev-share cap management system and NIL Go clearinghouse. The CSC, headed by former MLB vice president of investigations Bryan Seeley, will be responsible for stamping out the pay-for-play deals that have dominated the NIL era of college sports, theoretically capping the market for athletes and ensuring that schools do not exceed the $20.5 million they’re allowed to distribute.

Athletes are required to submit to the clearinghouse all third-party NIL deals that exceed $600 — so basically all of them. The clearinghouse then must determine which deals are for a valid business purpose and are within a “reasonable range of compensation” and which are simply a recruiting incentive.

How will the clearinghouse determine which deals are circumventing NIL rules and which are legitimate? Nobody knows. College coaches and administrators are also in the dark on whether the clearinghouse’s decisions will hold up in court against a legal challenge and on what sorts of investigative or punitive powers the new enforcement arm will possess.

Advertisement

Caitlin Clark appearing in a State Farm commercial or Cooper Flagg hawking New Balance shoes almost certainly wouldn’t trigger any red flags. But what about Tyson Chicken brokering a seven-figure deal with an incoming five-star point guard at Arkansas? Or Nike doing the same for a coveted quarterback transferring to Oregon? Or some school’s collective connecting a wide receiver with a car dealership owned by an affluent alum?

“What everyone is waiting to see is how this NIL clearinghouse will work,” Ackerman, the Big East commissioner, said. “If schools are capped per the terms of the House settlement but they can circumvent the cap through these third-party payments, then I think that any quote-unquote ‘advantage’ that anyone has is out the window. That would threaten this structure that has been crafted, which is intended to create some guardrails and to allow schools to responsibly manage their money.

“If the Wild West we’re in now can’t be managed through this clearinghouse and schools can supplement in significant ways what they’re spending directly, it will remain to be seen who the advantage goes to.”

For either Gonzaga or the Big East to have any semblance of a financial edge, the clearinghouse must be able to combat pay-for-play NIL deals and power-thirsty boosters who flout the rules by depositing money into athletes’ bank accounts under the table.

Advertisement

Count many in college sports circles as having serious doubts that will happen.

Ohio State donors reportedly raised $20 million to pay for the 2024-25 football roster that went on to capture the national championship last January. The men’s basketball rosters everywhere from Kentucky to North Carolina to BYU reportedly will cost well over $10 million next season. As Kull, the St. John’s athletic director noted, it’s hard to give big-money donors the power to help assemble a team for a few years, only to yank it away out of nowhere.

“I know the thought process and the hope was that the settlement would remove collectives from the equation,” Kull said. “I don’t see that happening. An SEC football program might get 80% of the revenue sharing money, but it’s not going to dissuade their boosters in how they’re currently doing NIL for basketball. So I don’t see it being the advantage that we all in the Big East would love it to be.”

The way Standiford sees it, third-party NIL deals are about to be “the new battleground” in college athletics. The Gonzaga athletic director envisions athletic departments investing heavily into telling the stories of their star players, building their individual brands and trying to make them attractive to corporations seeking to partner with college athletes.

“You can compete in an open market for the advantage of your program, versus trying to beat the rules,” Standiford said. “Play by the rules — just do it better than anybody else.”

Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet. (Want to receive it in your email every Wednesday? Easy sign-up here.)

Name-dropped today: Bryan Seeley, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, Justin Ishbia, Dick Vitale, Sue Bird, David Zaslav, NiJaree Canady, Heather O’Reilly, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, Kara Nortman and more. Let’s go:

Driving the Conversation

What does the massive money shift in college sports actually change?

A lot has happened to the business of college sports since last Friday, when the historic House v. NCAA settlement was finalized, so let’s go with a “Previously, on college sports upheaval …” theme:

> As of July 1, each DI school can directly pay its athletes via an annual revenue-sharing pool set at around $20.5M. (A salary cap? Umm, not quite.)

> The settlement includes a new oversight and enforcement organization: The “ College Sports Commission.” The CSC enforces the rev-share “cap” and — much more importantly — is empowered to review any meaningfully sized NIL deals with players. (We’ll come back to this in a sec.)

> Name to know: Bryan Seeley, formerly MLB’s head of investigations, now head of the CSC.

