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

The NCAA Tournament is the only reason we're here, and ironically enough, college basketball's landscape will still take a huge hit despite saving the day

By Matt Norlander May 24, 2024 at 12:55 pm ET• 11 min read

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.