Okay FINE here's an emergency newsletter now that House was approved

Good morning, and thanks for checking your email on a weekend.

I don’t think I’ve sent an Extra Points newsletter on a weekend for….two years? Three? But, when there’s such a huge story, and everybody else is writing something, and folks seem to expect you to write something…well, I’m a sucker for peer pressure.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the news. Late on Friday, when most of America had turned off their laptops, Judge Wilken approved the House settlement.

On one hand, yes, this is a massive, historic, change. For the first time, NCAA institutions will be able to directly pay grown-up amounts of US currency to their athletes. They will not have to launder it through a booster collective and pretend it’s for charity. They won’t have to ask boosters to stuff cash or casino chips in a McDonald’s bag. Schools can take a chunk of that TV money or Playfly money and give it to basketball players.

That’s a big deal! It really wasn’t that long ago when the idea of schools directly paying athletes was perceived by large swaths of the American public (and hell, even the American sportswriting corps) as an irredeemable blemish against the sacred tenants of amateurism.

I’ll want to spend time at NACDA and over the next few weeks to better understand the nuts and bolts of the College Sports Commission and some of the regulatory framework that’s going to actually try to execute this settlement. But rather than marvel at the earth-shattering change in college sports… I have to admit. For such a huge change, this feels awfully anticlimactic.

Part of that is because not that much actually super-duper changes right this very second

Here’s the truth. Almost everybody in D-I has been operating on the assumption that this settlement was going to be approved. Contracts were sent to athletes months ago that were predicated on the school’s ability to cut checks in July. Schools hired GMs, bought front office software packages, and began to staff and reorganize their departments around this new reality. Nobody was waiting for Judge Wilken’s permission to prepare for the direct payments era.

So the official statement paves the way for the CSC to write press releases and maybe for some ADs to relax a teensy bit at NACDA, but it’s not like this changes anyone’s plans. Honestly, most of the big schools were prepared to start paying people on July 1 even without a settlement, current NCAA bylaws be damned.

That would still all be well and good if many practitioners really felt like this settlement was going to usher in a new era of labor peace and regulatory certainty. A few of these people do exist. I’ve talked to them. But they’re a minority in the college sports industry.

I can’t predict the future. But I am pretty confident that the key components of the House settlement are going to be legally challenged in the near future. There will be parties who will challenge the distribution of direct payment funds on Title IX grounds (male athletes are positioned to capture the overwhelming majority of that money at the moment). There will be lawsuits challenging the settlement structure on state law grounds. On antitrust grounds. On labor classification grounds. And probably other grounds too.

The second the CSC or NIL Go tries to flag a potential outside booster deal or sanction an athletic department in any way, there will be lawsuits.

So to me, there’s really only one interesting question left

What happens first? The conclusion of the first batch of lawsuits challenging the core pillars of the House settlement structure, or lawmakers finally passing federal legislation that will settle many of the unanswered questions surrounding athlete compensation?

Because until the courts affirm that some entity can say “no, these boosters can not pay this right tackle $1.4 million dollars and say it’s for a social media marketing campaign”, or until Congress says “shut up these are the new rules now,” any labor structure enacted on July 1 is written in sand, ready to be washed away at a moment’s notice.

You may have to follow the rules that are written in sand. Or at least, you’re supposed to follow them. But you can’t build permanent structures around them.

In the meantime, I’m pretty confident this is what is going to happen

The game today is the same game from last week, or the week before that.

Every athletic director, from the biggest P4 programs to the most modest of the low-majors, is going to continue to hustle for new revenue sources. Student experiences and academics and alumni relations are all important, but nothing happens if the payroll doesn’t get met, and that means everybody needs more cash.

Virtually every coach, or staffer working for a coach, is going to work to find loopholes to get around “the salary cap”, or they’re just going to bulldoze right through them and dare anybody to do anything about it. Nobody gets promoted for exceptional NCAA bylaw compliance. You keep your job if you win. Winning takes good athletes, and good athletes cost money. Nobody is going to be scared into diligent cap compliance because of a Charlie Baker press release. Sorry, Charlie.

And the College Sports Industrial Complex will continue to chug along. Every agent, every lawyer, every consultant and every SaaS founder is going to try to leverage this new world to make more money.

And I can’t fault the hustle. I sell a software product too. Not one that will solve anyone’s roster management problems, but hey, we’re all out here trying to solve problems.

So sure, it’s historic. And maybe I’m wrong about all of this! I’m going to ask a bunch of smart people over the next few days, and it’s entirely possible I am missing something important.

But for now? Just because something is historic doesn’t mean it actually changes anything significant. In the short term, I see the industry navigating the same battles as it did pre-House.

Somebody is gonna try to pay athletes more money to get them to play at ol’ State U, and somebody else is gonna try to impose limits.

Same as it ever was.

See y’all at NACA. Or in your inbox.