Guess we’ll be writing House updates for at least another week

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Quick reminder! Earlier this week, we celebrated the 5th birthday of Extra Points. This email has a bunch of information about where we’re trying to take the company over the next year, and also has a discount link for 25% off an Extra Points subscription. This code will expire at 6 PM CST tonight, so if you want to save money on EP and get some free stickers, friends, now is your chance!

You’ll be forgiven if you forgot about that post, of course. There’s been an avalanche of news over the last 48 hours, and I’m not even talking about COLLEGE BASKETBALL WATCHING CHICAGO POPE. 

There’s too much going on to give all of these developments a full newsletter, but I did want to quickly highlight a few big stories that dropped since Wednesday:

Guess we’ll be writing House updates for at least another week

The conventional wisdom for the first few months of 2025 was that the proposed settlement to House v NCAA would be approved in early April. Well, we’re quickly approaching mid-May, and while it looks like we’re close to a final answer, the settlement terms have still yet to be approved.

Earlier this week, the NCAA and power conferences filed a revision to the settlement terms surrounding roster limits. The new filing allows schools to grandfather athletes who are currently on a roster, athletes who had been cut earlier this year, and high school athletes who committed, only to then lose their roster spot due to cuts.

But schools don’t have to do this. The grandfathering is optional. Some schools, like Notre Dame, have signalled that they intend to grandfather impacted athletes. Perhaps other schools will reach different conclusions.

One of the objectors, Steve Molo, says that the settlement revisions “didn’t go far enough.” The $12 billion dollar question here is whether Judge Wilken will agree. Is an optional phased-in implementation of new roster limits enough of a compromise to secure the settlement, or will the whole thing get blown up because the major conferences wanted to save a few bucks?

Wilken said that objectors can file responses to the revision up to May 13, and then the NCAA can have three days to respond. That means the soonest some sort of conclusive resolution could drop is around Friday, May 16.

What will she do? I don’t know! Speaking only for myself here, I’m personally ready for somebody to just send a press release to say what’s actually happening, rather than trying to make predictions and parse out every tiny line in a legal filing. I turned down law school specifically because I didn’t want to do that for a living, after all.

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Speaking of mid-majors and power conferences,

The NCAA contemplates yet another significant governance reform

The NCAA Division I Decision-Making Working Group put out a draft of a potentially significant change to the organization’s current structure. In addition to potentially streamlining several NCAA committees, the proposal also calls for the D1 Board of Directors to drop to 13 voting members, instead of 24.

But, because NCAA governance has to somehow be as complicated as possible, there will be still be 24 votes. Instead, the seats tied to P4 conferences will have votes that are worth more than everybody else. The rest of the board would be made from current college athletes (three), two G5 institutions, two CCA22 votes (from the Collegiate Commissioners' Association Group, or FCS + IAAA), another FCS, and another D-1 vote.

So it would look like this:

The TL;DR here, as I understand it, is if the four power conferences all vote together on something, they’ll control a majority of the votes. But the Big Ten and SEC wouldn’t be able to unilaterally push anything through…one defecting P4 league would be enough to give everybody else a majority.

This isn’t finalized by any means, but if you’re somebody who is paying close attention to either a) the NCAA’s ability to slash through enough subcommittees to get stuff done faster and/or b) the largest conferences securing even more power and influence, this is a story worth monitoring.

Here’s what else I wrote this week:

• I published a guest post from Arizona State historian and college sports advocate, Dr. Victoria Jackson, who proposed a novel solution to the roster limits problem. What if we just bring back JV teams?

• I understand that many sports lawyers believe that Donald Trump does not have the authority or the political coalition to get deeply involved in college sports reform. Since an awful lot of very smart people have looked pretty stupid for saying “there’s no way Donald Trump could do that,” right before he does that thing… I think it’s time for the college sports industry to get serious about planning for a world where the White House changes the rules about a lot of stuff….not just antitrust. And yes, I saw the commission he’s establishing… I’ll have more on that next week.

• This feels like a zillion years ago, but I also poked around into why Kentucky moved athletics into an LLC…and I’m not sure if this is going to launch a national trend, or if it’s really about more Kentucky-specific laws and policy goals.

• I also put together a 5,000ish word primer on how some of the basics of the college sports industry work…from budgets to shoe contracts to broadcast deals. This resource is completely free. Feel free to bookmark, send around, etc.

• And finally, we added even more documents to the Extra Points Library. This week included over a dozen new contracts relating to ticketing services, plus updated men’s and women’s basketball coach contracts, sports marketing deals, and more.

Thanks for reading, everybody. I’m back to the phones and will have more newsletters in your inbox next week.