House Settlement Finalized to Push College Athletics and NCAA Into a New Era

The House v. NCAA settlement has been approved, and with it comes a whole different era of college athletics. Amateurism is officially gone and a de facto semi-professional model is in. There have been plenty of articles, posts, opinion pieces, etc. that have covered what is now permitted beginning with the 2025-26 academic year. I won’t cover every single aspect in detail, but here are the big items from Ross Dellenger of Yahoo:

• The NCAA will have to make $2.8 billion in back payments over the next 10 years to former athletes.
• Schools can share up to $20.5 million in revenue with student-athletes beginning with the 2025-26 academic year, but schools are not required to participate in revenue sharing.
• The maximum amount of revenue that can be shared will increase annually, with the current estimate to be $33 million by 2035.
• The maximum amount of revenue a school can share in a given year is 22%.
• Schools can distribute revenue as they see fit, with no preset allocation to any sport.
• Schools do not have to opt into the settlement.
• New roster limits will be in place beginning with the 2025-26 academic year, plus walk-ons will continue to be allowed.
• Athletes who were or will be cut can be grandfathered into the roster limits for the entirety of their career. The exemption will carry over if the athlete transfers.
• $2.5 million in new scholarships can be awarded, which can be attributed as part of the $20.5 million cap.
• NIL Go will review and approve of all NIL deals worth more than $600.

This was only a small selection of the many changes that will be happening as the calendar turns to July 1. It’s worth mentioning that the lawsuits won’t end because the settlement was approved. There are many legal landmines for the NCAA to continue navigating through and this settlement wasn’t an end-all, be-all.

Roster Limits and Possible Impacts

One aspect that I’m particularly curious about is the roster limit changes. I’ve included a table below showing each sport, the old scholarship limit, the new roster (and theoretical scholarship limit), and the increase. The average roster size is based on the work by the Business of College Sports (BCS). The new limit represents the maximum roster size limit and the maximum amount of scholarships a school can offer. For example, a school could offer 55 full scholarships to its Acrobatics & Tumbling team. Some sports may see a full allotment, while others may not change much from the status quo. Colleges do not have to offer the maximum number of scholarships and are allowed to provide partial scholarships. The new limits present two sides of the same coin when it comes to realignment: which sports will add and which sports will they cut?

I think the new limits, combined with some of the already present trends, shed some light. Acrobatics and STUNT are likely to see an increase because the high roster limits mean more tuition dollars for schools, offsetting any Title IX issues, and were recently recommended to be added as championship sports by the NCAA. The same applies to women’s wrestling and men’s wrestling has become more popular as well, so don’t be surprised if those two see growth in D1. We haven’t seen a ton of new D1 sports teams for 2025-26 or later (only 49) due to the pending House settlement, but that could change soon. One sport that has seen tremendous growth is flag football, but it’s not listed below. It will soon be added to the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program, which will lead to more formal rules being put in place.

On the other side, the clubhouse leader for sports cuts is tennis, which will go from 12.5 total scholarships to 20 under the new limits (10 for each team). Schools rely heavily on international students for tennis, which is going to become more difficult. Central Arkansas’s women’s roster had no US-born players on it, UTEP’s women’s team had 6 of its 7 players born outside the US, and Eastern Illinois’s two tennis teams had 13 of 17 players born outside the US. All three of those schools announced the discontinuation of tennis this spring. Another issue beyond attracting international students is that the bar is so much lower for a max roster size than nearly every other sport. Only golf is lower at a max limit of 9 for each team! International students may have a higher tuition rate than US students, but that cancels out if there are opportunities for 2-3x more students in other sports or if fewer international students are enrolling. It’s a bigger bonus if a school doesn’t have to give out many scholarships while maintaining a high roster size.

Soccer is in the same place as tennis, with a large percentage of international students making up the rosters. Soccer will allow up to 28 scholarships, but it will see 21 schools drop the sport in 2025-26 or later across the NCAA and NAIA. However, none of those cuts are at the D1 level. The Track & field community has raised concerns because the roster sizes will lead to athletes being cut, and conference-specific rules can further reduce the new roster limits.

Roster size and international students aren’t always the main determining factors. Basketball has a max of 15, and some schools are reliant on international players, but it’s one of the biggest revenue pieces for schools and conferences thanks to the NCAA Tournament. Schools won’t cut basketball because the NCAA Tournament units are too lucrative. Other Olympic sports can’t say the same, and that’s where schools have already been cutting, and will continue to do so. Don’t be surprised if conferences stop sponsoring some sports, leading to a continuous cycle of cuts. Not all cuts will be equal because while some will drop the team altogether, other schools will keep a club team.

