After the House v. NCAA Settlement: Will college athletes be able to gain real power by 2035?

A new chapter in college athletics has begun … but the story is far from finished. This summer’s landmark House v. NCAA settlement cracked open the door to revenue sharing and ushered in sweeping reforms, but even a multibillion-dollar agreement can’t escape turbulence. Legal challenges are already mounting, Congress is inching closer to direct involvement, and the sport’s power brokers are bracing for another round of seismic decisions as key media deals — including that involving the College Football Playoff — near expiration in the early 2030s.

Using the House settlement’s 10-year timeline as a guiding framework, CBS Sports spoke with dozens of stakeholders to explore what the future of college athletics might look like by 2035. This four-part series, begins with the most crucial piece of them all: the players.

The Collective Bargaining Chip

As college sports hurtle into a new era of revenue sharing and tighter reins on third-party payments, the landscape is shifting fast — and not without friction. A new battle is brewing between athletes and administrators, one that could redefine the power dynamic at the heart of the multibillion-dollar enterprise.

Yes, players are finally sharing revenue with their schools, but they still lack negotiating power over salary caps, health benefits and rule making. Across the sprawling ecosystem of stakeholders — athletic directors, attorneys, commissioners, and player advocates — there’s little agreement on whether collective bargaining is a solution, a threat or both. 

Tennessee athletics director Danny White saw the storm clouds forming back on July 1, 2021 — the day the NCAA cracked open the door for athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. What followed was a chaotic rush into a largely unregulated marketplace where some NIL deals looked more like thinly veiled pay-for-play handouts than legitimate business arrangements. Now, with the $2.8 billion House settlement and federal proposals like the SCORE Act on the table, some within college athletics believe the chaos might finally be contained by a set of new guardrails.

Others, like White, believe the House setlement doesn’t address key issues related to athlete compensation — and that means the threat of more antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA, its conferences and schools is likely.

“There’s only two ways,” White told CBS Sports. “Congressional intervention or complying with the law. There is a pathway by which we can comply with the law: it’s called collective bargaining.”

“Collective bargaining” may as well be a four-letter word in the collegiate space, but the idea is gaining traction among power brokers. Legal hurdles, both state and federal, along with a decades-long battle against unionization, make such a shift politically and logistically complex.

That hasn’t stopped White. For three years he’s quietly developed a collective bargaining model he believes could save college sports from the paralysis of future litigation, endless rule rewrites and constant internal strife.

His plan would not classify players as university employees. Instead, it proposes a national employment organization for football and men’s basketball players. They would be employed by that entity — akin to the Screen Actors Guild — and represented by a players association capable of negotiating salary caps, health and educational benefits and rules governing the sports. That would include taming the unregulated transfer portal that’s thrown rosters into disarray.

“We can draw a line of delineation as it relates to antitrust and Title IX between the two sports that profit, and all the rest of our sports that are so important to the college athletics model,” White said.

White’s framework would also sidestep state labor laws, a critical detail in the football-obsessed SEC where right-to-work laws dominate. Still, the politics remain thorny.  “The right-to-work, red-state, blue-state thing has confused this issue,” White said. “They don’t have to be employees of the schools, they don’t have to be employees of the states. They could all be employees of one national entity.”

Commissioners often argue players already have a voice through the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, which provides input on major issues but lacks the voting clout of unions like those in the NFL or NBA. In recent years, administrators have refused to engage with groups calling themselves players associations.

“The last thing these commissioners and NCAA officials want are athletes having an independent voice where they can actually have access to real information, not NCAA propaganda that is self serving to the schools, administrators, their salaries and their interests,” said Ramogi Huma, executive director of the College Players Association and vociferous critic of the NCAA’s policies.

White’s collective bargaining proposal ruffled feathers within the SEC.

“I’ve opined about bargaining,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said in the spring. “I’m not going to jump into some public disagreement.”

Sankey, who has mastered the art of deflection, has a record of skepticism on collective bargaining. 

“I think that’s problematic for a number of reasons,” he said last summer. “I think there’s a better way.” 

