Associated Press

OAKMONT, Pa. (AP) — Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller can look across the vast landscape of Oakmont where each won momentous U.S. Open titles and see in some respects how little has changed.

The course is longer than when Nicklaus defeated Arnold Palmer in a playoff in 1962, than when Miller set a U.S. Open record that still stands 52 years later as the only man with a 63 in the final round to win.

But it’s still about putting. It’s still those greens that feel like putting on a basketball court.

“I was talking to some of the guys in the locker room a few minutes ago,” Nicklaus said Saturday. “And they’re saying, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Well, obviously putting is the key out here.’ I three-putted the 55th green. I had one three-putt that week, and I’m still ticked off I three-putted that one. That was sort of my mindset.”

“Basically you had to figure these greens out and not let them get to you,” he said. “And be patient. One-under par won the tournament, and 1-under par doesn’t win a lot of tournaments today. But it did then.”

And it might now.

Only three players were under par at the halfway point for the 125th edition of the U.S. Open, and the record 10th one at Oakmont. Only 27 players have finished a major championship at Oakmont under par, and the next 36 holes determine how much — or if — that list will grow.

Miller’s win was epic, mainly because he thought he was out of it with a 76 in the third round of the 1973 U.S. Open, leaving him six shots behind. On a soft course, Miller delivered what he considers “literally a perfect round of golf.”

Almost. His only bogey in that round was a three-putt on the long par-3 eighth hole.

Miller was a premier striker of the ball whose putting was streaky, and what he marvels about even today was missing only one fairway and hitting every green, every shot except one left below the cup on the lightning-fast greens.

“That’s hard to do at Oakmont, to hit 18 greens and have no downhill putts,” Miller said.

Both also had to deal with Arnold Palmer, the King, particularly in his home country of western Pennsylvania. Palmer had won the Masters for the third time in 1962. Nicklaus was a powerful 22-year-old with a crew cut — “Fat Jack,” he was called — who didn’t care about anything but winning and didn’t realize the crowd was against him.

“He was the guy you had to beat if you wanted to win, and particularly here,” Nicklaus said. “It was really kind of funny because I never really heard the gallery. I was a 22-year-old kid with blinders on and not smart enough to figure out that people rooted for people. I just went out and played golf. That’s what I did.”

If he could have donated one club to the USGA from his Open title — as players are asked to do now — Nicklaus didn’t hesitate on the key to winning.

“I three-putted one time in 90 holes,” he said.

Miller never got around to answering what club he would have donated — driving was key to miss only one fairway, his iron play was sublime in hitting every green. He did what few others even consider at a U.S. Open. He attacked, because he had to.

“I was more of a guy that didn’t like it to be close,” he said. “If that ball is going in the hole, I’m going to fill it up until the round is over if I can. None of this fancy stuff about hitting away from the target. I wanted to have the thrill of going for knocking down pins out of the green. That was my fun. I liked to drive fast and hit hard with the driver and that kind of stuff.

“I don’t know, everybody does it differently,” he said. “But that’s just the way I thought.”

Miller spoke how he thought, endearing him to U.S. viewers with his 29 years in the booth at NBC covering the U.S. Open, never afraid to use “choke” when talking about pressure.

Among the many changes that have occurred since their glory days at Oakmont: money.

The prize fund is $21.5 million this week, with $4.3 million going to winner.

Nicklaus won $17,500 for his 1962 U.S. Open title. Eleven years later, Miller won $30,000. That’s true in all sports and particularly now in golf as the PGA Tour is in a money race with the Saudi backing of LIV Golf.

“Would I have loved to have had what’s going on here when we played? Yeah. Obviously all of us would,” Nicklaus said. “But I also was really pleased that … Johnny and myself both trail blazed the way for what’s happening today. I think if you look back at (Ben) Hogan and (Sam) Snead and those guys, they trail blazed it for us.

“I don’t think that would have made any difference, whether we were playing for what we played for or what they’re playing here today,” he said. “If we would have had the ability to do this, I think we would have tried to do the same thing.”

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AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf

RALEIGH, N.C. — It has been a week since the House settlement with the NCAA changed everything about college athletics forever, and yet nothing has really changed.

As earthshaking as the agreement is, to dole out billions in back pay to former college athletes while opening the door to “revenue sharing” — a phrase concocted to give plausible denial that this isn’t just the semi-pro operation — universities have been planning for this for so long, the actual finalization of the lawsuit and implementation of its provisions actually amounts to business as what is now usual.

Six months ago, North Carolina’s term sheet with Bill Belichick specified $13 million of UNC’s roughly $20.5 million revenue-sharing pool would go to football, at a time when that wasn’t even technically legal yet. And the ink on Judge Claudia Wilken’s signature was barely dry before the NCAA and the power conferences started leaking drafts of favorable legislation in Congress. Their lobbyists have been waiting years for this moment.

