California judge Claudia Wilken approved the House Settlement late Friday night, that means the revenue sharing era began at 12:01 a.m. today (June, 7, 2025).
But what does that mean? Here’s some explanation of what’s changed and what comes next.
First off, teams that opt in to the settlement (which every power-conference team will) have a pool of $20.5 million to use to pay athletes directly.
That money comes out of each university's own athletic revenue, hence, “Revenue sharing.”
The cap will go up year to year, the $20.5 is for the 2025-26 school year.
Most teams have said they are probably going to spend 75-80 percent of that pool on football, 10-15 percent on men’s basketball, five percent on women’s basketball and five percent combined on all other sports, but there is no rule about how the money is spent.
If a school wants to spend 100 percent on football, it can, if another wants to spend 100 percent on basketball, it can, if a third wants to become the most dominate swim & dive team in the country by spending a few million there, it can.
Teams just cannot spend more than $20.5 million across all sports.
Enforcement of that will go to the College Sports Commission, a board made up of commissioners from the power conferences and led b Bryan Seeley (a former MLB executive). There has been talk about a deal agreed to by the power conferences to give up the ability to challenge CSC rulings with harsh penalties like getting kicked out of the conference for schools that break the rules or don't agree, but that has not been set up yet.
This will, supposedly, return NIL to what it was initially intended to be. A local company paying a player to do a commercial or endorse a product.
The new enforcement entity for NIL is a clearinghouse named NIL Go run through Deloitte (a large accounting firm), which will launch on Wednesday, June 11, and will look into every NIL deal that pays more than $600 dollars and was agreed to after 12:01 a.m. today.
That’s why teams were rushing to sign mega deals that had front-loaded payouts during the basketball transfer portal, they wanted the deals to get done in time so as not to be under the new NIL Go jurisdiction.
Deloitte did an analysis of past NIL deals and said 70 percent of previous deals given by NIL collectives would have been denied, while 90 percent of past deals coming from public companies would have been approved.
That doesn’t mean deals for more than $600 are no longer allowed, but they will be checked by a third party to make sure a company paying the deal is getting “commensurate value.” How that will be defined, I’m not yet sure.
On July 1, schools will be able to start sending out revenue-sharing payments to players.
The schools have a little under a month to really get it all figured out for the next year and appropriate that money.
Contracts started being sent in for approval immediately after the settlement passed, so schools have known where they wanted the money to go.
Missouri Athletic Director Laird Veatch mentioned a few times that Mizzou had a plan pretty well laid out, it was just delayed after this settlement didn’t pass when expected.
On July 6, schools must designate student-athletes permitted by the settlement to remain above roster limits.
This was the part that held up the settlement.
Roster limits were implemented, football teams can only have 105 players, men’s and women’s basketball teams can have 15, baseball can have 34, men’s and women’s soccer can have 28, softball can have 25 and volleyball can have 18. I’m not sure what the restrictions are for other sports, but every sport now has a limit, but every player on each team can be on scholarship if the school determines it wants to spend that money.
Judge Wilken didn’t like the way a roster limit essentially eliminated thousands of spots for walk-ons, so any that were on rosters at the end of their sport’s last season and lost their spot moving forward because of the expectations of the coming limit can be “grandfathered” in.
Once designated, they will not be counted against a roster limit at any school they go to. So if they were to transfer in the future, they would still not count against their future school’s limit. Once a player is designated, they will not count against any roster limit for the rest of their college career.
At the start of the school year
With the exception of designated athletes, fall sport rosters must be at or below the roster limit by the first day of competition.
On Dec. 1
With the exception of designated athletes, winter and spring sports must be at or below roster limits by Dec. 1 or the start of competition, whichever comes first.
So winter sports will have to be by the start of competition, spring sports will have to be by Dec. 1.
What's next?
There are a lot of new lawsuits expected to start quickly (ugh).
The state of Tennessee recently passed a law saying public universities in the state, essentially, don’t have to be restricted by the salary cap and can spend whatever they want. I’m not sure how that would work, but it’s what led to the power conferences starting to pass around a deal that would require teams to agree to being looked over by the College Sports Commission, with harsh penalties like getting kicked out of the conference if they don’t.
There almost certainly will be a lawsuit there.
There will probably be a Title IX issue.
Title IX was meant to require schools to spend the same amount of money on men’s and women’s sports. Well, adding possibly 90 percent of $20.5 million directly to football and men’s basketball would make that math harder.
The increased scholarship limits will help even the balance, Veatch has said Missouri will add a lot of scholarships, especially in women’s sports, which is how I think most teams will try to work around it, but there will probably be an issue there.
There will be many, many more lawsuits and issues raised.
Stay up to date on all the Mizzou news with your premium subscription.
Talk about this story in the story thread and discuss so much more in The Tiger Walk.
Make sure you're caught up on all the Tiger news and headlines.
