Dellenger: Unanswered questions remain with NCAA's settlement

During Tuesday morning's edition of TexAgs Radio, Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports provided the latest regarding the NCAA's most recent settlement and the process that goes along with it. Dellenger also touched on the future of collectives, conference realignment and more.

Key notes from Ross Dellenger interview

• I was at SEC Spring Meetings in Destin. I was able to catch up with some administrators, university presidents and Commissioner Greg Sankey. Everybody that usually would have answers didn’t, and there is a lot of unanswered questions. Part of that is expected. They’re in the process of writing the long form of the settlement agreement, and they’ll be doing that for another few weeks. They’ve agreed on a short-term term agreement. It’s more like term sheets because this is such an in-depth, broad settlement agreement. There is still active negotiations about what’s in the long form. There are a lot of unanswered questions that won’t be fully answered until that long form is complete.
   
• I would say that the July or August or whatever the fall semester for 2025 is the goal. It would surprise me if that were to change. The long form will probably be submitted sometime in July, and then there are a bunch of processes that happen. You have an approval process from the judge that includes a three-month objection period for plaintiffs – former player, current players – to object to the settlement. Then there are hearings over those objections. It’s at least five months away from the finalization of this. If it gets much further, then you could see that alter the implementation timeline for a new model. By spring of next year, everything will be finalized and implemented. Over the course of this finalization process, the details of a new model will come out. They’ll be sorted out, and schools will know more answers to these questions over the next couple of months.
   
• One of the big things the settlement does is for the 10-year duration of the settlement is bind everyone together in the NCAA. That includes power conferences. It is seen my many as a binding agreement to make sure everybody stays together for 10 years. That’s one of the goals, for sure.
   
• It is a complicated thing, but when you break it down, you can understand what they’re doing with the walk-on thing. It’s not just immediately saying, “No walk-ons.” It’s not just a money-saving thing. It’s kind of a trickle-down. One of the things in the settlement is to eliminate scholarship caps and restrictions. There is a thought that the restriction will lead to another anti-trust lawsuit against the NCAA, so how do you eliminate that? You get rid of that restriction. They’re doing away with a scholarship cap that will be replaced with a roster limit. Each sport will have a roster limit, and those sports and schools can offer as many scholarships as they want up to the roster limit. No. 1, that is to eliminate the potential to eliminate more anti-trust lawsuits over scholarship restrictions. How does that impact certain sports and walk-ons in football is the second part. Take a football roster of what it is now, which is 120 football players. You will have schools offer scholarships to all 120. That means more expenses, and it also means 40 more scholarships to women’s sports because you have to balance things out due to Title IX. You eliminate a lot of expenses if you just shrink the roster to 85-90 players. In order to avoid incurring more expenses in the form of 80 more total scholarships, you shrink the football roster.
   
• Not every sport will see the rosters condensed like that. Baseball programs have around a 32-man roster for scholarship players, but the sport is given 11.7 scholarships for those 32 guys. With a cap of 32, the school could use 32 full scholarships. You would have to additionally add women’s scholarships on top of that. It will be on a sport-by-sport basis when it comes to roster limits.
   
• At the highest levels with the major conferences, I don’t think you’ll see a ton of sports eliminated. You’ll see sports in the ACC, where they lead the country in an average of sports the schools carry; you may see them drop sports to the club level. I could see that happening, but a wholesale elimination of programs? I don’t see that happening at the major conference level to the degree that some believe. I think administrators will search for other ways of cutting expenses and additional revenue streams. Eliminating sports could potentially end in lawsuits.
   
• Look for ways for athletic administrators to find untapped revenue, which we’ve seen already – whether it’s naming rights stuff or corporate sponsors on fields. Moreso, I think you’ll see some of that as well as the reduction of staff, which you’ve already seen at Texas A&M.
   
• Plenty of people think that collectives will “poof” and go away with this new model. The collectives themselves say that is not the case. There is an evolution going on with collectives, and the next evolution of NIL is them turning into marketing agencies. Those marketing agencies in a new model could be permitted to distribute funds to athletes outside of the university. It could be third-party NIL that does not count against the school’s cap. I think they want to exist in that world. The issue for collectives with that is many of the deals we see collectives strike now are considered fake or phony NIL. In the future, the way the settlement is written, you will probably have a new enforcement arm to scrutinize NIL more than ever. “True NIL” is something you hear used. Enforcement arms will have a clearing house that will approve these “true NIL” deals for fair market values. College leaders are pretty convinced this is something they can do. There is no doubt that collectives are not immediately disappearing.
   
• I caught up with Trev Alberts a couple of times in Destin. We discussed all the things we’re talking about here and the issues that come with the added expense of $20-25 million. We discussed how to go about it, and as he put it, “College athletics doesn’t have a revenue problem, but a spending problem.” The first way to slow that is to reduce expenses, and I think we see him doing that already at A&M. Alberts has a good reputation amongst his peers of managing and running an athletic department, and I think he’s one of the ADs is going to lay more of a path for how we may see other athletic departments handle all of this.
   
• I got to catch up with Mike Elko at SEC Spring Meetings as well, and he did an incredible job at Duke. If you can do that work that quickly at Duke, there is no reason to think that Elko cannot do that at A&M where you have more resources and are in a more fertile recruiting ground. You’re also in the SEC, where you’re going to see some significant increases in revenue and conference distribution. A&M has been in a great position and just hasn’t quite gotten over the hump. Elko did a good enough job at his last stop where he could be the guy to finally get the Aggies over that hump.
   
• I hope to have a summer without realignment. It has been three of the last three years. I hope they wait a little bit. Anything happening this year would be a little quick, but don’t put it past them. It would be a stiff price for Florida State or Clemson or both to leave so quickly.
   
• Fans probably get most frustrated with the transfer portal and player movement. That is not addressed in the settlement, but enough is where schools could sign multi-year contracts and agreements with athletes. The rate of player movement could be decreased a little bit, but athletes will have to agree to these contracts. That would be a positive for many fans.