U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken acknowledged during a hearing Monday the concerns surrounding the landmark $2.9 billion House v. NCAA settlement and asked attorneys for fresh feedback on several topics before making her final decision in a few weeks.
As reported by The Associated Press, athletes have criticized the plan as confusing and one that undervalues them, and attorneys have expressed concern about the impacts on campuses across the country.
“Basically I think it is a good settlement, don’t quote me, and I think it’s worth pursuing,” Wilken said, as reported by the AP's Eddie Pells and Janie McCauley. “I think some of these things could be fixed if people tried to fix them and that it would be worth their while to try to fix them.”
The judge asked both sides to come back in a week with how they might be able to address some of her concerns, saying, “Some of them are big-ticket items, some of them aren’t.” Then, there would need to be some re-drafting done, she said.
"Wilken has already granted preliminary approval of the settlement involving the NCAA and the nation’s five largest conferences," Pells and McCauley wrote. "The plan remains on track to take effect July 1 and clear the way for every school to share up to $20.5 million each with its athletes annually.
"Among concerns raised by objectors who testified at the hearing were the fairness of roster cuts and how they are accomplished, the process for how name, image and likeness (NIL valuations are established, and the management of athletes who will participate in the settlement in coming years."
“We’re taking your feedback. We’ll take it to our clients,” NCAA attorney Rakesh Kilaru told Wilken. “But I just want to really reiterate here this was a long road to get to this point. We need a lot of schools to approve it. There’s a lot of pieces of this settlement. .... So I cannot make you any promises we’re going to say anything is different because we think what we did is appropriate and enough but we’ll take it under advisement and come back.”
According to Pells and McCauley, the settlement hashed out last year by attorneys for the defendants and those representing thousands of current and former athletes has its share of critics, and they had the floor before Wilken. Smaller schools say it will leave them behind deep-pocketed, donor-heavy programs, and the proposed guidelines are not expected to slow the massive spending now common across college athletics.
Wilken listened to testimony and occasionally asked questions, but gave no indication that the concerns would upend the settlement, which calls for replacing scholarship limits with roster limits. The effect would be to allow every athlete to be eligible for a scholarship while cutting the number of spots available — a proposal that Wilken indicated could be phased in initially, per the reporting of Pells and McCauley.
Wilken said she understands athletes and families being concerned about roster spots being eliminated with little warning — it would be “pretty difficult to bear” — because of the settlement agreement, the AP reported.
“My idea there is to grandfather in a group of rostered people. There’s not that many,” she said. “It’s not that expensive. It would save a lot of good will and angst and unhappiness from a lot of students and their parents, so why not just do it?”