> The big conferences (Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC and even the Pac-12) all agree to abide by the new rules. (Umm, not quite?)

> Congress has a proposed bill to codify a lot of the House settlement (good luck with that).

That brings us to today, when that new review system, called NIL Go, launches. NIL Go is overseen by the CSC and managed by the accounting firm Deloitte.

NIL Go is the most pivotal — and persnickety — element of this entire new universe: Athletes must self-report into the NIL Go system any third-party NIL deal worth $600 or more for review. (As my colleague Stewart Mandel pointed out: “Which, in the major sports, is pretty much all of them.”)

Deals that don’t meet a hazy “fair-market value” criteria will be flagged, rejected or sent to arbitration. (But wait: Isn’t “market value”… what the market is willing to pay?)

One college football team’s personnel director put it bluntly to my colleague Justin Williams:

“If you tell a booster or business owner they can’t give a star player $2 million, there will be lawsuits. There’s no enforcing this. Fair market value? F— Deloitte. This is going to get even crazier.”

Mandel says every legal expert he has talked to thinks NIL Go won’t survive a legal challenge. Williams predicts the return of the old-school college football “bag man.”

Here’s the upshot: The system goes live today, and Seeley, his CSC investigators and Deloitte can try to constrain the (ironically pretty efficient!) competitive forces that have always and will always dominate college sports.

Between revenue sharing and NIL (“Go” or no go), the biggest, most well-funded college programs will be spending $50 million or more — per year — on their programs (and that doesn’t count ever-increasing coach or AD or GM salaries). The only limit is that there are no limits.

Judges can rule. Policies can change. Accounting firms can require a login. But Buddy Booster is going to find a way to get that recruit for their program.

Get Caught Up

Epic tennis rivalry spells viewership boom

Big talkers from the sports business industry:

> French Open’s Alcaraz-Sinner final: Did we all just watch the sports event of the year? It’ll be hard to match. (Five-set tennis FTW, and — as expected — the ratings for that match were as blistering as the shots, topping out at 2.6 million in TNT’s first year at Roland Garros. Not all is rosy for TNT: More on that below …)

> F1 2026 schedule reveal: 24 races (three in the U.S.), a new stop in Madrid and a “grueling” season finale, but the eye-opener was F1 choosing to put the Canadian Grand Prix up against the Indy 500. For all F1’s sizzle, the Indy 500 remains the granddaddy of global auto racing.I defer to my colleague Jeff Gluck’s astute analysis of that conflict: “Why would F1 even consider this?”

More Gluck: “Instead of weighing the optics, F1 never hit the brakes on its quest for motorsports domination and plowed right into a head-to-head battle with one of the most cherished traditions on the international racing calendar.”

> U.S. Open at Oakmont: Follow my colleagues at The Athletic for coverage of golf’s U.S. Open this week, but here is a great story at the intersection of the course’s myth and reality. (One more: The secrets of Oakmont’s distinctive “church pew” bunker.)

> World Cup 2026, one year out: Host cities across the U.S. are “taking a light approach,” per my colleague Asli Pelit, but expect the ramp-up to accelerate this summer. (Loved our team’s predictions on how things will play out over the next 365 days.)

> MLB Anonymous Player Poll results: Our league-wide player polls always yield fascinating results (just ask Tyrese Haliburton). MLB players said they would like to play for Texas’ Bruce Bochy, but there is a reason Colorado’s Bud Black got fired. Most interesting data point: Nearly 80 percent of players said legalized sports betting has changed how fans treat them.

Other current obsessions: Netflix returns to boxing with Alvarez-Crawford … Justin Ishbia eventually buying the White Sox … Dick Vitale staying on ESPN … College football front-office consultants getting the bag … the legendary Sue Bird talking with our “No Offseason” crew … the return of “Drive to Survive” legend Guenther Steiner (to MotoGP) …

What I’m Wondering

What happens to TNT Sports?

“It hasn’t been a real driver for us.”

That’s Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, on live sports programming and rights that will be jettisoned from his oversight upon the WBD split into two parts: the high-growth “Streaming and Studios” company Zaslav will oversee and “Global Networks,” a debt-laden collection of presumptively declining cable assets, including TNT Sports.