🗣️ What key voices in collective bargaining debate say

Conference administrators remain hopeful that Congress — via the newly introduced SCORE Act — will codify aspects of the $2.8 billion House settlement, which took effect July 1. The settlement allows schools to share up to $20.5 million annually with athletes, with the aggregate increasing by at least 4% annually over the next decade. Revenue sharing and NIL deals now fall under the oversight of the newly formed College Sports Commission — a leaner, more nimble enforcement body created as part of the House settlement to replace the NCAA’s previous, often-criticized system.

“It’s positive progress and has an opportunity to serve the enterprise well,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said. “For the naysayers, the alternative was bleak, continued uncertainty, never-ending legal challenges and enforcement that was somewhat marginalized because of legal issues.”

Still, the new framework isn’t immune to legal pushback.

Conferences and the NCAA have spent millions lobbying lawmakers in Washington over the last several years, asking for antitrust protection from a slew of lawsuits related to player compensation, movement and eligibility. After years of losing court battles, the NCAA is closer than ever from getting what they want in Congress.

“If the NCAA is granted a broad, sweeping antitrust exemption, athlete collective bargaining and representation is in tremendous jeopardy,” said Maddie Salamone, a sports law attorney and former vice president of the College Football Players Association. “You’re going to see a lot of litigation over all of this for a number of years, regardless. Effectively, if the NCAA is given that antitrust exemption, they’re just going to claw everything back.”

The SCORE Act would override existing NIL laws in 34 states — many of which conflict — and provide limited legal immunity to the NCAA and its member schools. It would also officially deem athletes as students, not employees, striking at the heart of the current labor debate. Critics argue the bill undercuts the power that players have only recently begun to build.

“If Congress is going to come in and give us antitrust protection and allow us to set up guardrails that are fair for everybody, with basically a pass on what the Sherman Act says, then we don’t need collective bargaining,” White said. “That could be a solution. I don’t suggest that we go back to the way it used to be. I think it’s great that the players are making money. They should have always gotten a piece of the pie, and we’ve settled that with the past damages and the House settlement, and moving forward, they’ll get a piece of the pie, and they deserve that, but the system needs organization and guardrails, and I’m not sure that the House settlement on its own is enough for us to put those things in place.”

But do players even want to unionize? That’s far from clear. No prominent players have organized, and commissioners claim athletes don’t want to become employees.

📉 What changes if players are employees?

If college players become employees, schools will have to treat them exactly like employees under the law — paying payroll taxes, providing benefits, obeying labor relations rules, etc. Players could also be fired or traded. “Think of the Pandora’s box we opened,” said Jay Ezelle, an attorney who represents several NIL collectives, including Yea Alabama, the Crimson Tide’s official NIL collective. If universities must treat athletes as workers, “we just killed college athletics,” Ezelle warned.

“I talk to a lot of student-athletes, I’ve not encountered one who wants to be an employee,” he continued. “What I hear from them is we’ve got this pretty good right now. We like what we’re doing. We like this setup. 

“I would start listening to the student-athletes on this. It’s amazing to me that there’s all this talk that we need CBAs, and none of it is coming from student-athletes.”

Said one executive within a power conference who wished to remain anonymous: “That is more than just a talking point. That is a thing. The commissioners are coming at it from a place where they recognize a lot of their student-athletes don’t want it.”

Vocal or not, more than 4,100 players, including 2,365 in power conferences, are members of Athletes.org, Cavale said. Members include Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia and former Arizona State swimmer Grant House, the namesake of the antitrust lawsuit that has paved the way for revenue sharing with players. Cavale claims 12 of 16 athletic directors in the SEC support collective bargaining, though most remain silent.

Supporters say organizing has been slow because the rules keep shifting.

“What’s happened the last few years has given athletes crash courses on what their rights are and what they should be thinking about longterm,” Salamone said.

But corralling thousands of players across dozens of programs is no small feat.

“They’re a hard cohort to wrangle because they graduate and move around so quickly, and they’re young people,” Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez told CBS Sports. ” I feel like a lot has been done to increase their organization and voice in the NCAA system. Would they be more effective if they had an outside organization? I don’t know the answer to that.”

