Will Cain Country - Gabe Feldman: This Is The Future Of The NCAA

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

On this edition of The Will Cain Show’s Friday sports episode, Will sits down with The Director of the Sports Law Program and Director of NCAA Compliance at Tulane University, and the host of Sports Wise, Gabe Feldman to do a deep dive into what's happening with roster limits, sports expansion, NIL, recruiting, and the current wild west landscape of the NCAA across all sports following the NCAA vs. House lawsuit settlement.   Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail]   Subscribe to The Will Cain Show on YouTube here: Watch The Will Cain Show!   Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

falling apart changing evolving we're standing at the frontier of a brand new world when it comes to college sports how's it going to shake out salary caps in college sports nil roster limits and scholarship expansion What does it mean for every sport from college football to college lacrosse? With sports law expert, Gabe Feldman. It's the Will Kane Show, normally streaming live every Monday through Thursday at 12 o'clock Eastern time at Fox News.com. The Fox News YouTube channel and the Fox News Facebook page is Canaan Sports edition of the Will Kane show, available only by subscribing at Apple or on Spotify. I have been absolutely fascinated, not just as a father, but as a fan of what's happening with college sports.

It's been hard to keep up with court rulings, congressional oversight, and settlements of the NCAA, which has led to a brand new world where we have roster limitations, but scholarship expansion. What does that mean? Is it easier or harder to get a scholarship for college, water polo, college lacrosse, college soccer? And is college football now just completely pro football with a salary cap? Have we finally figured out NIL? Until makes sense of all of this today, I have a deep dive conversation one hour with someone who knows. The director of the sports law program, an associate provost for NCAA compliance at Tulane University, Gabe Feldman.

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podcast featuring common ground. In-depth talks with lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle, along with all your Brett Bear favorites

like his all-star panel and much more. Available now at Fox Newspodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Gabe Feldman,

the director of sports law program and associate provost for NCAA compliance at Tulane University joins us now. He's also the host

of SportsWise. Let me check out Gabe there. Today I want a deep dive, Gabe, on what's going on with the NCAA, with sports, roster expansion, scholarship limits, and so forth. But can we start, and thank you for being here, by the way, Gabe. Good to see you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Can we start sort of where all this started? Let's talk about the court decisions that led us down this path where we have sort of a brand new world emerging

in sports. And I'm not just talking about football and basketball, but it's resetting the entire landscape for every sport, from lacrosse to soccer to women's rowing. We're in a whole new world now. And let's start with how we got here. Yeah, we got here through a series of lawsuits. As you mentioned, they were primarily about football and basketball, men and women's basketball, but the impact has gone well beyond that. And so what the NCAA has had since about 2014, You might remember the Ed O'Bannon case and the NCAA kind of had a split decision there. They won part of it. They lost part of it. But that loss, I think, invited more people to sue and really look at college sports and say, wait a minute, there are billions of dollars

being generated. There are coaches who are making $10, $12 million a year. There are facilities that are being renovated every three or four years and are spending hundreds of millions of on that. And the athletes, for the most part, are getting the same thing they were getting for the last 50 years. That's not insignificant what they're getting. They're getting an athletic scholarship. They're getting great access to education, tutoring, coaching, exposure. But everything else was increasing except what the athletes were getting. And so I think it really encouraged a lot of lawyers and athletes to sue to say, shouldn't we be getting more? And the court started becoming more and more receptive to that. And it probably reached its apex with the all

decision, which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court a few years ago, that again said, look, NCAA, we're going to give you mostly a win in this case. But here's the loss. The loss is that you have to defend all of your rules under antitrust law, just like every other industry does. And they held in that case that athletes had a right to receive what they call education-related expenses, which is what's led to these Alston payments, about $6,000 a year per athlete. But that, again, I think invited further lawsuits. And it also scared the NCAA in thinking that, wait a minute, we might continue to lose all of these cases and lose complete control over college athletics. So you have this house case in a couple of related cases that sought to blow up

the whole system that said, we don't think the NCAA should be able to put any limits on what college athletes are paid, whether it's by boosters or collectives or by the schools themselves. And that was headed to trial and the NCAA said look this is too risky let's settle and so they settled with the plaintiffs and this is part of that landmark settlement that if it gets finally approved will change college sports and as you said not just for football and basketball players but this is going to have a direct impact on every athlete at every school in a division one level and will probably trickle down to d2 and d3 but that's that's how we got here very broadly speaking okay so it starts with the ed o banon case which famously is about whether or not college athletes can get paid beyond the value of their scholarship.

But talk to you about this settlement that they've arrived at. Give me the – I'm going to try to get to the part which I'm most interested in today, which is what happens with the rosters and scholarships, honestly, for non-revenue-generating sports? Because this is the thing, when I'm on the sidelines at a soccer game, Gabe, with my sons and their friends' parents. that no one fully understands how it's all going to shake out. But it's shaking out in real time. But tell me the terms of this settlement that we're close to arriving at. Yeah.

