A federal judge agreed to the legal settlement of millions of dollars known House V. NCAAThe road paves the way for a new era for university sports.

Starting in this fall, colleges Universities in NCAA’s upper section will be allowed to pay athletes directly for the first time. The payments will be limited by setting the maximum salary at the beginning at $ 20.5 million per school. More than two billion dollars will be paid for former university athletes who have not been allowed to earn money while they are in school.

“Despite some settlements, the settlement agreement will lead to an unusual relief for the members of the settlement classes,” wrote Claudia Wilkin, the American boycott judge on Friday.

Approval of the settlement “represents a big step forward for university sports”, ” The president of NCAA Charlie Baker said. He added that the direct payments of the players are a very positive change and those that have long been late. “

The origins of the settlement

For decades, university athletics governed the tradition of amateurs, and NCAA rules prevented schools from compensating players-called “athletes” by NCAA-with anything that exceeded a scholarship that covered the costs of tuition fees and attended the college.

But the money in the large college sport has grown dramatically over the past few decades. Hundreds of millions of millions of broadcasting deals, ticket sales, donations and licensing agreements escalate.

“The money has become very large so that it does not allow athletes to obtain a reduction,” said Noah Henderson, a collective golf player for one time.

the house The settlement arose from three different lawsuits on the case of compensation for collective athletes. Prosecutors were a category of about 390,000 current and former university athletes, and the defendants were NCAA and five of its sports conferences. The negotiations took more than a year to complete.

How does the settlement work

There are two main parts of house Settlement: one looks backward, looks forward.

When looking back, NCAA and schools agreed to pay 2.75 billion dollars for former university athletes who played before 2021. This is the year in which NCAA changed its rules to allow players to sign licensing agreements to earn money from their name, pictures and right, known as Nil. Men’s soccer and basketball players will get the largest payments, as the prominent athletes who played in major schools got five or six numbers.

To move forward, the settlement sets a new system that allows schools to pay the players directly. Schools will be able to identify the players who pay and how to pay them. Most compensation is expected to be for players in sports that generate the largest revenue for schools: football in the first place, as well as basketball for men and women.

A settlement also determines the salary ceiling. For each school, compensation for players in all sports will be calculated for the maximum at the beginning of $ 20.5 million, and this may rise to $ 33 million in 2035. The new list limits, which replace the limits of traditional scholarships for each sport. Schools may give the largest possible number of scholarships, but the team’s sizes are limited.

It is expected that about half of the first-section schools in NCAA will adopt the new framework, either because its SEC, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and PAC-12 conferences are naming as a defendant and are required to comply with the settlement or because they are expected to choose them for their conditions, according to the court documents that lawyers raise to negotiate the settlement. Some schools, especially those in the lower football division and those who do not have completely football teams, will come out of the settlement and continue to compensate for athletes only with scholarships and other attendance costs.

Name, image and proverb

Since 2021, when NCAA first allowed players to earn compensation from their name, pictures and investigators, payments have become a real operating system. Star players, such as Duke’s Basketball Cooper Flagg, received millions of dollars in these deals.

Another major part of the settlement targets these excessive deals to establish a third party to review licensing agreements for “fair market value”.

This concept has been criticized by some in college sports. Sam Erlich, a professor at Boys State State University, who is likely to face legal challenges, said.

“There will be important questions about the type of powers enjoyed by the clearing and whether the clearing is legal,” Erich told NPR last month.