Historic House case settlement has college basketball — not college football — to thank for saving the NCAA

Stodgy old heads dispersed across college athletics — whose power has been reduced and whose perspective on reality is only now finally crystallizing through the one course of action they can’t deny: losing their money — may semantically disagree with this next sentence, but I assure you every word of it is fundamental truth. 

On Thursday, the NCAA and its richest conferences officially committed to a future that will feature direct payments from schools to college athletes in exchange for their participation in NCAA-sanctioned competition. 

The NCAA’s archaic amateurism model — which wrongly profited off unpaid labor for nearly the entirety of its existence — is all but finished. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise would merely be repeating the NCAA’s time-honored, head-in-the-sand pantomime that led the organization to this point of humbling inevitability. 

The NCAA and its five co-defendants (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and the soon-disbanding Pac-12) in the House v. NCAA case all voted to avoid going to trial and are moving forward with a settlement and the signing of term sheets that will require two gargantuan commitments: nearly $2.8 billion worth of back pay over the next decade to more than 15,000 former college athletes who did not receive name, image and likeness benefits between 2016-21; plus a signed pledge to invest millions of dollars annually at the power-conference level for the next 10 years to continue to pay college athletes, no matter what sport they play or how accomplished they are. The star quarterback will earn a stipend just as the backup lacrosse goalie and second-string soccer striker will. 

It’s a foundational philosophical change that could sustain from now through the everlasting continuation of American college sports. In the past five years, the NCAA has found itself routinely pulled into evolutionary and revolutionary change. This is not only the…

Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/historic-house-case-settlement-has-college-basketball-not-college-football-to-thank-for-saving-the-ncaa/

Author : Matt Norlander

Publish date : 2024-05-24 17:22:39

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