Chase Griffin’s Post

Damages to college athletes to range from a few dollars to more than a million under settlement Thousands of former college athletes will be eligible for payments ranging from a few dollars to more than a million under the $2.78 billion antitrust settlement agreed to by the NCAA and five power conferences, a deal that also paves the way for schools to directly compensate athletes while attempting regulate payments from boosters. So, I just wondering if the funds go to the schools first and then is distributed to the student athletes - reporting issues probably? https://lnkd.in/ewa7cPtr #highered #highereducation #higheredleadership #college #colleges #university #universities #Collegesanduniversities #Sacubo #Cacubo #EACUBO #wacubo #nationalcouncilforhighereducation #americancouncilofeducation #nationalhighereducationcouncil #councilforadvancementandsupportofeducation

🚨 **College Sports on the Brink of Transformation** 🚨 This week could mark a turning point for college athletics as a potential joint settlement in the House, Hubbard, and Carter antitrust cases approaches. Here are the key points from Ben Portnoy at the Sports Business Journal: 1. **Settlement Deadline**: Notre Dame and the Power Five leagues are finalizing a settlement by this week, ahead of a critical hearing in another antitrust case, Fontenot v. NCAA, on May 23. 2. **Financial Stakes**: Failure to settle could result in catastrophic financial repercussions, with potential damages up to $20 billion, possibly driving the NCAA and Power Five leagues to bankruptcy. 3. **Revenue Sharing Model**: The settlement might introduce a revenue-sharing model where schools could allocate around 22% of their media rights, sponsorship, and ticket sales revenue to athletes, starting in the 2025-26 school year. 4. **Title IX Implications**: The distribution of funds raises significant Title IX concerns regarding gender equity, which schools will need to navigate carefully. 5. **NIL Collectives**: The role of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) collectives remains uncertain. The settlement could change the dynamics but won't eliminate the need for collectives, which may help schools manage athlete payments. College athletics are at a crossroads, with major changes and challenges ahead. How schools adapt will shape the future of the sport. 🏈🏀 #CollegeSports #NCAA #Antitrust #TitleIX #NIL #AthleteCompensation https://lnkd.in/gP64XUjy

🌟 Landmark NCAA Settlements: Perspectives from Nixon Peabody LLP 🌟 🚀 The recent landmark NCAA settlements on Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rights are set to revolutionize how student-athletes are compensated, offering them unprecedented financial opportunities. 🔑 Key Highlights: --💰 $2.75 Billion in Damages: Athletes will receive significant compensation over the next decade. -- 🏫 Direct Payments from Schools: Schools can now share a substantial portion of their revenues directly with athletes. -- 📈 More Than Just Scholarships: Enhanced benefits include third-party NIL payments, healthcare, and more. Our cross-disciplinary team at Nixon Peabody (i.e., Education, Labor & Employment, Private Equity, and Entertainment) are at the coordinated forefront of these developments, as reflected by some of their insights: S. Amy Spencer: “[W]ith the degrees of uncertainty and risk for NCAA member institutions, the Title IX issue is likely to land back in federal court, with the House settlement in some way exchanging present antitrust issues for future Title IX issues..” Matthew Netti: “Schools must consider potential ripple effects a settlement would have under the state and federal labor and employment laws, and whether further challenges and union organizing efforts by student-athletes could rise as a result.” Nic Mayne: “We may be closer to a normal athlete endorsement market, with evolving collectives providing additional compensation opportunities.” Ready to dive deeper into what this means for you? Read the full article, stay ahead of the curve, and of course reach out to my above-mentioned talented colleagues if you have any questions. #NixonPeabody #NCAA #NIL #CollegeAthletics #FutureOfSports #LegalInsights #HigherEducation #GameChanger

The NIL floodgates are already wide open in college sports, but the Peach State may have just kick-started a paradigm shift that will further revolutionize the athlete compensation landscape. On Tuesday, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp issued an executive order ostensibly permitting the state's institutions of higher education to pay athletes directly by shielding them from NCAA retaliation. As Dan Murphy and Mark Schalabach of ESPN note, the news echoes a similar move by the Virginia legislature this summer. Since July 2021, only third-party collectives legally distinct from their affiliated schools are permitted to pay players, though coaches and school employees can promote these efforts openly. Additionally relevant to today's news? The NCAA has failed to issue any comprehensive national guidance regarding NIL rules, leaving that responsibility -- and a neck-deep morass of legal muck -- up to individual jurisdictions. As the Georgia Bulldogs and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets athletic departments said on the occasion in a joint statement: "We extend our sincere gratitude to Governor Brian Kemp for his leadership today. In the absence of nationwide name, image, and likeness regulation, this executive order helps our institutions with the necessary tools to fully support our student-athletes in their pursuit of NIL opportunities, remain competitive with our peers, and secure the long-term success of our athletics programs." Expect legal battles over this order; such executive actions do not carry the force of law without going through a formal legislative process. In any event, however, the latest battle in the multi-front war over the future of collegiate athletics has escalated even further. The ultimate step? A labor revolution that grants employee status to college athletes, permitting them to unionize and collectively bargain for not just base pay, but benefits and protections regarding health, safety, quality of life, and beyond. Stay tuned. Read more from Dan Murphy and Mark Schlabach of ESPN: #sportsbusiness #nil #collegesports #ncaa #georgia #uga #georgiatech #espn