So I'll say the big piece is there will be $2.8 billion in damages paid out to athletes that were playing from 2016 all the way up to 2024. And that's going to divide it up primarily for football players and men's women's basketball. And then it'll kind of trickle out to other athletes. as well. So that's the damages portion. Then there's the going forward, the new model for college sports portion. The big part of that is that schools will be allowed to, but not required, be allowed to pay up to at least in year one, $20.5 million directly to athletes. That's from the schools to the athletes. And that will likely be also distributed in a similar way, about 70, 75% to

football if you have a football program, and then men's basketball, women's basketball, and then 5% of that or so will be shared amongst all the other athletes. College athletes will be allowed to make money off of their name, image, and likeness, but this is really trying to set up a pro-sport style system where those deals have to be legitimate deals, just like they do in the NFL. You can't do an NIL deal to try to do an end around around the salary cap. Same idea here. And so third-party deals from boosters or collectives, there's going to be an outside entity

that's going to evaluate these deals to make sure they are fair market value. and if they're not, they'll be rejected. And so you have a system where you have a cap of what the athletes can be paid, and then you have the ability to do NIL deals, but those have to be legitimate deals. And then the last portion of it, and the portion that, frankly, will impact more athletes, more parents, more grandparents,

is the elimination of scholarship limits and replacing it with roster limits. So historically, you could have as many athletes as you wanted on a roster, but you had scholarship limits. So for baseball, for example, you could put as many guys on the roster as you wanted, but you could only give out 11.7 scholarships, divide it up any way you want. They're now eliminating those scholarship limits, but instead, putting a roster limit on. So you can give everybody on your roster a scholarship,

but for many of these sports, we are going to shrink the roster. So football is what everybody talks about. Everybody knows about the scholarship limit historically have been 85 on football. But schools would carry 130, 140, 100,000. 50 athletes. So what they've done is said, all right, we are going to put a roster limit on at 105, but you can scholarship all 105 of them. So 20 more football players will get scholarships, but 30, 40, 50 of them might lose their roster spots. And we're going to see something like that for many of the other sports out there. Okay, three buckets you just described for us.

The third bucket you're talking about the scholarship and roster limitations is the one I want to spend the most time on. But I'm going to wait for a second because I want to talk about the other two for a second. So on the, there's the first bucket, which is, I think you said, a $20.5 million essentially salary cap system within Division I college athletics. That is athletic department wide. So that is, that money is shared among all the teams, but 75% you're saying will go to football and men's and women's basketball the schools get to decide so the settlement doesn't dictate how much each team or athlete will get paid so it's up to the individual school to decide and what most power for schools have said is they're going to roughly again these are schools that have football

programs spend about 70 to 75 percent on their football team 10 to 15 percent on their men's basketball team five is per seven on women's basketball and then the rest divided up among the other athletes that's not what every school's doing but that's what most of the power four schools are doing there are some schools they're not going to spend anywhere near 20.5 million right they might just distribute one two three million that that's then gets divided up among their athletes i got it but they can go up to 20 million okay um do you if they spent their full salary cap limit Gabe, if they did spend it, and I can pull up my calculator real quick, but you probably know it off top of your head, I'm just curious, do you have any sense yet of how much money

that is per athlete? If schools are going to do, as you've heard, let's just stick with the big schools for a minute, so like your big power for conferences, they're probably going to spend their full 20 million, a good chunk of them, and they're probably going to go 75% to football. So let's just play the game out for a minute. Does every athlete on the team get the same amount or can they use that as a recruiting tool to say no big time quarterback five star from high school you're going to get a huge chunk of our salary cap to come to the university of Georgia that's up to the school and the assumption is that there will be a premium paid for the premium positions just like we've seen over the last few years just like we see in pro sports

that the star quarterback right the skill positions are going to to get paid more. Again, that's up to the school to decide, and that's why we're seeing so many schools hire these general managers and essentially front office personnel to figure out who they want to sign and then how much they're going to pay them and what they need to pay to be able to recruit. So yes, it is likely that the quarterback will continue to make more than the backup offensive line. So it's a true pro sports model within the scope of that 20 million. You can apportion that however you want. You can do it pro rata per player. You give it to the player that you really want.

And you can decide how much is going to football and basketball. So it is a free market inside that $20 million cap. That's a lot of money on an annual basis. Do you have any sense, Gabe, at this point, like how that's going to shake out? Like, will all the Power 4 conferences spend the full $20 million? Because I know we are in a place. I had Alabama Athletic Director Greg Byrne on my show this week. And we talked about, what are you going to be?

able to keep? What are you not going to be able to keep? How is this going to work? Do you have any sense yet of how many can afford to do this on the annual basis? Spend the full 20 million? Yeah, so I heard your conversation with G.B. And I think that there are lots of powerful schools who, most powerful schools can afford it if they want to do it. And it is a question of whether they want to reallocate resources. So we're at a point in time right now. We're already seeing this with many schools that five years ago, 10 years ago said, we need to raise as much money as we possibly can for two purposes. One, to build a better facility and two, to hire a better coach, because that's going to allow us to recruit athletes better. If you're locked in to how much you're spending on your

facility and you have a 10-year deal or eight-year deal with your coach, yeah, you might struggle to find a little bit of money because you've already committed so much money. But for those who are a little more nimble and more flexible, you can say, you know what, we're not going to build that $8 million or $50 million stadium. Instead, we're going to shift that over to the athletes because it's all designed to do the same thing, which is to recruit the athletes. So I think part of it is going to be reallocation. But for most schools, it's going to be a choice. How are you going to choose to spend your money? The schools that say we can't possibly afford to spend an extra three or forward 10 or 15 million dollars on athletes are often the ones that are spending 40, 50,

60 million dollars to buy out a coach that they fired and then spend another 50 million dollars on a new coach. And that's the choice. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but it's not necessarily can they afford or not afford to do. It is how are they choosing to spend. For many of the schools, they are going to make a choice that we want to continue spending on football and basketball, maybe baseball, maybe hockey, depending on where you are geographically. and that they are going to limit how much they're going to spend on these other sports. Schools have already announced that. And what's interesting, and we haven't talked about yet that interferes with the free market a little bit,

that changes this from a pro sports model, is there are other laws that apply and maybe most prominently Title IX that will limit or impact what schools can do in terms of what they can cut. But what most schools have announced so far is that they are not going to cut sports. instead they're going to gut sports. So we're going to see a tiering of sports. We're going to see the schools spend the most money on football, men's women's basketball, and then maybe next you have baseball and your women's volleyball and softball.