All of this has been coming for a long time, and only a dispute over players who were losing their scholarships and roster spots delayed the actual settlement until June. The reality had set in long ago.

The House settlement isn’t perfect. There are major potential Title IX issues and real concerns over what scholarship caps might do to sports that have traditionally had big rosters like track and swimming. The fact that a big part of the back pay for former athletes is coming from NCAA basketball tournament revenue while the College Football Playoff doesn’t pay a dime shifts the financial burden unfairly from big football schools to everyone else.

It is, however, better than nothing. It ushers in a new world of college sports, one where athletes can be openly paid by their universities on top of whatever NIL deals they can still gather, one that’s long overdue. For one thing, all the money that used to change hands under the table will be in plain view now. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

For another, athletes long ago deserved a piece of the bags of money they generated for athletic directors, coaches, administrators, contractors, vendors, lawyers and everyone else who suckled at the sugar teat of a college-athletic industrial complex built on free labor. College athletes always had value, even if the world pretended they did not. Now they can actually collect.

It took a long time for that edifice to fall, and now that it has, none of the fear-mongering from petty tyrants trying to safeguard their turf has come true. Former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany once said his conference would have to drop to Division III if the O’Bannon lawsuit went through. For real! You know what came out of the O’Bannon lawsuit? Cost-of-attendance payments for players and a long-awaited college football video game that was the best-selling game of last year! The Big Ten seems OK!

Amateurism was always a scam. The ideal of the amateur was created by the British gentry to avoid having to compete against the lower classes, who couldn’t afford to row or play rugby as a hobby. Professionals started competing in the Olympics decades ago and the world kept right on spinning. There was never any reason why you couldn’t be a student and an athlete and get paid to do it.

Teaching assistants get paid. Students with work-study jobs get paid. Natalie Portman appeared in Hollywood blockbusters without compromising her eligibility for Harvard student drama. The only reason athletes were different was because there was so much money coming in that the adults wanted to keep all the profits for themselves. The only reason the NCAA bureaucracy as we know it exists is because those adults didn’t trust each other not to cheat and pay them anyway.

There is going to be more upheaval as everyone adjusts to this new world, even with a headstart, and a lot of the things fans like least about the past few years of college athletics aren’t going to change right away. The transfer portal isn’t going anywhere, although the ability to pay players directly may lead to more mutually beneficial arrangements that somewhat dilute the current annual free-agency system.

There’s a way to fix all that, by moving toward some sort of collective bargaining with athletes that sets terms of pseudo-employment everyone agrees upon. The NCAA would rather push through legislation that sets those terms unilaterally post-House now that it senses favorable winds on Capitol Hill. But House, for all its faults, is a step in the right direction and long overdue. If it doesn’t feel like much has changed yet, it’s because so much already has.

For the past three years, there have been two windows for college football players to enter the transfer portal, one starting in December following the conclusion of the regular season and one in April at the end of the spring practice season. Coaches and administrators across college football, however, are eager to limit transfer movement to just one window each year.

Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork believes that window should be in the spring. He’s of that opinion based on the timing of both the end of the academic year and the start of revenue-sharing agreements, as the academic year for Ohio State and most other universities ends in May while annual revenue-sharing contracts with athletes under the new model created by the House v. NCAA settlement will run from July to June.

“If we ever say that we care about academics and we want to live by that, then I think the transfer portal window should be in the spring. And then now that you have a revenue sharing contract, where you will have an MOU with an athlete, from a fiscal management standpoint, it’s better to put it in the spring,” Bjork said Thursday.

Ryan Day has also suggested that he’s in favor of a spring transfer window, citing the strain that the winter portal window puts on teams who make deep runs in the College Football Playoff. Because players on CFP teams get an additional five-day window to enter the portal after their season ends, Ohio State had to fight off tampering efforts for many of its players last January following the national championship game, while it was unable to replace players who entered the portal during that window – most notably backup defensive tackle Hero Kanu – because the portal had already closed for every team other than Ohio State and Notre Dame.

“For us, if we didn’t have the second transfer portal window (in the spring), that is very, very difficult, because we’re trying to make decisions about next year yet our year isn’t even done yet,” Ryan Day said during an appearance on The Joel Klatt Show in February. “That affects your current roster, and it’s just messy. So I think you got to have two portals, unless you’re going to finish the season sooner. But if you’re finishing the season on January 20th, you can’t have just one portal window (in the winter).”

“If we ever say that we care about academics and we want to live by that, then I think the transfer portal window should be in the spring.”– Ross Bjork on his push for a spring transfer portal window

The elimination of the winter portal window would have some cons, particularly the fact that teams wouldn’t be able to add transfers to their rosters for spring practice. But the positives would outweigh the negatives for teams like Ohio State that expect to be competing for national championships every January.

