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https://www.denverpost.com/2025/08/31/house-settlement-cu-buffs-csu-rams/
The University of Colorado athletics department faces an existential challenge — one shared by many other schools around the country that support and promote major college athletics.
A department that’s operated at a deficit for five of the last seven reported fiscal years must now find an extra $20.5 million in 2025-26. Then the Buffs have to do it again every year after that, at annual increases of 4%, until that number grows to roughly $33 million in 2035.
The new expense is a direct result of what’s known as the House settlement — an agreement that permits NCAA member institutions to pay athletes directly for their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rights starting this fiscal year.
Schools can either opt into the agreement and begin paying athletes, as both CU and Colorado State University have, or risk falling behind in an industry that grows increasingly more cutthroat with each passing year.
The latest round of conference realignment — which brought CU back to a picked-over Big 12, and CSU to a reconstituted Pac-12 — further widened the gap between the haves and have-nots by consolidating large sums of media dollars and decision-making power within two conferences: the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference.
With more realignment expected after the current conference media contracts end, starting in 2030, the race is on for programs outside those two conferences to make themselves as attractive as possible to the industry’s power brokers.
“College sports are not in equilibrium yet,” said Roger Noll, a Stanford University professor who is an expert in the economics of sports. “The chaos has only just begun.”
And that chaos makes opting in to the House settlement a requirement, according to Noll.
“Think of it as the ante in poker,” Noll said. “Participating in the House settlement gets you to the next round, and the next round will hopefully have more information, and you can hopefully make a better decision.”
Even in the short term, that’s a difficult proposition.
Both CU and CSU nearly doubled their athletic expenses over the last 10 reported fiscal years, and CU needed spikes in direct institutional support over the last two reported fiscal years to avoid operating at deficits exceeding an average of $19 million annually.
The gamble is that heavy investment now will pay off in the future. Record football ticket sales in the first two seasons of the Deion Sanders Era, as well as jumps in television ratings and undergraduate enrollment, suggest that could be the case for CU.
“CU has a shot in this new era. It’s not impossible they could succeed, and they might as well see what happens,” Noll said. “Colorado State is going to have a much harder time from where they are.”
CU athletic director Rick George told The Denver Post that the Buffs are committed to paying the full freight of the revenue-sharing cap to their athletes. CSU athletic director John Weber told The Post that the Rams plan on ramping up to the $20.5 million cap. Weber said he wants CSU to be one of the first Group of 5 schools — Division I FBS institutions outside the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC — to get to that point.
One thing is clear: For both state schools to fund athlete revenue sharing, they’re going to have to get creative.
“We’re all anxious to understand what the environment and playing field is going to be for everybody,” CSU football head coach Jay Norvell said. “We know it’s a transition, and we’ve just got to swim real hard upstream and have as much success as we possibly can until everything gets clarified. That’s the reality for everybody.”
CU athletics finished in the black in fiscal year 2024 after generating $146.6 million in revenue and $138.3 million in expenses, according to its NCAA financial report.
Yet even with recent records in contributions ($29.3 million in donations in FY ’23) and ticket sales ($35 million in FY ’24), CU’s athletic department needed $54.9 million in direct institutional support over the last two reported fiscal years to avoid a deficit. By comparison, CU athletics received $49.3 million in direct institutional support — classified as revenue in NCAA reports — over the previous six fiscal years combined, between 2017 and 2022.
Now CU athletics must account for another $20.5 million to pay its athletes, on top of Coach Prime’s record $9.5 million salaryafter the school boosted his pay last spring.
CU’s revenue-sharing equation will align with how much revenue each program generates, meaning nearly 90% of the money will go to football and men’s basketball players. Based on the 2024 operating revenues for CU, football’s cut would be about 77%, while men’s basketball’s would be 11.2%.
George acknowledged the department must look for additional revenue to meet the revenue-sharing cap, though he said CU won’t make “big increases” in ticket prices.
CU installed turf at Folsom Field this summer, partly to enable more concerts, and tripled its student athletic fee for undergraduate students to $90 per semester starting this fall. The latter was the first such increase in three decades. On Aug. 7, CU also announced a seven-year partnership with The Mountain States Ford Stores to become the official naming rights partner for the football team’s indoor practice facility.
In addition, CU will continue to lean heavily on its Buff Club, the fundraising arm of CU athletics that features the Flatirons Societyfor donors who give $10,000 or more.
“(That $20.5 million) will come from the different things that we do, like concert revenue, our multimedia rights partner (Learfield’s Buffalo Sports Properties), our conference distributions, our donors that support our program,” George said.
CU earned $16.6 million from media rights in FY ’24, its first year back in the Big 12, plus an additional $12.1 million between NCAA and conference distributions.
