College Sports Has a Payroll. It Still Doesn’t Have a Pay System.

Strategic Analysis | September 12, 2026

College sports spent years fighting over whether athletes could be paid.

That fight is largely over.

The harder one is beginning.

For schools participating in the House v. NCAA settlement, the revenue-sharing cap is $21.32 million for the 2026–27 academic year. Athletic departments can now put millions of dollars directly into athletes’ hands. Some schools are assigning pools to individual sports and allowing those programs to decide how the money is divided among their athletes.

But a salary cap answers only how much can be spent.

It does not answer who gets the salary.

That distinction may define the next era of college sports.

The House settlement resolved—or at least temporarily stabilized—the threshold question of direct athlete compensation. It did not create a collectively bargained wage scale, prescribe how much football should receive relative to women’s basketball, establish how two linebackers should be valued against one another, determine whether Title IX requires a different distribution, or decide whether the compensation rules themselves survive future antitrust scrutiny.

Instead, college sports has built something resembling a payroll without building the institutional machinery that normally governs one.

That is why the next major compensation fight will not simply be athletes against the NCAA.

It will increasingly be athlete against school, athlete against athlete, sport against sport, and—perhaps most consequentially—one conception of what these payments are against another.

Because before anyone can decide what a fair split looks like, college sports may first have to decide what, exactly, it is paying for.

Judge Claudia Wilken approved the House settlement on June 6, 2025. Its prospective provisions permitted participating Division I schools to provide athletes with direct benefits and compensation up to a pool initially calculated at 22 percent of average Power Five athletic revenues, with the limit increasing over time. The settlement's economist estimated that the pool would begin above $20 million per school and eventually rise to $32.9 million by 2034–35.

But there is an important distinction hiding inside the settlement.

The settlement also created a $600 million fund compensating former athletes for alleged lost “pay-for-play”—essentially, the value of athletic services they might have received absent the NCAA's old compensation restrictions. Of that fund, 75 percent was allocated to football, 15 percent to men's basketball, 5 percent to women's basketball, and the remaining 5 percent to athletes in other sports. Individual awards within the major sports could then be adjusted based on factors such as seniority, recruiting rating, and performance.

That is the origin of the now-familiar 75-15-5-5 shorthand.

And it is becoming something much larger than what it originally was.

Industry reporting before implementation found schools widely considering that same distribution for their prospective revenue-sharing pools: 75 percent for football, 15 percent for men's basketball, 5 percent for women's basketball, and 5 percent for everyone else.

There is an obvious reason.

It is easy. It is familiar. It roughly corresponds with the economic hierarchy of many major athletic departments. And because the percentages appear in a federal class-action settlement approved by a federal judge, they carry a superficial aura of legal respectability.

But that last step is where the analysis goes wrong.

A damages model is not a compensation constitution.

The settlement formula was designed to answer a backward-looking question: in a hypothetical world without the NCAA's unlawful compensation restraints, which athletes likely suffered which economic losses?

Prospective compensation asks a different question: how should a university distribute money today among hundreds of athletes competing in different sports, with different market values, under different contractual arrangements and potentially different legal protections?

Judge Wilken did not declare 75-15-5-5 lawful for that purpose.

Quite the opposite. When objectors argued that future conduct authorized by House might violate antitrust law, the court expressly stated that those questions would remain “unresolved and unadjudicated.” Approval of the settlement, the court emphasized, was not a judgment that conduct permitted under it complies with the Sherman Act “or any other law.”

The same distinction appears in the court's Title IX discussion. Judge Wilken did not hold that future revenue-sharing allocations complied with Title IX. She said schools remained free to allocate benefits in a Title IX-compliant manner—and that athletes retained the right to sue if schools did not.

The court approved a settlement.

It did not approve a salary schedule.

There is a powerful argument for giving football and men's basketball most of the money.

They generally generate the most direct revenue. They command the largest media audiences. They drive conference television contracts, ticket sales, sponsorships, donations, licensing, and many of the commercial opportunities that made revenue sharing possible in the first place.

