The devil might be in the details, but all you really need to know about Monday’s landmark hearing on a multibillion-dollar series of anti-trust cases against the NCAA is this: The charade is over.
Amateurism is dead.
College athletes are about to get paid — not just through third-party NIL deals but by the schools themselves.
As long as a California judge approves the settlement in the coming days, as many expect, the revenue-sharing era will be upon us, with universities allowed to directly pay their athletes up to $20.5 million per year.
It looms among the most seismic moments in NCAA history, and, for many smaller schools with already frayed resources, it represents a crossroads as unsettling as it is ominous.