And then, and that third tier, they're not going to get rid of them, but they're not going to have the same facilities. They're not going to have the same level of coaching. They're just going to be treated very differently because they need to figure out where to spend the money. And there is a finite amount of money at a certain point. And so it's going to shift even more

of football and basketball. Do you think it's going to have a depressing effect on coaching salaries? To your point earlier, with so much money flowing into football and basketball, one of the effects is when you didn't pay the players, you use that money to upgrade facilities and you use that money to try to recruit the best coach possible. And we saw coaching salaries go, I don't even know, college coaches, the top are in the $10 million plus range, right? Is that five to $15 million sort of range?

So with this money to your point of reallocation, let's say you're a college football coach right now. I mean, it's still a lot of money. But I'm just curious, like, are you kind of looking at a market that's not going to stay at that level or certainly not going to grow? Is there going to be a depressing effect on football coaches' salaries? I think that's a fascinating question that we're going to see play out. And I think some of that's going to be competition. What is the school value? And does a school think that they can get a better team by having a, you know, you talked about it with Greg,

with a Nick Sabin, paying him $12, $14, $15 million a year, or he better off having a lower profile coach and paying him $4 or $5 million and spending that additional six or seven on athletes. And I think we're going to see schools make different decisions. And some will try to do both, but some won't be able to do both. And I certainly think there's a risk.

Anytime there's a massive change in the system, there's a risk that the people who had most of the benefits are going to lose some of those benefits. Again, I don't think college football coaches are going to go poor because athletes are going to be getting money. But I think we might see it a recalibration. And we're not only do you have head coaches making $10, 11, $12 million, you have assistant coaches making two, three million dollars, you know, making more than their pro counterparts.

I do think that's going to level out a little bit. And the system has been inflated because they haven't had to pay their labor. And now when you do have to pay them some, I think, again, assuming there's just not another magical pot of gold that comes out there, you've got to figure out where that money is going to come from. Well, is there no Title IX effect on this $20 million to be paid out to athletes? So there's no requirement that you do that gender equal? That's the billion dollar question that we will find out an answer to as soon as this system starts working, because there are title nine lawyers that are waiting to bring this lawsuit that say wait a minute when it comes

to financial aid when it comes to scholarships when it comes to treatment and benefits the locker rooms the equipment those all have to be distributed equitably right not equally but equitably and now you're saying most of the power four schools that we're going to give upwards of 80 to 85 percent of this 20.5 million dollars to male athletes and that's under most definitions of equitable that's not equitable for purposes of Title IX. The schools are saying... Can I just interrupt you for a second? Yeah, please.

The equitable, equal thing is so important in society, period. Like, what's the difference in the two? But you said right now it doesn't have to be equal. It has to be equitable. I just kind of want to push on what that means, because the counter argument will always be. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Football brings in all the money.

So you can't... We can't be forced to give equal amount of money to football that we're given to women's volleyball. That disrupts the entire market. it honestly it's like that's not real so what are we talking about like it has to be equitable on all this other stuff so let me give you the yeah the simplest way to explain it for financial aid for athletic scholarships it has to be equitable not equal so what they look at in terms of equity is you look at the percentage of athletes who are participating who are male versus female and the

aid the scholarships have to be distributed in that percentage so if you have 60% male athletes then they can be getting 60% of the scholarships. But if you have 60% female athletes, they have to be getting 60%. It's 50-50, then it goes 50-50. The question is, though, do these $20.5 million, do they count as athletic scholarships? Or is this a different kind of money? The athletic scholarships, there's no argument to be made under the law that football players should be getting more because they generate more money.

That's just not an argument Title IX permits when it comes to athletic scholarships. There are, though, if you look at the locker rooms of the equipment and travel, you say, why do the football team, why is their budget so much higher, and why are they flying on chartered planes, and why is their gym so much bigger? The answer to that can often be because the teams are bigger. The equipment's more expensive. There's just more athletes. They just have to spend more.

So that's a non-discriminatory justification for it. In general, though, saying that they generate more money and more people are interested has typically not been a defense to a difference in spending, right? That, that, that, and part of the reason for that is the argument that, well, football is more popular because it's been promoted more than women's sports. And if you promote women's sports, then they will be as popular. But the shorter answers your question to, you know, that's a, that's a very thorny, complicated issue that we could spend hours talking about. The very short answer is for that $20.5 million, right now schools are planning, for the reason you talked about, planning to distribute most of it to male athletes,

because they're the ones that are generating the interest, generating the revenue. They're the ones that the media companies are paying them hundreds of millions of dollars to broadcast. That doesn't mean they're not going to be sued for it. And so I think we can expect a lawsuit challenging that distribution. But here's the other thing. And then I'll stop talking about this. If you pay 50-50, let's say you pay half to female athletes, half to male athletes, the male athletes would likely sue saying, I'm being discriminated against. I'm the one who's generating all the money, and yet you're paying the women more money. So this is either way, I think we're going to see more lawsuits coming out of this.

