What the historic $2.8 billion settlement to pay NCAA players means for college sports

Geoff Bennett:

In a historic first, the NCAA and the country's Power Five conferences have reached an agreement to pay their athletes.

The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12 have accepted the general terms of a settlement that requires the NCAA to pay nearly $2.8 billion in damages to nearly 14,000 athletes over 10 years between 2016 and the present, and creates a new system that will allow schools to spend up to $21 million per year to pay student-athletes in all sports starting in 2025.

The settlement was proposed to resolve a series of lawsuits against the NCAA, which could have had to pay billions more. It still has to be approved by a judge and many details still need to be worked out, including how schools will pay athletes, whether the payments will be equitable by gender and what that means for different sports.

To learn more about this groundbreaking deal, we have Pat Forde, senior editor at Sports Illustrated, as our guest.

Pat, it's great to have you here.

I think it's safe to say that the days of amateur and collegiate athletes are over. Help us understand how significant this moment is.

Pat Forde, senior editor at Sports Illustrated: “Yes, this is the death of amateur sports, which has basically always been a tradition in college sports.”

So this is a significant milestone. The castle walls of amateurism have been faltering for years, especially since three years ago when name, image and likeness payments were first approved, but this is a significant acceleration since then.

This, as you noted, provides compensation for college athletes who no longer play their sport for four years and then also provides a framework for payment for another decade. So there's a lot of money going out of the traditional coffers of athletic administration, coaches, athletic directors and facility utilization, directly into the hands of the players, from the schools themselves.

That's the real change here.