There has been more change in the last five years than the entire history of intercollegiate sports (150 years or so). Resistance to provide reasonable/logical reform has landed us here and reform now feels mandated. Remember when COA was the end of the world financially for annual budgets? Then the sky was falling with Alston? Transfer portal and NIL would kill college sports? And here comes revenue share…threading the needle of employment status will require precision. Obviously, so much still has to be worked out…and how will schools, conferences, campuses and donors react? Today’s collegiate athletics leaders must adapt and deliver on these comtemporary pressures…while continuing to provide lifechanging opportunities for young men and women (about 98% of which will never make a dime playing the sport they love professionally) to pursue their academic, personal and athletic dreams through the student-athlete experience at our institutions. Buckle up.

As expected, the SEC and PAC-12 have joined the NCAA and the other Power 5 conferences in agreeing to a potential settlement of the pending class action litigation brought by current and former college athletes seeking to share in the profits generated from use of their name, image and likeness. The terms of the NIL settlement, which includes a revenue-sharing plan, must still be approved by Judge Claudia Wilken of the Northern District of California, who is presiding over the consolidated actions in House v. NCAA, Hubbard v. NCAA and Carter v. NCAA. Counsel for the plaintiffs has stated that the settlement will also feature a "mechanism" that he believes will make it easier for schools to rein in the marketplace for third-party NIL deals. It will be interesting to see how the NCAA attempts to implement this mechanism in a way that complies with federal antitrust laws and whether the settlement sparks any movement in Congress to advance legislation in this area. #NIL #NCAA #antitrust https://lnkd.in/eWTzwd36

A potential issue looming over the NIL era, outside of college athletes’ fight for direct compensation, is the question of tampering. Tampering is when an individual associated with one team/university attempts to attract a player who is on or committed to a different team. At the professional level, there are rules that govern when a team may contact an individual already under contract with another team without the original club's consent. For example, under the NFL’s tampering rule, there is a 52-hour window of “legal tampering” when clubs can contact pending unrestricted free agents to discuss potential deals (this period begins next week on Mar. 11). Before this window, players under contract can only discuss new deals with their current team. Similarly, the NBA’s tampering rule prohibits any member of an organization from contacting another player under contract with a different team to persuade him to leave his current team. The penalties are serious: voided contracts, draft picks taken away, trades reversed, and fines up to $10 million (though penalties imposed have been significantly lighter).  The situation in college sports is different. Judge Corker, in the Tennessee case, enjoined the NCAA from enforcing its rules "to the extent such authority prohibits student-athletes from negotiating compensation for NIL with any third-party entity…” President Charlie Baker issued a statement saying that the NCAA will “pause and not begin investigations involving third-party participation in NIL-related activities.” From the athletes' point of view, this situation is positive as it allows them to potentially get new information on their market value on a real-time basis, and from a fan's point of view, there was plenty of speculation this was already happening with athletes hitting the portal and immediately signing with another team. For states without NIL laws that might prohibit this behavior, expect to see collectives actively recruiting college athletes (even those on another team’s roster) and making those NIL deals conditional on attendance at a particular university. Where at the start of NIL coaches feared having to recruit their existing players annually, now the landscape could become even more volatile. And the NCAA is stuck. Anti-tampering rules will not pass antitrust muster unless agreed to in a collective bargaining framework. Might there may be a claim of tortious inference with third-party contract for this behavior? Since grants-in-aid are essentially at-will, I'm not sure there is because while a contract termination may have been induced, a breach wasn't. Likewise with the National Letter of Intent (NLI) - a claim based on the NLI might be a bit stronger, but the NLI only covers one year, so if athletes enroll and participate in the first season, they are free to move on. J. Corker's order works as intended - it gives college athletes leverage, and it will now allow the market to show them "their true NIL value."