If an athletic department is trying to retain a star quarterback who can leave through the transfer portal, paying that player more than the backup catcher on the softball team does not seem particularly radical. It looks like a market behaving like a market.

And that point matters.

The strongest case against rigidly equal distributions is not some nostalgic theory of amateurism. It is that individual athletes have different economic values and different competitive alternatives. Artificially suppressing those differences could simply move compensation elsewhere—toward legitimate third-party NIL deals, collectives, sponsors, or competing schools.

But that does not settle the legal question.

Title IX generally prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs receiving federal financial assistance. Existing Department of Education rules addressing athletic financial assistance look to whether total scholarship dollars awarded to men and women are substantially proportionate to their respective participation rates, while allowing disparities attributable to legitimate sex-neutral factors.

The new revenue-sharing system does not fit neatly into the old boxes.

In January 2025, the outgoing Department of Education took the position that certain school-paid NIL compensation should be treated similarly to athletic financial assistance. The incoming administration rescinded that guidance the following month, expressly rejecting the proposition that Title IX clearly requires proportional distribution of athlete revenue-sharing dollars.

That rescission matters.

But it is an agency position, not a Supreme Court opinion. It does not repeal Title IX, and it does not answer how a court will classify a particular compensation program.

That makes the most important Title IX question more subtle than: Must women receive 50 percent?

The better question may be:

What is the school actually paying for?

If the payment is characterized as athletic financial assistance, one body of Title IX rules becomes relevant.

If it is compensation for licensing an athlete's NIL, another argument emerges.

If it is payment for athletic services, retention, roster participation, promotional appearances, or some combination of all four, the analysis becomes more complicated still.

And labels will not necessarily control.

A contract called an “NIL agreement” that pays an athlete primarily to remain enrolled, stay on the roster, practice, compete, and avoid transferring looks economically different from a conventional endorsement agreement in which a business pays an athlete to appear in advertisements.

That is why future litigation may turn less on the headline percentages than on the architecture behind them.

What criteria did the university use?

Was the allocation based on actual revenue, recruiting value, projected wins, NIL marketability, position scarcity, historical spending, coach discretion, or simply copying what peer institutions were doing?

Were those criteria written down before the dispute arose?

Were they applied consistently?

Were women's programs evaluated under the same methodology?

How much compensation came directly from the school, and how much came through outside commercial arrangements?

The PowerPoint explaining the allocation methodology today could become Exhibit A tomorrow.

The allocation problem is often discussed as a cross-sport problem.

It is also an intra-team problem.

Texas Tech, for example, publicly explains that each sport receives a benefits pool and has discretion over allocations within the sport.

Think about what that means in football.

A coach or general manager may have millions of dollars to divide among quarterbacks, linemen, receivers, defensive backs, incoming recruits, returning starters, developmental players, and transfer targets.

Two athletes playing the same position may receive radically different offers.

One may have guaranteed compensation. Another may have payments conditioned on enrollment, eligibility, roster status, promotional services, or continued participation. A third may have substantial outside NIL income that changes what the school needs to offer to retain him.

At that point, “revenue sharing” becomes less a single policy than hundreds of bilateral negotiations.

And contracts create contract disputes.

Ole Miss supplied an early preview this summer when it sued former football players Princewill Umanmielen and Devin Harper after they transferred to LSU. According to the university's complaints, each had signed a 2026 revenue-sharing agreement containing an early-termination provision. Ole Miss alleges Umanmielen owes $550,000 and Harper $400,000 after leaving within the contractually defined early-termination period. The allegations remain just that; the reported cases had not produced merits rulings when filed.

The details are important because the dispute looks remarkably ordinary.

Offer. Acceptance. Contract term. Alleged breach. Damages.

That may be the most revolutionary thing about it.

College sports spent decades insisting athlete compensation was categorically different from ordinary commercial activity. Now universities are signing agreements with athletes and going to court to enforce six-figure termination provisions.

Once that happens, the drafting matters enormously.