Ironically, TNT is in the spotlight this week with sports fans for its exceptional French Open coverage and ongoing Stanley Cup Final broadcasts, along with a recent deal to license more CFP semifinals from ESPN.

I checked in with my colleague Andrew Marchand to wonder: What’s the future for TNT Sports?

“For TNT Sports, it will, in theory, be more nimble and have more optionality. Sports will be the main driver of the new company, whereas previously it was very important, but probably not No. 1. Fans will be able to watch all of its networks on linear TV.

“Where it becomes a bit more interesting is in the streaming game. It could do a deal and be on Max, or it could license its programming out, to say, an ESPN DTC. Or it could do both.

“TNT lost the NBA but has picked up rights, so it is still very much in the game to go along with a portfolio that includes the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, MLB playoffs and the Stanley Cup playoffs, among other properties.”

Grab Bag

Ratings Point: 2.4 million

No women’s college softball game ever has drawn a larger audience than Texas’ title-clinching win over NiJaree Canady and Texas Tech.

Oh, and Canady signed another $1M NIL deal to return to Texas Tech next season (BTW: a deal done in advance of the new NIL Go launch, so not beholden to that system). In some nice timing, the startup AUSL pro league debuted last weekend. Stock way, way up on women’s softball.

Don’t miss: My colleague Lindsay Schnell’s profile of Canady. (Congrats to Schnell on her much-deserved 2025 Billie Jean King Award for excellence in women’s sports coverage, given to her by the Associated Press Sports Editors.)

Related: People watched Fever-Sky (even without Caitlin Clark): The WNBA is showing plenty of data-backed signs that the TV-viewing enthusiasm from last season is still building, and it transcends Clark.

Is it possible nearly 2 million fans tuned in to CBS last Saturday thinking they’d see Clark? Perhaps a few of those did, but the far more likely reason was that they saw one of the league’s great rivalries available on broadcast TV and decided to tune in.

Payout of the Week: $1 million

What U.S. women’s national team alum Heather O’Reilly and her squad of former and current players earned for winning The Soccer Tournament, the winner-take-all 7-on-7 competition, for the second straight year.

($1M is a great purse; on a per-player basis, that’s more than MLS players qualifying for the Club World Cup will make.)

Investors of the Week: Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds

The “Deadpool and Wolverine” buddies went in on the Aussie SailGP franchise, a league powerhouse. “Welcome to Wake Waves,” anyone? (I’ll show myself out.)

Meanwhile: SailGP came to NYC last weekend, and it was a scene.

Runner up: Kylian Mbappe, who invested in a SailGP team of his own (France, naturally).

Branding of the Week: Boston Legacy

You might remember the debacle of a brand launch for “BOS Nation,” Boston’s NWSL expansion franchise. To their credit, the ownership team acknowledged their error, pivoted to the solid “Boston Legacy” and then — lessons learned — deftly executed their “crest” reveal.

ICYMI: Last week, we published an exclusive 1-on-1 with superlative women’s sports investor Kara Nortman, whose Monarch Collective owns a piece of the Boston Legacy (along with two other NWSL teams). Hear from Nortman here.

Save the Date: Aug. 30, 2025
Lee Corso’s “College GameDay” farewell (appropriately when Ohio State hosts Texas, given how many times Corso has donned the “Brutus” headgear to predict an Ohio State W.)

Beat Dan in Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle #261 — 0:30
Try the game here!

Worth Your Time

Great business-adjacent reads for your downtime or commute:

Finding Jordon Hudson: “Hudson did not respond to an interview request for this story… So in lieu of hearing from her directly, the next best option? Walking — or in this case, driving — hundreds of miles in her shoes.” — Brendan Marks, with the definitive story on one of the most fascinating sports figures of the year, including a random run-in with Bill Belichick.

Two more reads worth your time:

(1) Revisiting Roger Federer’s incredible commencement speech.

(2) I enjoy a sash on a soccer/football shirt (as do many!), so this history of the distinctive style had my attention.

Back next Wednesday! Text your colleagues this link so they can get MoneyCall every Wednesday for free. And check out The Athletic’s other newsletters, too.