Okay, one more thing on this equitable thing. I thought that Title IX required the same number of male and female athletes. So in other words, you know, when Title IX first came in, the whole problem was balancing out the 85 football scholarships, right? And this is in the 90s, I believe. So all of a sudden you saw all these male teams get cut, like UCLA men swimming, who dominated men swimming. great, great program overnight was gone because they had to balance out the number of male and female scholarships. So I thought we were forced into this 50-50 thing. So the revenue split would be 50-50 or the financial aid and facilities would be split 50-50. So it could be, but that first

one, so the participation prongs where we look at the athletic opportunities that athletes get male versus female, there's three ways to comply with that. And I'll try to make this as simple as possible because I don't want this to be another law school class for everybody. But the first way you look at it is it's substantially proportionate to the gender enrollment at your school. So you look at the overall student body. And if there are 55% male students and 45% female students, that's what your athletic program has to look like. That's what substantial proportionality is. The challenge for schools is we have a lot more women going to college these days than men. So many schools have 55% female students or 60% female students, which means,

To be equitable, you have to have 60% female athletes. And that's hard for a lot of schools to do because one of football and two, just a lot of men who have interest in playing sports. But there are two other ways that you can comply, even if you're not having that substantial proportionality. One is if you can show that you continue to grow your programs for female athletes and that you're on a trajectory. Most schools are unable to do that because they just haven't been consistently adding sports.

So the third way you can do it. And a lot of schools are relying on this now is to say, we have fully men. all of the interests and needs of our female athletes. And we should not be forced to add more spots just to say that we're complying with Title IX. That's not consistent with the spirit of the law. If we can show we don't have enough women who are interested, we don't have enough that are able to field a team

that can compete in a team, you can use that to say, well, we know we have 60% male participation in sports, even though we have 60% female students on campus. You can say, we've fully satisfied all the needs of our female athletes. So more and more schools are relying on that. So it doesn't have to be 50-50.

It's never had to be 50-50. It's always been anchored to your student enrollment or showing that the students who are there are fully and effectively accommodated in terms of their desire to play sports. Okay, one last question on this first bucket, the $20 million salary cap. What is your sense right now, Gabe,

on what the impact of that alone? We'll do NIL in a minute, but that alone will do to the competitive landscape. If every program is asking what can we afford to do, and there's going to be different answers to that, the easy assumption is we're just talking about a furtherance of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So you'll have this big divide where the University of Texas is,

the Ohio states are going to continue to excel on the field because of their advantages off the field financially, and those that struggle a little more, maybe Tulane, financially, are going to have a harder time, there'll be a bigger separation. Is that your sense? It's possible. I would say that there's already such a massive gap in terms of the resources. And the $20.5 million, if you look at the amount that a Texas or an Alabama spends on athletics now compared to a ball state,

it's way more than $20.5 million. And so it might make it worse, but there are some schools that we're seeing. And BYU has done this with basketball. And again, this is under the kind of middle ground. We don't have the new system yet. But we have collectives, at least being able to pay athletes exorbitant amounts of money to play for a year or two, that we're starting to see some schools that say, hey, I'll pay $8 million to get the star basketball player for a year to put us in the tournament and give us some publicity. So there may be some schools that have enough funding from donors that say, hey, let's make a run at this.

We couldn't have done it in the past. we can pay the money directly to the athletes. But otherwise, yes, I think it's hard to see it as anything other than widening that gap between the haves and the have-nots. But, and this will get into the other buckets, I think it'll happen with football and basketball, but we might see an increase in competitive balance with all the other sports. And we may even see it a bit with basketball, even though this year people are saying, look what happens in the new world. You only have the top seeds or no Cinderella's with no upsets. That's happened before. or let's, you know, let's let it play out a few years to see if that's a trend or just a one-off.

But you look at the big East schools and the schools that have FCS football, who are not going to be spending $17 million on football or $15 million on football. They've got that $20.5 million cap. They might spend $15 million of it on basketball. The Alabama's in the Texas is they can't because they're spending $15 million on football. And they only have $6 million left under the cap. So we might see, you know, this is the Big East, this might be their time of Georgetown, I was going to say Syracuse, but the current Big East, they have a shot maybe to compete more in basketball. And then you go down to baseball, softball, water polo, soccer, where some schools might say, you know what, we're not competing in football.

So let's spend the money on baseball and soccer. And let's give an extra $500,000. And we can now all of a sudden be competitive in soccer and baseball or more competitive. competitive. So I think you might see a further tilting of the scales for football, but you might actually see some more competition with the other sports. More of the Will Cain Show right after this. Hey, I'm Trey Gowdy host of the Tragutty podcast. I hope you will join me every Tuesday and Thursday as we navigate life together and hopefully find ourselves a little bit better on the other side. Listen and follow now at Fox Newspodcast.com. It is time to take the quick.

It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at the quiz.com. Then come back here to see how you did. Thank you for taking the quiz. Okay, we're going to see if you're right on that in a minute because I want to come back to that. But now let's go into the NIL conversation, the second bucket.