The negatives might outweigh the positives for everyone else, however, and that’s why Ohio State appears to be in the minority with its desire for a spring transfer window.

The Athletic’s Chris Vannini reported Friday that momentum is building for a move to just one transfer portal window in college football. A final decision on when that portal window would be hasn’t yet been made, but one of Vannini’s sources described the preference for January over April across the sport “as an 80-20 split.” The American Football Coaches Association proposed a 10-day window that would run from Jan. 2-12 in 2026, which would come after the majority of bowl games except for the College Football Playoff semifinals and national championship game but would still be early enough for players to transfer into new schools in time for the spring semester.

“I want January,” Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire said, per Vannini. “I want to get my team, and I want to roll and get ready for winter conditioning, spring football, and take that team into the fall.”

An early January window with no spring window would make navigating the portal even more difficult than it already is for the teams that make deep CFP runs, as they’d have no choice but to evaluate the transfer market and make roster decisions in the midst of trying to win a national title. But those teams might not find much sympathy from the rest of college football.

“It’s really hard to be playing in a championship setting and having to deal with that,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart told reporters last month at SEC spring meetings. “When I brought that up as a complaint or a problem, I was told there’s no crying from the yacht.”

Regardless of which transfer window is ultimately chosen, Bjork believes college football needs a comprehensive calendar to govern what will happen over the course of the year from preseason camp, the regular season and the College Football Playoff to the transfer portal, signing day, spring practices, OTAs and more. And Bjork believes those details need to be hammered out as soon as possible with the 2025 college football season now under three months away.

“We have to keep pushing that. My colleagues and I in the Big Ten, we want to keep pushing that. We’ll collaborate, we’ll communicate, but we think we need to get that done sooner rather than later,” Bjork said. “‘Cause fall will be here soon, and all of these things are gonna be on top of us, and we need to have that transfer portal window cleaned up, for sure.”

RELATED Ohio State Athletic Director Ross Bjork Thinks Conference Commissioners Should “Take a Step Back” In Public Discourse Over CFP Model

Taylor Lyons of The Baltimore Sun joins Fear the Podcast this week to discuss his recent reporting that Ja’Kobi Gillespie is headed to mediation with Blueprint Sports, the collective handling Maryland’s NIL dealings. Blueprint says his contract became void once he transferred, but Gillespie says that clause does not exist in his contract. Lyons fills us in on the details of that situation and sheds some light on the drama with Maryland’s Athletic Department in the final days of Kevin Willard and Damon Evans. Willard has been on a media tour lately trying to save face about his departure and some of those details contradict what Lyons has heard from others close to the situation.

Listen below, check out our earlier episodes here and don’t forget to  Subscribe to IMS Radio on …  iTunes| Spotify | Stitcher | Podbean | Amazon Music | TuneIn | Apple Podcasts

LSU 5-Star WR Commit Reported to Ink NIL Package Worth up to $1 Million originally appeared on Athlon Sports.

Despite already being committed to the LSU Tigers, that hasn’t stopped several other big-time programs from pursuing five-star wide receiver recruit Tristen Keys. The Hattiesburg, Mississippi, native is the No. 5 player in the country according to On3, as well as the top wideout and best player in Mississippi.

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In addition to the Tigers, Miami, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas A&M and Auburn are all pushing their NIL budgets to secure the talents of this 6-foot-2.5, 185-pound burgeoning star.

Because so many teams are still recruiting Keys, his NIL valuation could push close to $1 million, according to the latest reporting from On3’s Pete Nakos.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that Keys had secured a NIL agreement with athletic apparel and footwear company Adidas, estimated to be worth over $500,000, according to On3.

Keys joined LSU in March over offers from several college football powerhouse programs. In just 10 games played last season as a junior at Hattiesburg (MS), Keys collected 40 passes for 839 yards and 12 touchdowns.

Per a scouting report from Charles Power posted at On3, Keys is a “contested catch maven who looks like the top wide receiver prospect early in the 2026 cycle,” and he “displays a huge catch radius, high-pointing the football and coming down with one-handed grabs.”

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Despite not even having enrolled in a college yet, Keys is ranked No. 19 among high school players in the NIL 100, On3’s list of estimated NIL values.

Keys is one of two five-star recruits committed to LSU, joined by defensive lineman Richard Anderson for the 2026 class. The Tigers also already have seven four-star commitments as well and rank second in On3’s team recruiting rankings.