But those NCAA revenue distributions will go down over the next 10 years for all Division I schools, as the NCAA uses that money to fund $2.8 billion in backpay to former college athletes as part of the House settlement. The federal settlement also eliminated scholarship limits while instituting roster limits for each sport and created regulatory oversight of third-party NIL deals.
CU’s revenue from media rights and overall conference revenue will increase as part of the Big 12’s extended TV contract that runs through 2031. The extension is expected to distribute an average annual payout of $31.7 million per school, according to ESPN, starting in 2025-26. That figure, however, is dwarfed by the per-school distributions in the Big Ten ($63.2 million in FY ’24) and the SEC ($52.5 million), according to the conferences’ tax records. And those payouts are expected to increase this year, according to USA Today.
Such a gap forces schools outside the Big Ten and SEC into more difficult choices in order to meet the revenue-sharing cap, including where to make cuts. CU did some of that already when it eliminated the positions of two longtime assistant track coaches in June. George said CU “consolidated” those roles into one position.
As George acknowledged, “You can’t do all of this just in revenue generation.”
“We’ll look at our expenses, the different things that we’re doing, and we’ll consolidate in areas where we may need to,” George said.
The one line George says CU does not intend to cross: cutting any of its 17 sports, even if the NCAA lowers the minimum number of sponsored sports required of Division I FBS members (16).
“We have goals when we started this, and one of them was we would not cut any sports, and we have not,” George said. “… There is very little change (in support) that our student-athletes will see.”
The Rams constructed $220 million Canvas Stadium last decade in part to draw interest from power conferences like the Big 12. While that investment factored into their ability to draw an invitation to join the Pac-12 in 2026, the conference the Rams are joining is still multiple rungs below the upper echelon of college athletics.
Thus, the school enters the House era leveraged in more ways than one: first, with the roughly $12.2 million in annual debt service it must pay through 2055 for the construction of Canvas; then with the millions more it has pledged to pay athletes starting this year.
That makes the challenge to meet college sports’ heightened financial bar even greater.
“A few teams from the Group of 5 will succeed in getting into the Power 4, and maybe whatever super-conferences come after that,” Noll said. “… But for a school like Colorado State or any Group of 5, it’s going to cost a lot more than (just the revenue-sharing money) to be in that conversation.”
CSU athletics had a record $73.5 million in revenue in FY ’24, but it also had $73.2 million in expenses. And while CSU has had at least $10 million in contributions for three straight years, including $14.2 million in 2024 that nearly matched CU’s intake in that category, they are financially much further behind.
The median FBS athletic department revenue in FY ’24 was $96.69 million, according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, including median revenues of $152.1 million for ACC schools, $173.6 million for the Big Ten and $200.1 million for the SEC. Even in their new conference, the Rams will be behind the old Pac-12 guard in Washington State ($89.5 million in FY ’24) and Oregon State ($120.3 million).
College football insider Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News estimated CSU’s payout from the Pac-12’s multiple TV deals will be in the range of $7 million to $10 million, which falls well below CU’s revenue in the Big 12.
“CSU is at a different resource level than CU,” said Bob Donchez, a CU professor of finance and the director of the school’s business of sports program. “For CSU to make that next round of realignment impactful for them, it’s going to be a couple of big steps, not just one big step.”
Michael Rueda, a sports and entertainment attorney with Withers LLP, says that for non-Power 4 schools such as CSU, the choice to fully fund the $20.5 million revenue share will be tough.
“A deep dive (into this) is probably not the best choice for every university,” Rueda said. “And it’s less of an obvious decision for some that sit on the cusp.”
While Weber said the Rams plan on ramping up to the full revenue-sharing amount “within the next couple years,” Blake Lawrence, the co-founder of the athlete marketplace and NIL technology company OpenDorse, says CSU can be competitive relative to its situation by paying revenue-sharing money that’s about 10% of its overall athletic budget.
“If you are Colorado, the number is $20.5 million (to be competitive),” Lawrence said. “… But for any Group of 5, about a $10 million rev-share budget is a big one, which means a $7 million or $7.5 million football budget is highly competitive at the Group of 5 level.”
Like CU, CSU’s revenue-sharing equation will align with how much revenue each program generates. Weber says the Rams don’t plan to cut any of their 16 sports even if the NCAA Division I minimum is lowered, and that they will raise the money for revenue-sharing from “a variety of different sources.”
“There’s no naming rights on the basketball and volleyball arena (Moby Arena), so that’s an obvious start,” Weber said. “There’s no naming rights on our soccer complex or softball complex. It’s common in a lot of bigger schools to sponsor naming rights on head coach job titles, the athletic director’s job title. We haven’t done any of that, so there’s some basic stuff we can do there.”
Weber, whose background is in startups where he often had to solve funding challenges, vows to do the same at CSU. But he also noted that the Rams would be judicious in how they spend their revenue share money.