(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)

Nate Oats has turned Alabama into an SEC powerhouse on the basketball court, and while he has yet to break through and win a national title, Oats is already one of the preeminent coaches in the sport. Now, as he tries to break through for another Final Four appearance and a championship banner, Oats will have even more on his shoulders and more discretion to determine the outcome of the game. 

On Tuesday, the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel approved rule changes to “help enhance the flow of the game in men’s basketball for the 2025-26 season,” according to an NCAA press release. The most notable rule change is a coach’s challenge, which can be used at any point throughout the game so long as the challenging team still has a timeout remaining. 

Coaches will be able to challenge out-of-bounds calls, basket interference,/goaltending, and whether a secondary defender was in the restricted area arc. If the challenge is successful, teams will have one additional video review challenge for the rest of the game, including overtime. If the challenge is unsuccessful, the team loses the challenge and cannot challenge for the rest of the game. 

Our end of game agony could be over

Perhaps the most exciting part of the rule changes for fans of men’s college basketball is that officials will no longer be able to review an out-of-bounds call at any point in the game unless through a coach’s challenge. 

Those reviews caused constant delays to the finish of games and made the final two minutes of any men’s college basketball game almost unbearable to watch. Giving the power to the coaches will leave us with some late-game reviews, and officials can still go to the monitor for goaltending calls, but this should significantly cut the number of times the officials go to the monitor and kill the momentum of the game. 

There will undoubtedly be a significant call missed and a coach who finds himself without a challenge, but now that is simply part of coaching and the ever-evolving decision-making process on the sidelines. That could cause some frustration from an aggrieved fan base, but that’s better than causing the entire college basketball watching population grief with constant stoppages during every close game. 

As far as Alabama is concerned, the analytically driven coaching staff under Oats will no doubt find a way to optimize their challenge usage and extract the slightest edge on the rest of the country, as good coaching staffs always do. The introduction of the coach’s challenge is good news for the Crimson Tide and college basketball at large.

Name, image, and likeness, NIL. Those three letters, which used to stand for national letter of intent in college sports, completely upended college athletics just a few years ago. Now, rather than three letters there’s one word that is rocking the college athletics world. House. Well, it’s actually the House settlement, but you get the idea. This past Friday, a U.S. District Court Judge signed off on a settlement in a longstanding dispute between current and former college athletes and the NCAA. You can read an excellent article on this over at Sportico which covers the intersection of the law and sports. It’s a great site with a lot of great content. I’d recommend heading there often with this new world we are in.

So, what does this all mean for your favorite college sports? Well, there’s a few rather important points that everyone should be aware of going forward.

Advertisement

• Revenue sharing is here. Colleges who are a part of the settlement, the Ivy League has opted out, will be allowed to share up to $20.5 million per year with their athletes. Think of this as the salary cap from your favorite professional league. Teams can spend under this of course, but they cannot go over it. No luxury tax or anything else here. This appears to be a hard salary cap.

• Scholarship limits? A thing of the past. Due to some last minute haggling between the parties it was ultimately determined to scrap scholarship limits. How will this work out exactly? It’s not as if Purdue basketball could take 20 scholarship guys and have it work out. You can’t really keep 13 scholarship players happy, how would you keep 20 happy? This seems to be most impactful for football where the scholarship limit often meant having only a limited number of players at each position. Now? It could become a part of a strategy to stock up on certain high value and injury prone positions. Maybe? This one needs time to marinate before we get a grasp on it.

• New NIL regulations are finally here. Starting June 7th, so this week, any NIL deal that is over $600 will face independent review by what is being dubbed an NIL clearinghouse. This is essentially a way to ensure that players aren’t getting (for example) $500K to go to one autograph signing. They are wanting this to be a way to level the playing field and stop the shoveling of money for essentially no show jobs, but much like the scholarship limits, there’s a lot here that needs worked out.

• There will also be a pool of money, reported to be around $2.8 billion over 10 years for athletes from the past 8 years who were not being paid. Like much of this settlement there are still questions about how this will work.

So what does this all mean for Purdue? Well, the athletic department put out a statement this week to let us know.