Related: 5-Star LSU Commit Posts Two-Word Message After Massive NIL Deal Revealed

Related: Garrett Nussmeier Has Hilarious One-Word Reaction to LSU’s Social Media Post

This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jun 13, 2025, where it first appeared.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) – On Friday, a federal judge signed off on arguably the biggest change in the history of college sports, clearing the way for schools to begin paying their athletes millions as soon as next month as the multibillion-dollar industry shreds the last vestiges of the amateur model that defined it for more than a century.

Nearly five years after Arizona State University swimmer Grant House sued the NCAA and its five biggest conferences to lift restrictions on revenue sharing, U.S. Judge Claudia Wilken approved the final proposal that had been hung up on roster limits, just one of many changes ahead amid concerns that thousands of walk-on athletes will lose their chance to play college sports.

The sweeping terms of the so-called House settlement include approval for each school to share up to $20.5 million with athletes over the next year and $2.8 billion that will be paid over the next decade to thousands of former players who were barred from that revenue for years.

One of the lead plaintiff attorneys, Steve Berman, called Friday’s news “a fantastic win for hundreds of thousands of college athletes.”

The agreement brings a seismic shift to hundreds of schools that were forced to reckon with the reality that their players are the ones producing the billions in TV and other revenue, mostly through football and basketball, that keep this machine humming.

The scope of the changes—some have already begun—is difficult to overstate. The professionalization of college athletics will be seen in the high-stakes and expensive recruitment of stars on their way to the NFL and NBA, and they will be felt by athletes whose schools have decided to pare their programs. The agreement will resonate in nearly every one of the NCAA’s 1,100 member schools boasting nearly 500,000 athletes.

NCAA President Charlie Baker said the deal “opens a pathway to begin stabilizing college sports.”

The road to a settlement

Wilken’s ruling comes 11 years after she dealt the first significant blow to the NCAA ideal of amateurism. Then, she ruled in favor of former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon and others seeking a way to earn money from the use of their “name, image and likeness” —a term that is now as common in college sports as “March Madness” or “Roll Tide.” 

It was just four years ago that the NCAA cleared the way for NIL money to start flowing, but the changes coming are even bigger.

Wilken granted preliminary approval to the settlement last October. That sent colleges scurrying to determine not only how they were going to afford the payments, but how to regulate an industry that also allows players to cut deals with third parties so long as they are deemed compliant by a newly formed enforcement group that will be run by auditors at Deloitte.

The agreement takes a big chunk of oversight away from the NCAA and puts it in the hands of the four biggest conferences. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC hold most of the power and decision-making heft, especially when it comes to the College Football Playoff, which is the most significant financial driver in the industry and is not under the NCAA umbrella like the March Madness tournaments are.

Roster limits held things up

The deal looked ready to go, but Wilken put a halt to it this spring after listening to a number of players who had lost their spots because of newly imposed roster limits being placed on teams. 

The limits were part of a trade-off that allowed the schools to offer scholarships to everyone on the roster, instead of only a fraction, as has been the case for decades. Schools started cutting walk-ons in anticipation of the deal being approved. 

Wilken asked for a solution and, after weeks, the parties decided to let anyone cut from a roster—now termed a “Designated Student-Athlete”—return to their old school or play for a new one without counting against the new limit. 

Wilken ultimately agreed, going point-by-point through the objectors’ arguments to explain why they didn’t hold up. The main point pushed by the parties was that those roster spots were never guaranteed in the first place.

“The modifications provide Designated Student-Athletes with what they had prior to the roster limits provisions being implemented, which was the opportunity to be on a roster at the discretion of a Division I school,” Wilken wrote.

Her decision, however, took nearly a month to write, leaving the schools and conferences in limbo—unsure if the plans they’d been making for months, really years, would go into play.

Winners and losers

The list of winners and losers is long and, in some cases, hard to tease out.

A rough guide of winners would include football and basketball stars at the biggest schools, which will devote much of their bankroll to signing and retaining them. For instance, University of Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood’s NIL deal is reportedly worth between $10.5 million and $12 million.

Losers, despite Wilken’s ruling, figure to be at least some of the walk-ons and partial scholarship athletes whose spots are gone. 

Also in limbo are the Olympic sports many of those athletes play and that serve as the main pipeline for a U.S. team that has won the most medals at every Olympics since the downfall of the Soviet Union.

All this is a price worth paying, according to the attorneys who crafted the settlement and argue they delivered exactly what they were asked for: an attempt to put more money in the pockets of the players whose sweat and toil keep people watching from the start of football season through March Madness and the College World Series in June.

What the settlement does not solve is the threat of further litigation.

Though this deal brings some uniformity to the rules, states still have separate laws regarding how NIL can be doled out, which could lead to legal challenges. Baker has been consistent in pushing for federal legislation that would put college sports under one rulebook and, if he has his way, provide some form of antitrust protection to prevent the new model from being disrupted again.