What happens if a coach leaves?

What happens if the athlete is injured?

Can the school terminate without cause?

Does an athlete owe money if he transfers before receiving much—or any—of the promised compensation?

Is an early-termination payment an enforceable estimate of damages or an unenforceable penalty under the governing state's contract law?

Does the agreement include arbitration? A forum-selection clause? Confidentiality? Offset rights? A defined NIL license? Specific promotional obligations?

And if the athlete leaves, what is the school really going to seek?

The Ole Miss cases ask for money, not an order putting the players back in Rebel uniforms.

That is probably a useful preview of where many of these disputes are headed. The contract can price an exit. It cannot make a broken relationship whole.

There is another reason the allocation issue will become difficult.

“Revenue generated by a sport” and “value created by an athlete” are not the same thing.

College football generates enormous revenue. But how much of Ohio State football's value belongs to its quarterback?

How much belongs to the institution's century-old brand?

The Big Ten's media contract?

The opponents?

The stadium?

The coach?

The fan base?

The dozens of players required to stage the product?

The answer matters because market-based compensation sounds simple until someone has to define the market.

A university could reasonably argue that a five-star quarterback has greater replacement cost and greater competitive value than most other athletes. That provides a sex-neutral business explanation for some compensation disparity.

But extrapolating from that individual valuation to “football receives 75 percent because football generates 75 percent” is analytically different.

The first is a claim about labor value.

The second is a budgeting decision among university sports.

And the distinction becomes especially important where the university itself has spent decades deciding which sports receive television exposure, marketing resources, premium facilities, favorable schedules, sponsorship inventory, and institutional promotion.

Revenue is evidence of value.

It is not necessarily a natural law.

That does not mean Title IX requires equal checks. The existing law simply does not answer the new compensation structure that cleanly.

It means schools relying on a market-value rationale should be prepared to demonstrate an actual methodology rather than merely invoking “the market” after the fact.

Market value is strongest as a defense when somebody actually valued the market.

There is another temptation worth resisting: treating the House settlement as antitrust peace.

Judge Wilken expressly refused to do that.

Her approval order said the antitrust legality of conduct authorized under the settlement remained unresolved.

And litigation has already arrived.

In June 2026, USC linebacker Talanoa Ili and Stanford quarterback Charlie Mirer filed a proposed class action against the NCAA, the Power Four conferences, the College Sports Commission, and several officials. Their complaint alleges, among other things, that implementation of revenue-sharing and NIL restrictions unlawfully suppresses athlete compensation. Those are allegations, not holdings—but the case illustrates that House did not place the new compensation system beyond antitrust attack.

Allocation presents a slightly different antitrust problem.

A single university independently deciding to pay its quarterback more than its swimmer is not the classic Section 1 case; the Sherman Act's core concern there is concerted restraint.

But the more college sports tries to solve allocation through uniform industry-wide restrictions, common formulas, coordinated ceilings, or collectively enforced compensation rules, the more antitrust questions return.

That creates a structural trap.

Schools want predictability.

Conferences want competitive balance.

The NCAA and College Sports Commission want enforceable national rules.

But uniformity generally requires coordination—and coordination over labor-market compensation is precisely where antitrust lawyers start paying attention.

The pending Protect College Sports Act shows Congress wrestling with that problem in real time. The revised Senate bill would impose a harder revenue-share framework and create a $22.5 million retention fund, with as much as another $5 million in retention spending unlocked dollar-for-dollar through NIL spending on women's and Olympic sports. The bill remains pending, but the design itself is revealing: policymakers are no longer debating merely whether athletes should receive money. They are already trying to influence where the money goes.

That is the next policy fight hiding inside the current one.

Professional sports already know how to deal with allocation fights.

Not perfectly. But structurally.

Players organize. Owners organize. They bargain over the percentage of revenue allocated to labor, salary caps, minimum salaries, maximums, contract guarantees, free agency, benefits, grievance procedures, discipline, and dozens of other rules governing who receives what.

The resulting collective bargaining agreements do not eliminate fights.

