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.

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.

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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.

When you refer to Jake Knapp, make sure you refer to him properly:

Jake Knapp: the 2025 National Pitcher of the Year!

Knapp becomes the first UNC baseball pitcher to earn the College Baseball Foundation’s National Pitcher of the Year, an award that has been presented since 2009. He becomes the first Tar Heel since Andrew Miller (2006) to earn the top pitcher in the country award, and joins the likes of Paul Skenes, Stephen Strasburg and Aaron Nola as players who have been awarded this honor.

Fans of the UNC baseball program got to witness Knapp’s dominance on the mound up close, being there every step of the way. His story is even more remarkable, given he spent the entire 2024 season rehabbing from Tommy John surgery.

No one expected Knapp to return and be as dominant as he was. The right-hander proved everyone wrong.

National Pitcher of the Year Committee Chair Chris Snead had some high praise for what Knapp accomplished in what will be his final season with the UNC baseball program:

“Jake represents everything that is good about college baseball. Here is a young man that battled through one of the worst injuries a pitcher can suffer to return to the field. In the process, he inspired his teammates and became the unquestioned leader of his team. Fourteen consecutive wins is significant and impressive. He was a complete pitcher and more importantly, he was a great person and teammate.”

What an honor for Jake Knapp, who put together a season for the record books. While some media outlets (cough, Perfect Game), didn’t feel the need to award Knapp with first-team All-American honors, the National Pitcher of the Year Committee realized just how remarkable his season was.

The main thing that will be remembered from Knapp’s incredible season is this fact: when he took the mound, the UNC baseball program simply didn’t lose.

No one else in the country can hold that claim.

Four Tennessee baseball names surfaced in the NCAAA transfer portal Friday morning, bringing the total number of departures up to seven since the end of the 2025 campaign.

Senior outfielder Colby Backus, sophomore right-handed pitcher Thomas Crabtree, redshirt-sophomore right-handed pitcher Austin Hunley and redshirt-freshman right-handed pitcher Brayden Sharp were the Vols who entered, joining pitcher Bryson Thacker and infielders Jack Jones and Robinson Martin who entered earlier in the week.

Backus, who may have one final year of eligibility due to the junior college waiver situation, played in 21 games this season for Tennessee, logging a .188 batting average with one run driven in. The Johnson City, Tenn. native spent three seasons on rocky Top and two seasons on the active roster, totaling five home runs on 13 RBI 15 hits with 23 runs scored. Backus was used primarily as a pinch hitter and defensive replacement throughout his Tennessee career.

Crabtree spent one season with the Vols after transferring up form the junior college ranks. The righty appeared in 12 games, accumulating a 2-0 record with a 3.00 ERA across 15.0 innings pitched. He struck out 20 batters, walked five and opponents registered a .151 batting average against him.   

Hunley, the younger brother of VFL Sean Hunley, combined to pitch 18.1 innings for Tennessee the past two seasons after redshirting in 2023 as a true freshman. The righty was 3-0 with a 4.42 ERA and 17 strikeouts to five walks with Tennessee.

Sharp, a two-way player for Tennessee, primarily focused on the mound his second year in the system. He appeared in eight games for the Vols this past season, totaling 15 strikeouts and five walks. In two seasons on the bump, sharp registered 11 appearances with a career ERA of 4.91. He also tallied seven career at-bats with Tennessee, scoring two runs.    

The 2025 non-graduate transfer portal opened on June 2 and will remain open until July 1. Players must have their name entered in the transfer portal by July 1 if they want to move on, but new destinations do not have to be made by that time.

Tennessee has added four players from the transfer portal thus far in the cycle and they are all right handed pitchers: Clay Edmondson (UNC Asheville), Mason Estrada (MIT), Bo Rhudy (Kennesaw State) and Brady Frederick (ETSU).