U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken is conducting a hearing today concerning final approval of the proposed multi-billion-dollar settlements of three athlete-compensation antitrust cases against the NCAA and the Power Five conferences. The centerpiece case is one brought on behalf of named plaintiffs including former Arizona State swimmer Grant House. The hearing is being held in Oakland, California. It was set to begin at 1 p.m. ET, and is scheduled to end no later than 8 ET.
Wilken is scheduled to hear from lawyers representing the principals and from 14 parties who are objecting to the settlements. Representing the plaintiffs are Steve Berman and Jeff Kessler. They are the attorneys who led the Alston case against the NCAA that eventually resulted in a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in favor of the athletes. Representing the NCAA and the conferences is Rakesh Kilaru, an outside attorney based in Washington, D.C.
In most instances, the objectors — or groups of objectors — will be represented by lawyers, but four athletes who are objecting are scheduled to speak.
What's at stake today
Here is what's at stake in today's hearing:
An arranagement that would include nearly $2.8 billion in damages that would go to current and former athletes — and their lawyers — over 10 years. The arrangement also would allow Division I schools to start paying athletes directly for use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) starting July 1, subject to a per-school cap that would increase over time and be based on a percentage of certain athletics revenues.
The proposed allocation of the damages would heavily favor football and men's basketball players because of modeling done an economics expert for the plaintiffs who determined that those athletes had the greatest value in the marketplace while the NCAA had restrictions on athlete NIL activities.
This will be challenged by objectors today, based on Title IX, the federal gender equity law. Among other reasons, the objector say that since this money would have come from the schools, it is subject to Title IX requirements.
However, those two elements would be just part of a comprehensive reshaping of college sports that would occur under the settlement.
Among other changes:
▶NCAA leaders would seek to engineer rules changes eliminating longstanding, sport-by-sport scholarship limits and replacing them with a new set of roster-size limits. In the first academic year after final approval of the settlement, the roster limit in football, for example, would be 105. Some FBS programs have had many more than that. Rosters in other sports at some schools also stand to be reduced. This is likely to be a target of objectors today.
▶While athletes would continue to have the ability to make NIL deals with entities other than their schools, the settlement would allow the NCAA and the power conferences to institute rules designed to give the power conferences —
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