They create a legitimate process for having them.

College sports currently has no equivalent.

That matters because the industry's emerging compensation system increasingly resembles a labor market while its governance system remains designed for amateur athletics.

The legal status of college athletes as employees is still unresolved. In Johnson v. NCAA, the Third Circuit did not hold that all college athletes are employees. It held that athletes cannot be categorically excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act merely because they are called amateurs and that some may qualify as employees depending on the economic realities of their relationships with schools.

Direct institutional compensation does not automatically answer that employee-status question.

But it hardly makes the issue disappear.

When schools directly negotiate compensation, condition payments on participation, budget millions for player retention, and sue athletes over contractual departures, the factual world looks increasingly different from the one in which “amateurism” itself supposedly answered the labor question.

That is why the long-term pressure may be toward some form of bargaining or athlete representation—not necessarily because every athlete wants to become an employee, and not necessarily through one national union, but because allocation disputes eventually require a mechanism for allocating power.

A genuine labor relationship could also change the antitrust analysis. Rules produced through bona fide collective bargaining can receive protections that unilateral or association-imposed restraints do not enjoy in the same way. And a CBA could create something the current system badly lacks: grievance procedures capable of resolving contract and compensation disputes without transforming every disagreement into emergency litigation.

There are enormous complications. Public universities face different labor laws than private institutions. State employment regimes differ. Athlete interests vary dramatically across sports. Football players at Ohio State may not want the same economics as rowers at Dartmouth.

But those complications reinforce the larger point.

The industry has solved the first question—can athletes receive institutional money?—without creating an accepted institution for resolving the next hundred questions that inevitably follow.

That may be the most important shift of all.

The next compensation era is not merely about dividing $21 million.

It is about authority.

Schools want discretion to spend strategically.

Football and men's basketball programs want compensation reflecting their commercial importance.

Women's athletes have Title IX rights that did not disappear when revenue sharing arrived.

Individual stars want market-based compensation and freedom of movement.

Athletes lower on the depth chart want contractual certainty.

The NCAA and conferences want cost control and competitive stability.

Congress may want national uniformity.

And courts will continue being asked to decide what happens when those interests collide.

There is no single legal doctrine capable of resolving all of it.

Title IX can police sex discrimination, but it is not a collective bargaining agreement.

Antitrust law can attack coordinated restraints, but it does not tell an athletic director what a left tackle is worth.

Contract law can enforce promises, but only after someone has negotiated the terms.

Labor law could provide bargaining machinery, but only if the necessary employment relationships and organizing structures develop.

That leaves college sports in an awkward middle period.

It has money.

It has contracts.

It has a cap.

It has a clearinghouse.

It has enforcement.

What it does not yet have is broad agreement on who gets to decide how the money is divided.

And that is why 75-15-5-5 should be understood for what it is.

It may prove commercially sensible at some schools.

It may become an industry norm.

Some version of it may even survive every legal challenge thrown at it.

But it is not a safe harbor simply because it appeared in House. It was designed to estimate historical damages, not to govern the future labor market of college athletics.

Confusing those two things would be convenient.

It would also be a mistake.

House did not end the fight over athlete compensation. It changed the question.

For years, college sports fought over whether athletes could receive a share of the enormous economic value surrounding them. Now that institutional payments are here, the argument moves downstream: football versus basketball, men's sports versus women's sports, starter versus backup, guaranteed money versus conditional money, direct payments versus third-party NIL, individual bargaining versus centralized rules.

And eventually, perhaps, bargaining itself versus continued litigation.

The smartest institutions will not treat allocation as an accounting exercise. They will treat it as a legal and strategic system: define what each payment is for, develop defensible valuation criteria, document why compensation decisions are made, draft contracts for the disputes that inevitably follow, and understand that yesterday's damages formula is not tomorrow's legal immunity.

College sports spent a decade asking whether athletes could be paid.

The next decade may be spent deciding who has the power to determine what they are worth.

The first revolution was about permission to pay. The second will be about power to allocate.