I was on ESPN, Gabe, when this sort of fight was happening and everybody was having their conversations about justice, you know. but one of the things, and I feel like I was criticized for this from the people that typically disagree with me, but I was criticized for saying, how are you ever going to know if a marketing deal is quote unquote legitimate? You know, my thing was always like, because under the original idea of NIL, it was truly name image and likeness. It was a marketing deal. I want you to endorse my product because you have a high profile. And I said at the time, you know, having grown up in Texas and seeing with SMU, you know, and by the way, God bless SMU because everybody was doing it. They were just doing it the most. But I did see, you know, we'll just call Billy Bob's Ford

dealership, who's a big SMU fan go, heck yeah, we're going to pay you. So what was going to stop that guy from saying, I want big time quarterback. Here's a couple million for a quote unquote marketing deal for my dealership that has no relationship to the true market value of that advertising deal, right? And you're telling me that now is important to the courts and the NCAA. They want to have a third-parting vetting system to make sure these are truly about marketing and not back-ins around just paying players. Right.

That's the plan. Whether that plan is successful remains to be seen. And I think you put the nail on the head that these marketing deals, their subjective value is in the eye of the the holder, you know, how much is somebody worth? How much are they willing to pay for it? How much is an autograph worth? You know, to me, it's worth 50 cents to somebody else. It might be worth a million dollars to add to their collection. So how are we going to put any real limitation on that? How are we going to stop someone from saying, yes, it is worth to me to have these three guys show up on my car dealership to pay them $500,000? Because, you know, this is not

typical endorsement deals. This is not your celebrity in New York or L.A. It means more in Texas. It means more in the SEC. And so you can't compare. And in fact, the values, the market value may be much higher in a Tuscaloosa than it would be in a New York City. Because college sports are just so much more valuable down there than they are in New York. But what I would say is there are two efforts to try to make this a workable system. One is by bringing in a third party. So it's not the NCAA itself that is rejecting these deals and punishing these schools or these athletes. So they think they have a layer of protection there. The other is they look again at pro sports and say if pro sports can do this and they've done it, it doesn't happen often.

But you probably remember the Joe Smith case or other cases where teams tried to go around the cap. And we heard rumors that the clippers tried to do this with Kauai Leonard, offering him additional money in an endorsement deal to recruit them to the team because they knew they couldn't pay more under the cap. And the leagues have really strict systems to make sure that these caps are being enforced. Does that mean that people aren't cheating in pro sports? No, they might be. It's certainly easier in pro sports when you have a much smaller number of teams and much smaller number of athletes, right? And you have a players association.

They have all sorts of regulations. But there is a model out there. I don't know how well it's going to work here. But I would say that my guess is that they're not going to come in and say that deal should have been worth $19,000, not $20,000. so we're rejecting it. It's more, I think we could probably all agree that if somebody pays a million dollars for one autograph, that that's not really for the autograph, that that's for some other purpose. And how do you handle the deals in between where it's $500,000 and you think maybe it's

only worth $50,000? That's where the third party is going to have to make these decisions. They're going to have some algorithm. They're going to claim it's all objective. I think one thing we can be fairly certain of is the first time an athlete has a deal rejected, there will be a lawsuit. May not come from the athlete because they're going to be part of the settlement, but the booster will sue. How are you coming in third party and telling me how I can spend my money? This is valuable to me, just like that painting I have in my wall, is incredibly valuable to me. Nobody's going to come and say, no, you can't buy that because you're spending too much money on it. So it's going to be, I think, messy. I think it's going to be really messy, but the goal, at least,

The goal is clear to create a pro-like system with a cap and then anti-circumvention provisions that say, yeah, go out and make whatever you can, just like the non-athlete student is, but you don't see the non-athlete student getting paid a million dollars for an autograph. So let's just make sure those deals are just like deals that everybody else in society is getting. How you enforce that, that we'll find out in a few months. All right. So right now, we're still in the second bucket. the NIL portion of paying athletes feels like a total wild wild west.

Interestingly, I think there are market considerations because I've heard a lot about schools. Again, I'm a Longhorn fan, so I keep up the best. Texas actually doesn't win every NIL battle for a player. And they'll lose NIL battles for, I mean, they'll lose to Nebraska who doesn't have as much money as Texas. So there are market pressures, donor pressures, booster pressures that it's not just, hey, we can afford everything in the world. But these two things that you're talking about they're bringing in are an attempt to make

this a little less of the Wild Wild West when it comes to NIL. Right, right. And it's also, those restrictions are only on the third part, the collectives and the boosters. If it's a deal with a Nike or some third party that has no connection to the school,

there's no vetting of that. That can go forward. It's only because we're worried that the collective or the booster is going to say, yeah, I've got a local business, but I really just want to get the athletes to come to school. And what the collectives did over the last three years, in many cases, they weren't promoting anything. They were saying it's for NIL, but they weren't doing it to promote it. They were all they were doing is to promote their collective, which was created

to just give more money to the athletes. So it was pretty transparent. And look, that may be fine. People might say, let them pay whatever they want to pay them. And that may be okay, but that's not what NIL is. And so if you want to pay them an unlimited amount of money, do call it something else. But if you're going to call it NIL, let's at least try to make it NIL. And so I think that's what the NCAA is attempting to do.

