The final approval of a settlement of three federal antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA on June 6 cleared the way for Ohio State to begin paying its athletes next month.
Under the terms of the historic legal settlement, member schools are allowed to distribute up to an estimated $20.5 million over the upcoming academic year.
Athletic director Ross Bjork said the Buckeyes are reserving $18 million for direct payments to athletes for the use of their name, image and likeness.
The remaining $2.5 million counting against the annual cap is tied to the funding for 91 new scholarships across their 36 varsity sports teams, an increase over previous amounts of financial aid awarded to athletes.
“This is about opportunity,” Bjork said, “to spread the resources to more student-athletes. Student-athletes are winning in this settlement. We believe it’s the right thing. We’re going to be ultra-competitive, because we’re Ohio State.”
Since the settlement was reached last spring, the school has planned to share the maximum-allowed amount, which is based on the average of major conference athletic departments’ primary revenues with percentage increase over the length of the 10-year settlement.
But full details of Ohio State’s revenue-sharing plans ahead of this new era in college sports remain a little hazy.
Bjork said athletes from four varsity sports teams are to receive the NIL payments from the university in 2025-26.
While he declined to identify the sports, deferring to a formal announcement that is expected to be made later this week, it is inevitable that football and men’s basketball will see a bulk of the cash.
The Buckeyes are prioritizing paying athletes with the highest market values, and no other sports have a higher profile or raise as much money for the athletic department on an annual basis.
Both football and men’s basketball resulted in $136 million out of $143 million in sport-specific revenues (95%) in fiscal 2024, according to financial records the department provided to the NCAA. Football produced $111.6 million.
Ohio State has also devised an internal formula to account for the popularity of the sports, considering metrics such as attendance at games and followers on social media.
“We really wanted to use data to measure all of this,” Bjork said.
Bjork declined to divulge the specific sums that will be directed toward the four sports as part of the department’s compensation model, though it’s difficult to imagine that the allocation will vary greatly from ones adopted by peers across the country.
One popular formula that was used in the preliminary approval of the settlement last year and has been implemented by several schools sets 75% for football, 15% for men’s basketball, 5% for women’s basketball and 5% for other sports. Judge Claudia Wilken’s approval for back damages for former and current athletes also used the breakdown as a model.
The impact of Title IX is likely to be more limited after the U.S. Department of Education in February rolled back guidance requiring NIL payments to be subject to the federal law requiring gender equity in college sports. A strict application might have resulted in proportional payments to male and female athletes at the onset of the revenue-sharing era.
“What you have to have is proportionality of your rosters, equal to that of the student body,” Bjork said. “Luckily at Ohio State, we’re about 50/50 of female and male students on campus, and our rosters reflect that. And your scholarship dollars have to reflect 50/50.
“Those are the components. There is a carve-out around some different rulings about Title IX that talk about non-financial aid and how those awards can be established. So we’ve taken all of that into calculation and consideration.”
Ohio State’s pool for NIL payments should expand in the 2026-27 academic year. Not only will the cap grow by 4%, but if the Buckeyes do not offer additional athletic scholarships, they could provide just over $21 million in direct pay to their athletes.
The approval of the settlement accelerates the trend in college sports that has resulted in schools putting more money in their athletes’ pockets.
It was a decade ago when the NCAA started allowing members to pay stipends to athletes to cover their cost of attendance, adding financial assistance that was in addition to scholarships that largely provided tuition, room and board and books.
Beginning in the 2022-23 academic year, they could also dole out up to $5,980 in academic bonus payments, or similar education-related benefits, following a unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case known as NCAA v. Alston. Ohio State made all athletes in good academic standing and meeting other basic requirements as eligible for the payments.
But neither resulted in as much of an influx of money as the settlement allowing for revenue-sharing will bring in the months ahead.
“At the end of the day, we’re still going to play games,” Bjork said. “We’re still going to go to class. It’s everything that happens in between that that is now under this new day in college athletics.”
Bjork views the settlement as a step toward providing structure for a college sports industry that has undergone a steady stream of significant changes in recent years. Along with establishing a system for schools to pay players, it set up an enforcement arm known as the College Sports Commission.
The commission, which is to ensure that schools remain under the cap, has also launched a clearinghouse with Deloitte to approve third-party NIL agreements exceeding $600.
The setup is to ensure deals are for a valid business purpose and do not exceed a reasonable range of compensation, an attempt to regulate pay for play that has been under the guise of endorsement deals in recent years.
The proliferation of donor-funded NIL collectives across the landscape since 2021 has allowed schools to help direct unwieldy sums of money to athletes through these entities. The amounts would be firmer under the settlement’s terms, enticing administrators such as Bjork.
“To me, we’ve just been in a state of uncertainty,” Bjork said. “You can call it chaos in many ways. In so many ways this just provides a ton of clarity for the enterprise, a ton of clarity for our coaches who are recruiting on a day to day basis. It provides meaningful structure.”
Joey Kaufman covers Ohio State football for The Columbus Dispatch. Email him at jkaufman@dispatch.com and follow along on Bluesky, Instagram and X for more.
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