The fund for past athletes will likely result in reduced NCAA payouts for member schools which Purdue estimates to be around a loss of $1.2 million per year for 10 years. Other than that, they want you to give more money. It’s really that simple.

If you know anything about the world of business or the world of athletics you know that their finances can be a bit of a shell game. No sports owner is ever making money on their team, they can never afford a new stadium, and they always have to raise ticket and concession prices just to break even. Now, if you believe all that I’ve got ocean front property in Idaho to sell you. I don’t pretend to know Purdue’s finances but I know that the large increase in TV revenue will come at the perfect time as Purdue looks to adapt to this new world.

Overall, I think this will be a good thing for the athletes and a good thing for a school like Purdue. Evening the playing field with a salary cap should make it easier to compete with the blue blood football schools, assuming that the NIL clearinghouse actually does what it’s intended to do. Could I be wrong? Of course I could. I could easily see a world where this exacerbates the haves and have nots and Purdue falls further behind. Only time will tell.

Advertisement

More from hammerandrails.com:

• Butler athletic director Grant Leiendecker intends to “invest additional resources into revenue-generating programs” after the House vs. NCAA settlement. But what does that mean?
• The Bulldogs had fallen behind their Big East foes financially, but Leiendecker claims Butler will improve and be more competitive as a result of revenue-sharing.

INDIANAPOLIS — Butler athletic director Grant Leiendecker vowed to be aggressive in the new NIL era and Friday’s formal approval of the House vs. NCAA settlement allows the men’s basketball program to make its first steps toward closing its player compensation gap.

Mankilling Mastodons

Nebraska’s Dylan Raiola invited to Manning Passing Academy
Nebraska quarterback Dylan Raiola was invited to the annual elite quarterback gathering.

Nebraska Makes College Football’s Top 25 Plays Since 2000: Black 41 Flash Reverse
One of the most famous plays in Cornhusker history is among the top plays of the 2000s.

Nebraska offers class of 2028 Hawaii quarterback Hunter Fujikawa – Yahoo Sports
A class of 2028 quarterback received an offer from Nebraska following a visit to Lincoln this past weekend, as well as a solid freshman season.

Nebraska Football: Huskers land priority OL Rex Waterman
Nebraska has added an offensive line target to its 2026 class following an official visit.

Nebraska baseball adds Washburn infielder from transfer portal | Husker Red Zone | hastingstribune.com
LINCOLN — Nebraska baseball has added to its 2026 class with the addition of Jett Buck from the transfer portal

Other News From The Sporting World

Switzerland beats USMNT in Gold Cup tune-up match
Switzerland scored four first-half goals as the U.S. men’s national soccer team lost its fourth consecutive game under coach Mauricio Pochettino.

Shedeur Sanders reacts Deion Sanders’ health status, keeps focus on his NFL future at Browns camp – CBSSports.com
The rookie quarterback of the Cleveland Browns prefers to stay on topic — his progress during NFL minicamp

Olympic athletes say pro-doping Enhanced Games are a betrayal and could lead to deaths | Drugs in sport | The Guardian
Olympic athletes have condemned the Enhanced Games, warning the PED-friendly event could result in long-term health consequences or even deaths

NCAA President Charlie Baker: House settlement helps NCAA avoid ‘bankruptcy’
NCAA President Charlie Baker told hundreds of collegiate athletics administrators during a keynote address Tuesday that the recent multibillion-dollar House settlement approval creates a far better future for the organization, one that comes with choices, instead of bankruptcy.

There’s a New NIL Enforcement Entity in College Sports. It’s Not the NCAA
The College Sports Commission will enforce the terms of the House settlement. The post There’s a New NIL Enforcement Entity in College Sports. It’s Not the NCAA appeared first on Front Office Sports.

Panel approves changes to enhance the flow of the game in men’s basketball – NCAA.org
The NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel on Tuesday approved changes to help enhance the flow of the game in men’s basketball for the 2025-26 season.

Yellow Journalism

What happens the day after humanity creates AGI? – Big Think
“We are racing towards a new era in which we outsource cognitive abilities that are central to our identity as thinking beings.”

Podcast Schmodcast

Auditory Enlightenment