What about, so one last thing on this NIL bucket, there's a line that is going to be hard to separate. You said there's a third party, like a big deal with Nike versus a booster. I don't know how you separate that line, by the way, either. Like Phil Knight is Nike? you know he's a big organ guy like how do you separate booster versus true third party advertiser

there are very specific rules in the in the NCAA bylaws and also in the settlement about how to differentiate those two so if you're a booster who happens to own a large company and if it's publicly traded then they will treat it just like a a normal third party um so if you're offering something to the public and it's a publicly traded company then they're not going to give that extra scrutiny. So the feeling is that Nike and Nike shareholders are not going to say, yeah, let's go ahead and spend a bunch of money in Oregon, that they would only do something that's actually going to benefit the company. But if it's just Phil Knight over there by himself saying, I'm going to give a bunch of money to Oregon, that's the one that would get the scrutiny.

So they do. Now, there are going to be ways around it. They're going to be loopholes. Every time you have a rule, people find a way to get around that rule. But there are at least rules to try to prevent the booster from hiding behind. a third-party company. Got it. Okay, now finally, this is the part I was most interested in, but I think we've been laying the landscape in part, and I think a lot of what we've talked about

is things people don't know and how this is going to shake out. But the third bucket, so the roster and scholarship limitations. So instead of doing this from an academic standpoint with you, I'm going to just do it through a personal lens because this is the way I think a lot of people are internalizing it right now, Gabe. So I have a son who's a junior in high school, right?

and he's very into soccer and he plays pretty high-level club-level soccer. I don't, he's not that interested in college. He's actually, you know, the kicker and punter on the football team as well. And when the new stuff came out, it was like, oh, my gosh, all of a sudden, soccer, for example, I think the number is can go from nine scholarships to 25. Everybody's like, whoa, that's a world, a new world of opportunity for high school soccer players to get scholarships. That was the first instinct.

It's like, oh, my gosh, this is really good. Pretty quickly after that, we were sort of disavowed of that. In that, first of all, interestingly, a lot of sports don't want high school players anymore. Because of the transfer portal, they want junior and senior level transfers. They want experienced players. And in some sports, like water polo or soccer, they want guys from overseas who are better, which is a whole other conversation, I think, that is worthy to be had as well. but the the they can now there's a roster limitation to your point but you have to give everybody

on roster a scholarship but that doesn't mean as I learned with Greg Gregg Byrne that you have to have a full roster to have that sport to field that sport so for example we'll use soccer I think the number is 25 for soccer you don't have to offer 25 scholarships you could offer 15 and your roster is set at 15 right is that a fair estimate estimation of like how this is going to work no so it's a look so they eliminated the scholarship limit and they put in a roster cap instead and you have the ability to offer everyone on your roster a full scholarship a partial scholarship or no scholarship so you can still have a full roster but they're not all scholarships it's just that the the cap on scholarships is gone so if you have

25 on your soccer team all 25 can be scholarship but you can also only scholarship five of them if you want. And the rest of them can be on scholarship. I've always heard, Gabe, I've always heard this is the death of the walk-on. People are saying that. No more walk-ons in college. That's not true? Well, it is, well, I wouldn't say death, but take football.

Football is where everybody talks about it, that you teams would have 130, 140 guys on their roster. That's now being cut to 105. So there are going to be 35 people who are walk-ons. right, who are gone. There's no spot for them anymore. Now, that's the downside. The upside is you have 105 guys who can now get a scholarship. So there are going to be 20 more football players who are on scholarship that weren't before. So it's a trade-off. You have fewer people playing, but the people who are playing have access to a scholarship that they wouldn't have had before.

So that's the trade-off. And so that's why it's sort of the death of the walk-on, again, for football, be no more walk-ons because all 105 players will be scholarship players got it so but you know here i'm just going to look at texas scholarship this is we'll get to this in a minute i'm just going to use this as an example um so men's golf had four and a half scholarships before right but now you can go to a full roster um but you don't have to so right you know whatever the new you could you could offer seven scholarships and still, I don't know what a men's golf roster limitation is, but I think it's eight, maybe, I don't know. You could still have three quote-unquote walk-ons

or recruited non-scholarship players in these sports. Yep, yep, yep. And you could have half them be on half scholarship if you want. They've eliminated that distinction between we used to call equivalent sports and headcount sports, where it's either a full scholarship or a partial scholarship. Now you can give whatever you want, and you can give it to as many of those. But the question now is what, can you afford? It's not so much what you're limited to by the NCAA. The question now becomes

what can you afford to give? And every school has a different answer for that, sport by sport. Right, right, no question. And there is the fear that you alluded to earlier that if you're paying an extra $20.5 million overall, and most of that's going to football or basketball, that if you want to cut costs somewhere that you're most likely, rather than reducing the coach's salary for football, you're going to reduce the money you spend on those Olympic sports, right, your third tier of sports. Now, maybe it won't lead to a loss of roster spots. It will, to the extent that there's a new cap that's lower than what the roster was before, but maybe it'll lead to a decrease in scholarships. In the short term, though, what the rule says is if you are currently on scholarship,

You cannot lose your scholarship because of any changes that are made from the settlement. So if you're an athlete right now on scholarship and you find out tomorrow that sorry, we cut your roster spot because of these new limits, you still get to maintain your athletic scholarship, even though you're not on the school, even though they're not on the team anymore. That's just for the existing players. But in three years, four years, when your son is maybe looking at colleges, then he may be faced of the situation where, wow, there are more scholarships available to soccer players, but they're way fewer roster spots.