Athletes.org is seeking collective bargaining under a non-employee model, working within the House settlement’s framework. Cavale has drafted legislation — the Save College Athletics Act — and is seeking sponsors in Congress.

Meanwhile, NIL deals have grown more complex. Many now include buyouts and penalties if players transfer. Arkansas, for example, is attempting to recoup nearly $500,000 from a contract signed by quarterback Madden Iamaleava, who left the school for UCLA after just four months on campus to join his brother, former Tennessee QB Nico Iamaleava.

Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin is a supporter of a player-backed organizations because he believes it could eliminate headaches in the current system.

“For a while now it’s all been very player friendly with the regulations and rules around it,” he said. “Now it’s going to come back somewhere in the middle, but there probably needs to be [collective bargaining] because you’re still going to have a lot of loophole issues and problems for both sides until there’s real contracts that have years to them.”

The National College Players Association, however, believes anything short of full employee status denies athletes their rights under labor laws.

The SCORE Act, which is backed by the NCAA, was introduced July 10 and has the most support in Washington, though it remains questionable whether it will pass a divided Senate, where several Democrats would need to support the Republican-backed bill.

“We’ll still be in a world where we don’t have the guardrails we need,” White said. “That doesn’t touch the transfer issue at all.”

A Democrat-backed bill that would make players employees under the National Labor Relations Act was introduced the same week as the SCORE Act. The “College Athlete Right to Organize Act” has been endorsed by the major players associations in professional sports.

Cavale believes organizing players at the top 20 programs could create a domino effect across the FBS, with negotiations separated by tier. He thinks that shift could happen within two years — if schools get on board.

“They want the result but haven’t taken the time to grasp how to do it,” Cavale said.

There are other avenues that may disrupt the new model introduced under the House settlement.

Other factors could still unravel the House model. If a future court ruling — like the pending Johnson v. NCAA case — determines players are employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act, defendants in the House settlement could seek to modify or eliminate the current revenue-sharing structure.

Huma, a vocal advocate for labor rights, believes the battle over employee status won’t be resolved within the next decade — and that the House settlement may eventually fall.

“I could see 10 years from now there’s a free market, just like there are for coaches, commissioners and ADs who make millions of dollars,” Huma said. “I haven’t seen a piece of legislation yet that would cap coaches’ salaries in the name of preserving amateursim or common sense. I haven’t seen any legislation restricting coaches from movement for one team to another in the interest of stabilizing rosters.”

Introducing ideas like unionization, NIL rights and pay-for-play into a 100-year-old system that had long banned player compensation altogether has sent shockwaves through college sports. Historically, the NCAA has changed only when forced — most often by the courts.

Former Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby co-chaired the NCAA’s NIL Task Force in 2019, two years before the Supreme Court’s Alston ruling and a flurry of state NIL laws forced the NCAA’s hand. Bowlsby believed progress was being made on fair guidelines — never intended to be inducements — before legislation upended the process.

“We all knew this is exactly what was going to happen,” White said. “It’s not NIL, and for us to continue to say it’s not pay-for-play … I mean, come on, what are we talking about? We’re so intellectually dishonest with the words we’re using.”

For decades, inequity has been a silent undercurrent within the NCAA model. Now, that imbalance is finally being challenged in full view.

“You see $12 million coaches and you don’t blame the kids for wondering, ‘What about me? I’m doing all the work,'” Bowlsby said. “It’s particularly difficult when a lot of the star participants are young African Americans and the people, for the most part, that are making the money, are old white guys. It’s easy to see why we got to where we got to.”

Proposals to stabilize the system range from preserving vestiges of amateurism to embracing a full-fledged free market. Yet, more leaders believe football — the financial engine of college athletics — may eventually need to break away from the traditional model to address Title IX concerns and create a workable partnership with players.

More than a dozen Power Five athletic directors told CBS Sports they believe collective bargaining is a road worth exploring.

“A lot of people think it’s inevitable but aren’t saying it,” a power conference executive said. “There’s going to be too many complications that continue to come up that will ultimately result in the biggest voices saying, ‘F*** it, let’s try this.'”