ESPN's Dan Murphy goes inside NCAA's settlement with power leagues

On Thursday evening, the NCAA and the Power 5 conferences reached a settlement that will allow schools to pay players. With so much unknown about the days and weeks ahead, ESPN staff writer Dan Murphy joined TexAgs Radio on Friday to provide some much-needed context.

Key notes from Dan Murphy interview

• It has been long overdue. Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen lawsuits, like the one that is in the process of being settled right now, chip away at the amateurism rules that have been a staple of college sports for 100 or so years.
   
• Yesterday was a breaking point in that. What we’ve also seen is an explosion in revenue for these schools and conferences as the TV deals and College Football Playoff arrived. It has been exponential and has gotten to a point where there is too much money not to see it as the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that it is.
   
• It took awhile to force the NCAA into the corner to actually treat it like a business. Yesterday was a very significant step in them acknowledging what this is and starting to share revenue with the players.

• Technically, the guys who are filing this lawsuit, Steve Berman and Jeffery Kessler, are the representatives of the athletes. They’ve sued on behalf of three named athletes — a women’s swimmer, a women’s basketball player and a former Illinois football player.

• They were granted class-action status, which means they represent the interest of every Division I athlete of that time frame. They are the ones advocating on their behalf, but they’re not polling every football player or basketball player out there. There are groups out there that feel like athletes will still need a bigger voice moving forward in negotiations, and while this settlement is a pretty big step moving forward, it does not eliminate the possibility that athletes might at some point have something that looks like a players’ association.

• The 2016 deadline is a tough deadline for some folks. The case that this lawsuit settles basically says that the NCAA was illegally restricting the way college athletes were able to make money from their Name, Image & Likeness. The lawsuit was filed in 2020. The way the court system works is that there is a statute of limitations on how far back you can sue for lost money. The statute of limitations is four years, which is how they got to the arbitrary deadline of 2016.
   
• The third piece is still to be determined. The third piece is very much up in the air. The biggest piece is the schools want to control NIL collectives better and separate endorsement deals with products vs. the endorsement deals that have been getting over the last few years, which are based on their performance on the field. That remains a huge challenge.
   
• There are state laws that make it hard for the NCAA to do anything, so as soon as the settlement paperwork went final last night, you heard the NCAA and conference commissioners immediately start saying that we still need help from Congress. They’ll still need a federal law to have any real teeth to any enforcement mechanisms they want to put in place with all of this. Otherwise, they’ll be challenged. They’re not done being in court. 
   
• The Supreme Court decision actually didn’t weigh in on Name, Image & Likeness. It just happened to come at the same time as the state laws made that possible. For the past 30 or 40 years, college sports and the NCAA have operated under the idea that they are a unique industry because they are based in education, and because of that, the normal rules of anti-trust laws haven’t applied.
   
• What the Supreme Court said in 2021 was that college sports weren’t special and that the same anti-trust laws still apply to college sports. That’s why we’ve had the explosion of all of these other lawsuits that are gaining traction. The state laws are still in the way of all of this. It will take a literal act of Congress to reel in the spending that is happening now. It won’t happen immediately. This is a big step forward, but it is not a silver bullet that adds stability to college athletics. Even athletic directors are confused on all of this.
   
• Title IX is a big one and a huge concern for people in athletic departments right now. The schools are going to be paying this money directly, and Title IX requires schools to provide equal opportunity and equal benefit to men and women in college sports.
   
• If the money is coming straight from the schools, there is the belief that you’ll have to spend equal money on men’s and women’s athletes and teams. It’s unclear whether that will be fully applied, but it seems like it will. That $20 million pot will have to be split widely between men and women, which takes the pot down to $10 million for your football and basketball teams. Frankly, that’s not much more than what big-time programs are already funneling into their football programs through their NIL collectives. It would be a great deal for women’s athletics and past athletes that will get a chunk of that $2.8 billion pot of money.
   
• Maybe, we will have more answers soon, but it is a big day. In about a year, we will be talking about how rosters are managed based on how schools are spending money on players, which will be a significant difference for college football fans.