Right. And we've already, you know, we've seen the numbers that thousands of roster spots will be cut because of this. And people are upset about that. And that's the main objection to the settlement overall. And it's the main objection for two reasons. One is because it impacts so many athletes. And two, because you look at the lawsuit and the lawsuit was all about compensation for

football and basketball and NIL. it had nothing to do with rosters. It had nothing to do with scholarships. And in fact, this roster issue didn't come up until very late in the litigation. It was added. It was amended to the complaint multiple years in and then became part of the settlement because you can't settle something that's not part of the lawsuit. So why would it add in? Yeah, there's a lot of theories about this. What the NCAA has said, and I've talked to their lawyers, outside lawyers, about this and they've said this publicly, is, that they wanted to eliminate the scholarship limit because they were worried they would continue to get sued and say,

why are you limiting scholarships? Why can baseball only get 11.7? And so this was a way to avoid the risk of litigation on the scholarship limit. But then you say, well, okay, great, but now aren't you opening yourself up to litigation on the roster limits? So you just move the target from the scholarships to the rosters. And I think that the NCAA, one, probably feels more comfortable in defending those roster limits. And two, they do have a different justification for having roster limits in place, particularly for football, it's maybe different for the Olympic sports. But just like in pro sports, we're worried about the better resource school stockpiling

players and putting 130 guys on your roster, paying them a bunch, but not playing them, just so your competitor can't get it. Right. That's what, you know, it's what the Yankees used to do. That's what the wealthy pro teams used to do, which is why we have roster limits and why then they had those practice squads and, you know, the term taxi squad. The reason it's called a taxi squad is because pro teams would try to avoid the roster limit by claiming they had a bunch of guys working for them as taxi drivers, but they were actually playing for them. And so that's why they would call the taxi squad, people trying to find their way around the roster limit. But the fear is that if you have unlimited roster sizes, then it's going to really hurt competitive balance.

And if you look at men's basketball, for example, again, this year accepted, part of the reason there's competitive balance in men's basketball is because there's so many great high school basketball players and only so many roster spots. So when Kentucky and Duke and Carolina, they fill their rosters, there's still lots of other good players to go around for the George Masons and the Gonzaga's. But if you don't have a roster limit, then the fear is that these top 25, 25 schools are going to get all the best players. So it seems like the logical outcome of these Olympic sports, and it's, it's a, I'm going to come back to the Olympic side of it, but the non-revenue generating sports is it seems like it's a logical place for schools to begin to save money. And it seems like if you play a sport that is not football or basketball, maybe a little bit of baseball, but primarily football for being honest, if you're playing a sport that's not that, it's probably going to be harder. not just to find a roster spot, but probably harder to find a scholarship unless there is some school out there

that has said, like you did earlier, you know what? We're going to distinguish ourselves in lacrosse. That's just what we're going to do. We're going to make our name on lacrosse, and we're going to offer a full roster of scholarships. But you're sort of now limiting the number of schools who are probably going to go in on this stuff.

It's going to be really hard, I think, for these sports to have competitive balance and for high schoolers out there to find their way to playing Division I non-revenue-generating sports. Yeah, I think you might be right that there's one caveat to that is that the non-power-5 schools, so it was a Power 5 when the case was filed, it's now Power 4, but for purposes, what I'm talking about is Power 5. For the group of five schools, they have an opportunity in the other schools to not opt into the settlement, that they can say, all right, we're not going to share $20.5 million.

We're not going to share anything. have money to do it. But by not opting in, we don't have the roster limits. So you're seeing some schools opting out of the settlement, which means, again, they can't pay, but they can have as many athletes as they want on their rosters. So there are going to be schools, not as many as before, but they're going to be schools that continue under the old way, have unlimited rosters, have limited scholarships, but there'll still be those athletic athletic opportunities there. So that's one thing that might soften it. And schools can make a new decision every year. So you have to declare within a certain period of time this year,

but then you can decide next year. You know what? That didn't work. We spent too much money. Well, let's opt out and then we can increase our rosters. That's hard to do from year to year, but that possibility is still there and we already are seeing some schools do it. But I think there's no question that as schools prioritize football and basketball and have the ability to spend more money on football and basketball, that it's got to come from somewhere. And yes, I think there will be fewer opportunities for a lot of Olympic sports and Olympic athletes. When I ask outside counsel for the plaintiffs in the NCAA about this, their answer is pretty much, well, that's what competition does. You know, you let schools decide how they want to spend their money.

And if they value football and baseball and basketball more, then they're going to spend more money on football and baseball and basketball. And the schools that want water polo and lacrosse, they'll spend there. But right now we're kind of forcing schools to spend money maybe in ways they don't want to spend it. And that raises, I think, the sort of existential question is what do we want college sports to be about? Do we want it to be about giving as many athletes and as many sports an opportunity to play as possible? Or do we want it to be about football and basketball? And I think, I think this wasn't the question you asked, but I think we may be headed where the football schools just pull away. They do their own thing and then we kind of recalibrate and the rest of college sports.

And I don't know which way basketball goes. But the rest of college sports says, all right, this is about broad-based participation. This is about development. This is about education. This is about opportunity to be at a school. This is potentially about Olympic development. All of that gets washed over when schools are looking at paying $20.5 million to football. Because that's their job.

