NCAA and Power 5 agree to settlement to allow schools to pay

"Several athletic directors told ESPN that they are hopeful the settlement lays the groundwork for a system in which success on the field is less dependent on which schools can spend the most money."

No P5 AD actually believes this. 

Also - find something you love as much as NCAA and College Administrators LOVE using the phrase "student-athlete" as if the USC QB is exactly the same as a CC runner at Evansville. They keep wanting "equality" when it doesn't exist.

I can't wait to read this settlement language. The power conferences get to make their own rules, too, which of course they do. How are mid majors going to compete if they have to spend a percentage of their revenue (which is often just from one sport) when they may be barely breaking even or losing money? Athletic departments are just supposed to take 20% haircuts over this?

Here is what the result will probably be: you won't see as much non-revenue sports on TV just to avoid the revenue sharing, non-revenue sports will be cancelled (or forced into club status) because they are now more expensive, and we will get a ton of Title IX litigation as a result. We're going to get tons of political blowback when the highest paid government employee in some backwater state is a college quarterback "employee."

Now we've just put the state governments in play since this is state tax dollars we are talking about for all the big major conferences. It's a pretty easy political argument to make that your tax dollars shouldn't be spent on some football player's salary when you've got $150,000 in student loan debt.

Pretty sure they cannot do that because of Title IX scholarship proportionality requirements. You can't have 100 men getting scholarships for football and basketball and 15 women for just basketball. Just making up for the 85 football scholarships will be impossible.

Next shoes to drop:

Lawsuits over tuition “fees” going toward salaries of “student athletes”. A lot of college students already don’t like paying for athletics. They definitely won’t like paying for their classmates’ salaries.

Official talks surrounding the establishment of NCAA Division I-AA basketball, and subsequent tournament(s).

Discussions regarding lowering the number of sport programs by an institution to maintain NCAA D-I status.

And if athletes are now employees (unclear to me, but I bet the IRS sees it that way) those scholarships have to be taxed as income. Non-revenue athletes are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Isn’t it common that University employees get free tuition already? (Although I don’t know if that benefit is also taxable income)

"Sorry coach, I have to study for these midterms."

"Sounds like you're not coming in to work. This is three strikes this quarter, so you're fired."