Transfer portal a big change? House settlement says, “Hold my beer”

Many fans are still processing the fact that a college athlete can transfer at the drop of a hat, but on Friday night, the House settlement lawsuit decision dropped, and everything changed.

The transfer portal was just a baby step in what is now happening in college sports. There are over 70 pages to the decision, and that is a lot to read for many. So, thankfully, there are true journalists out there who break it all down.

Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports posted a thread on social media with nice chunks of posts to make the decision much more palatable for the simple folk who ain’t into all that fancy book learnin’, like myself.

This is the post in the thread that started it all. It is the outline to the future posts.

Dellenger talks about the $2.8 billion in back pay to athletes. The thing that sticks out to me is that $2.3 billion of that goes to football and men’s basketball. I realize that most of the revenue generated is by those two sports, but I would be curious to see if teams like UConn, South Carolina, and Tennessee, to name a few, have their women’s basketball programs get a bigger piece of the pie. Those are big-time revenue generators for their schools.

The third post by Dellenger breaks down the current day and future salary cap for programs. There is now a salary cap, which in the first year is $20.5 million. The biggest issue I have here is that programs aren’t required to revenue share. So, while the cap is $20.5 million, schools can just hold on to that money if they want.

Here is the thing, though. If you don’t use that money on the players, you aren’t going to have a good team. Theoretically, that should incentivize teams to use the money.

This post talks about how teams plan to do the back pay. But there is also a little part in there that Title IX is not exempt. That means women’s sports don’t have a guaranteed equity in this settlement. Dellenger does mention that lawsuits are likely to come. I am curious to see what happens on that front.

Dellenger does mention that there is $2.5 million in new scholarship money coming in. In the post, it does seem that women’s sports will get help here. More opportunities for women in sports at the college level by potentially adding more scholarships. That is always a good thing, as women’s sports are growing at a rapid pace.

Rosters have changed. Football is going from 85 scholarship players to 105 on a roster. Men’s basketball is going from 13 to 15. While it does seem like a big change on paper, I am not sure how much it will change the college landscape.

The little thing called playing time still exists. Players don’t want to go to a program and be third or fourth string or in the third rotation off the bench. They want to play. I don’t think this will rock college sports too much, but it may give some athletes a scholarship that otherwise would have to pay for college, which is always a good thing.

Final thoughts

That is a lot to digest in a short amount of time. A final wrap-up is that programs now have to pay former players, mainly in men’s basketball and football, from 2016 onward. Current and future players will now earn money based on value and a revenue-sharing program.

There is a salary cap in college sports, too. It will be interesting to see how schools divvy that out, but at least we can all roughly play on the same playing field when it comes to money. If you thought the transfer portal was crazy, it was only one toe that was dipped into the water. Now we have an entire leg submerged.