I don't blame them. It's just what the market is forcing them to do. A couple more questions here. It seems like I'm not, when I ask questions, I want to. understand and try to project forward. Everybody thinks sometimes you're like endorsing or condemning. It seems like this is going to have a massive detrimental effect on our Olympic development. Like the reason we're so good at so many Olympic sports is because we have the collegiate

environment to develop fensers and not that that's a sport that we dominate, but, you know, we do swimmers, you know, we're really good of swimming. And part of that is because we have really good NCAA swimming. It seems like this could down the road be a thing where the United States isn't really dominating the Olympics anymore. Why? Because we're not developing these athletes anymore through the collegiate system. Yeah, it could. It could. Again, if we go down this path and no other changes are made, I think that is a real risk that as we de-emphasize the Olympic sports, it's going to hurt the Olympic sports. I mean, I don't think that's a particularly

controversial perspective, but the two points on that. One is that there's a question of, well, Well, if that's true, even if we accept that it is true, should we require our football players and our basketball players to fund Olympic sports to subsidize? Yeah, right. So there's that issue. And then the other issue is, all right, we can find another way to continue Olympic develop. We just need a new structure. So maybe we should federate the sports.

So you have them to talk about this with U.S. soccer. U.S. soccer kind of takes control over collegiate sports as well and develops it from grassroots all the way to the Olympic level, to the elite level, and you could see that for other sports where that's going to require some new funding. But there is a model where we continue to develop and we continue to excel. But I will say the impact on Olympic sports, I'm worried about it. I'm worried about the impact on broad-based opportunities, about gender equity, about all these things that could be impacted negatively. That's where I think we might get, and I know this is silly to say, but we might get Congress to actually step in, right?

It's naive to think Congress can do anything right now, but there's one thing that people can rally around, and that is Olympic sports in this country, right? We want to see our Olympic team succeed. We also want our college athletes to succeed. We want our football teams to succeed. So that's, you know, despite the divisive world we live in, sports may be the one thing that can bring Republicans and Democrats together. all right then there's this and you heard me ask gb about this so i think this is i think this is big news and i read it on a longhorn's website but the the announcement was that the university of texas will add 200 new scholarships at a cost of uh more than nine million dollars a year um now

this i would assume is outside of the 20 million dollars that you can pay athletes directly this is just adding scholarships to your point up to the full roster limit and um You know, the, Byrne was direct with me. He goes, yeah, that was sort of a shot across the bow, what we heard from UT, that they're going to add all these because schools can't afford to do it. He told me that the scholarship is one thing, but we invest something like $200,000 a year into an athlete, between meal programs, tutoring, housing, facilities. So you can't afford. But so how it lays out, according to what was written about the University of Texas, is, for example, you know, men swimming and diving is going to go from 9.9 scholarships to 20. And they're doing this across the board.

Almost every sport at UT is going way up. They're going to offer scholarships up to the roster limits, I guess. And the most crazy one that I saw was women's rowing goes from 20 to 68. 68 women's rowing scholarships at the University of Texas. And so other schools are looking at this and going, wow, Texas can afford to do this. And they're going to dominate all these sports. So how do you read this? It's not just about UT.

I think this is a great prism. to how this all shakes out the competitive landscape. Yeah, it absolutely is, and most schools can't afford to do what Texas does. And Texas, like most universities, have their boards meeting at mid-meeting frequently over the last year to try to figure out how they're going to fit into this new landscape. And at Texas, they obviously decided, hey, this is an opportunity not only to continue excelling in football and basketball, but why we should be the best in every sport that

we're going to field, why not? And this is the way to do it, because we can now offer more scholarships than anybody else, or we're going to be able to do it across the board. Again, as we talked about, someone might say, all right, let's go all in on lacrosse, let's go all on on swimming, but Texas is going to say we're going all in on all of them. So we can now be competitive. And yeah, I mean, that, I don't see how that doesn't impact competitive balance and doesn't put, you know, we might look back and say the Olympic feeder in this country is not just college sports, it's the University of Texas. And Stanford has been that for many years. You know, if Stanford were a country, it would finish in the top three or four, the medal count

in the Olympics. So we might just see that. But most schools, again, cannot do that, won't do that. Just one other point that I forgot to mention on the roster limits. A reason that a lot of schools are upset about this is that for many schools, not the Texas's, but for many schools, they actually use those roster spots to generate revenue. because they have athletes who come to that school because they want to play a sport, but they pay full tuition. And so those walk-ons are not costing the school money. They are generating money. And so these schools are saying, wait a minute, we're going to lose money because we're losing these roster spots.

It's not about us trying to stockpile rosters so that we can be the best team in the country. This is how we maintain our funding. And this is how we can actually have college spots. is by having these paying customers, and if we're cutting them off, then we have no chance. And which is why some schools are saying, we have to opt out. We can't afford to opt in, not in terms of because of what they're paying, but just because they're going to lose those roster spots. What a fascinating discussion, game.

I really appreciate you giving us so much time today. I'm endlessly fascinated by this. I think it's incredibly complicated, and we are all on the sort of frontier of this, figuring how it's all going to play out. I don't even know over the next one to five to ten years in college sports. Gabe Feldman, Director of Sports Law Program and Associate Provost for NCAA compliance at Tulane. Check them out at Sports Wise. Gabe, thanks so much, man.

Yeah, my pleasure, Will. Enjoyed it. This is Jason Chaffetz from the Jason and the House podcast. Join me every Monday to dive deeper into the latest political headlines and chat with remarkable guests. Listen and follow now at Fox Newspodcast.com. or wherever you download podcasts. I'm Janice Dean. Join me every Sunday as I focus on stories of hope and people who are truly rays of sunshine

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