Yesterday a new antitrust lawsuit was filed against the NCAA, this one targeting all compensation restrictions (i.e. not just NIL (House), full cost-of-attendance scholarships (O'Bannon) or educationally related benefits (Alston)) including "pay-for-play." The case is styled Carter v. NCAA, and it was filed in the same Northern District of California federal court as the previous cases with the same lead plaintiff attorney Jeffrey Kessler of Winston & Strawn. The complaint includes a number of quotes from NCAA president Charlie Baker (from one day before!) regarding his new proposal for a new division that would required schools to compensate at least half of their athletes $30k/year in NIL money. It also includes a number of quotes from Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh who has been the most outspoken high-profile coach on the need to compensate the players for the revenue the drive to the sport. The common theme throughout the complaint is that while compensation has increased via full cost-of-attendance scholarships and now more notably with a free market NIL system from third parties, the popularity of the sport has never been higher. And this was always the NCAA's primary rationale for its compensation rules: that amateurism is what defines and sets apart college athletics from professional sports. That if the college athletes are compensated the sport and its popularity will look more like minor league baseball than what it has been. The complaint argues that in fact the opposite has happened, and therefore the procompetitive reason for what is clearly anticompetitive behavior (horizontal compensation fixing) is invalid. Side note: I have always thought the amateurism argument does a disservice to what makes college sports great for fans. The campuses, the rivalries, the fact we all went to one of these schools and now so do these athletes, the state/regional/local pride, the traditions; these are what make college sports great and different from professional sports. End rant. #sportslaw #NCAA #NIL #antitrust

Latest on NCAA settlement discussions in the House case per SBJ College’s Ben Portnoy below (with minor omissions): What could be part of a potential settlement? The House case centers on the NCAA and Power Five failing to share revenue with athletes dating back almost a decade. The settlement would rectify that through damages and build a system for sharing that revenue moving forward, likely over the next 10 years. While Kessler declined to share specific details about the settlement, given the ongoing nature of the discussions, when it comes to recent reports of what schools might be on the hook for, he said, “All the numbers are wrong.” More specifically, he said the formula for what schools will be saddled with -- likely using an average of revenues across the Power Five -- is still being worked out. A source briefed on the settlement, however, said an annual 3%-4% escalator tied to media deals has been considered as part of these discussions. “What you're seeing is each school or each conference doing their own internal back of the [napkin] numbers, and none of them may be right,” Kessler cautioned. That said, the general belief is schools could be on the hook for north of $25 million based on a percentage of revenues generated through things like media deals, ticketing, sponsorship and more. How schools will hit that mark is up for debate. Industry sources believe schools will be able to count around $2.5 million in both Alston grants and scholarships toward that ultimate number. How athletic departments might find the rest of the money, though, remains an ongoing discussion. "The most important part of the settlement -- and let's face it, there's still a lot of work to be done there -- but it creates a clarity and visibility on a whole bunch of issues that have been roiling everybody for a while," NCAA President Charlie Baker said during a brief media session at the ACC Spring Meetings in Florida on Monday, per ESPN. "The other thing it does is create predictability and stability for schools, but it also creates a tremendous opportunity for student athletes, especially at the schools that are most heavily resourced." Employment debate remains complicated regardless of House settlement The employment discussion, as I detailed in this week’s magazine, has three paths forward: keep athletes as non-employees and likely face legal challenges; classify athletes as employees, which brings massive financial ramifications; or find a middle ground centered on an antitrust exemption. Most in college athletics will tell you the third option is the best, but how that would shake out is TBD. College leaders, for now, are in a holding pattern until a House settlement is reached, but a discussion on employment is coming sooner than later.

The NCAA and the nation’s five biggest conferences announced Thursday night that they have agreed to pay nearly $2.8 billion to settle a host of antitrust claims, a monumental decision that sets the stage for a groundbreaking revenue-sharing model that could start steering millions of dollars directly to athletes as soon as the 2025 fall semester. NCAA President Charlie Baker along with the commissioners of the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern Conference released a joint statement saying they had agreed to settlement terms. They called the move “an important step in the continuing reform of college sports that will provide benefits to student-athletes and provide clarity in college athletics across all divisions for years to come.” Terms were not disclosed, though some details have emerged in the past few weeks. They signal the end of the NCAA’s bedrock amateurism model that dates to its founding in 1906. Indeed, the days of NCAA punishment for athletes driving booster-provided cars started vanishing three years ago when the organization lifted restrictions on endorsement deals backed by so-called name, image and likeness money. The deal still must be approved by the federal judge overseeing the case and plaintiffs will have the opportunity to opt out or challenge terms of the agreement. If it stands, it will usher in the beginning of a new era in college sports where athletes are compensated more like professionals and schools can compete for talent using direct payments. “There’s no question about it. It’s a huge quantum leap,” said Tom McMillen, the former Maryland basketball player and congressman who has led an association of collegiate athletic directors the past eight years. Now it is not far-fetched to look ahead to seasons where star quarterbacks or top prospects on college basketball teams are not only cashing in big-money NIL deals but have six-figure school payments in the bank to play. “This landmark settlement will bring college sports into the 21st century, with college athletes finally able to receive a fair share of the billions of dollars of revenue that they generate for their schools,” said Steve Berman, one of the lead attorneys for the plaintiffs. “Our clients are the bedrock of the NCAA’s multibillion-dollar business and finally can be compensated in an equitable and just manner for their extraordinary athletic talents.” For more, click on the link below. #escrowcredirt https://lnkd.in/ecYmnWGx