Additional Roster Size Impacts

The total number of combined roster spots across all sports will decrease under the terms of the settlement. Athletes who were on rosters for 2024-25 and were cut in anticipation of the new roster limits are considered “Designated Student Athletes”. DSAs can still be cut from the roster, but won’t count against the limit of the school they were cut from or any future school they enroll at. This is one way for schools to build roster depth, a point I explore further in a few paragraphs. It feels like everyone missed here by kicking the can down the road for one year to force cuts in 2026-27, instead of a gradual decrease in the roster sizes over a three or four-year period.

Roster sizes could also impact how schools approach each sport. In 2022, I wrote that Wright State and other mid-majors might be better off focusing on a single sport or a few sports to differentiate themselves, ala Gonzaga’s basketball team. I didn’t envision the House settlement and the drastic roster limit changes at the time, but the idea still holds. The Power 4 conferences will be focused on football and basketball due to the huge revenues those bring in, but smaller schools can find a niche sport to become a contender. It won’t be easy, and limited revenue sharing/NIL deals will hinder their chances, but there are opportunities for schools to become a contender in sports not named football and basketball.

This is where the NIL Go reviews would be helpful to mid-majors because the “reasonable range of compensation” won’t allow for overinflated roster budgets… in theory. This assumes that the NIL Go compensation reviews are properly determined (a very questionable assumption) and that there aren’t legal challenges to the entire process (spoiler: there will be). What’s preventing NIL deals from being done under the table and outside the purview of NIL Go? Sure, there are enforcement mechanisms in place, but those only work if schools are caught. These deals may also be in contradiction with state laws, making an already tenuous legal position more difficult for the NCAA and its newly implemented NIL rules.

One final possibility I want to follow is from something I mentioned in April on the now-defunct newsletter: development teams. My thinking is that schools will use development or junior varsity teams to hoard players, particularly roster depth-building players. This sounds cynical, but how much do we really know about the roster limit sizes in terms of how they function? Who says coaches can’t use JV teams to get around the limits? Forget the walk-on program, the JV team is where you put all the players you want to develop, and not have to worry about hitting the transfer portal to recruit half the roster. Could coaches use JV teams for players who have suffered a long-term injury, but don’t want them to take up a roster spot? Perhaps schools will try to use club teams as a way to “add” additional roster spots without losing an athlete to another team? I’m curious to see if this gets clarified and/or how it plays out over the next few years. Again, maybe I’m too cynical about the roster limit games that coaches may (not) play, but there’s a lot of gray area here based on the limited information provided

Other Thoughts

Beyond the impact on individual sports, I’m curious to see how many current D1 schools will drop to D2, or more likely D3, in the next 3 to 5 years. The true financial impact of the settlement won’t be known for years, but schools will have a solid understanding in the next two years. It’s hard to imagine that every school in D1 for the 2025-26 academic year will still be in D1 by the time the 2030-31 academic year starts. Many issues haven’t even been fathomed that will impact college athletics because of the settlement. It sounds very vague, but the haste with which the settlement was put together and the push to have it implemented for the 2025-26 academic year means things were missed. Plus, the inevitability of more lawsuits means more change is guaranteed. In fairness, some of the issues that will arise later couldn’t have been foreseen.

What happens with the eligibility lawsuits? The NCAA wants a simple 5-year window for athletes to play, but players keep challenging the eligibility aspect in court, which puts the NCAA in a bind. On one hand, the NCAA did this to themselves because the eligibility rules have been convoluted and somewhat arbitrary for much of the organization’s history. However, I do not think there should be unlimited eligibility, and I think the 5-year proposal is reasonable. Athletes will continually file legal challenges to this as a way to lengthen their careers because each judge will see the case differently. I’m honestly not sure how the NCAA gets around this in the courts without a collective bargaining agreement or an assist from Congress.

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that college athletics is now a semi-professional model. That’s true for NCAA Division 1. As a result, everything that wasn’t already commoditized most likely will be in the near future. The never-ending pursuit of higher revenue has already changed athletics and will continue to change it. I can’t say I’m excited or looking forward to the next few years, nor can I say that I loathe the idea of college athletics going forward. It sure will be interesting to watch how it unfolds.

Photo Courtesy of NCAA / NCAA Photos