Earlier this year, CSU unveiled a three-pronged approach in funding with the creation of the Ram Athletic Fund and the McGraw Society in addition to already-existing sport-specific funds. Weber says the McGraw Society already has about 70 donors committed at a minimum of $25,000 each.
“We live in a world right now where the pendulum swings wildly,” Weber said. “There’s a lot to be said about a strategic approach to this, and not reacting to wild stories or wild payments. … It’s a very purposeful push that we have.”
But those at CU and CSU, as well as experts, say that won’t be the case. As Donchez points out, “pocketbooks are different levels, and Texas pocketbooks are different than Colorado pocketbooks.”
“Some schools are always going to have a built-in advantage in other areas, where there’s no limit on spending,” said Mit Winter, an attorney with Kennyhertz Perry Law who specializes in college athletics. “Just limiting what schools can pay their athletes doesn’t create a whole lot of competitive balance, because it’s almost similar to what you had prior. There’s still huge gaps between the top and the middle and the bottom.
“The next world of recruiting is figuring out how to get your athletes third-party deals on top of what the school can pay.”
Take Texas Tech as a case in point.
The Red Raiders are expected to distribute a total of $55 million to athletes in 2025-26, according to CBS Sports. That includes the $20.5 million in revenue sharing and about $35 million in third-party NIL deals. Many of those Texas Tech NIL deals were front-loaded to athletes ahead of the approval of the House settlement. That makes them a frontrunner in the fundraising space in the Big 12, while traditional powers in the SEC, Big Ten and ACC also remain ahead of CU.
The exact figures paid to individual players at various schools are largely unknown, since those numbers have been kept out of the public domain. But ESPN reported that Texas Tech offensive line recruit Felix Ojo signed a $5.1 million, fully guaranteed, three-year revenue share contract in early July. It is believed to be a record in the House Era.
Coach Prime lamented the resource disparity at Big 12 media day in early July. He pointed out that “all you have to do is look at the (College Football) Playoffs and see what those teams spent, and you understand darn near why they’re in the playoffs.”
“We have alumni, we have boosters who are doing the best they darn could, but sometimes they just can’t compete with some of the other powers,” Sanders added. “And I wish it was truly equality.”
George recognized the uneven fundraising field that remains in the wake of the House settlement.
“Some schools have budgets up to $240 million, and we’re at $140 million,” George said. “They have 100,000-seat stadiums; we have a 50,000-seat stadium. So while it’s level from what the distribution from the school can be, there’s still an imbalance.”
“The NCAA’s strategy for four years has been to repaint the exterior, but still have it be the same old system where there are serious constraints on what was paid to students,” Noll said. “The NCAA is now trying to protect itself against that by getting Congress to pass legislation giving it A) exemption from antitrust laws and B) exemption from labor laws so the students can’t organize. Both of those efforts are almost certainly going to fail.”
Since 2021, collectives — third-party groups consisting of donors who pay athletes directly — have wielded significant influence over which programs get the most talent.
Now, as part of the House settlement, all third-party NIL deals over $600 are subject to review and approval by NIL Go, a portal the new College Sports Commission is running in conjunction with the accounting firm Deloitte. NIL Go has the power to nix deals that are not deemed to have a “valid business purpose,” according to the settlement.
“There’s no way to enforce that without violating antitrust laws,” Noll believes.
For those reasons, CSU’s director of its sports management program, Andrew Goldsmith, calls the settlement “simply a Band-Aid and not a fix.”
“Unless Congress gives the NCAA an antitrust exemption, this settlement will do little more than just kick the can down the road,” Goldsmith said.
President Donald Trump underscored the NCAA’s attempt to take back control over collectives with an executive order on July 24. The order seeks to prohibit third-party, pay-for-play payments and demands an expansion of opportunities for women’s and non-revenue sports.
But JT Stevenson, an attorney and agent for KMM Sports, forecasts legal challenges to the College Sports Commission’s power over collectives’ NIL deals.
“(CSC) is arbitrarily dictating how a separate entity from the school spends their money,” Stevenson said. “If you apply this legal analysis to any other industry, it’s unheard of. You can’t have Walmart dictating how Amazon spends its money.”
CU and CSU would both benefit from stricter regulation from the CSC. In fact, they are counting on it.
After the House settlement, both schools dissolved their ties with collectives, but many schools still have them in a new era that is essentially a gigantic, expensive experiment.
“It’s really important that we have guidelines around (NIL deals),” George said. “… It’s going to be important that the schools adhere to the settlement.”
Since Sanders took the helm in Boulder in late 2022, CU’s ticket sales, undergraduate applications and exposure have all drastically increased. Enrollment and student retention hit record highs. If college athletics are the front porch of a university, Sanders is the famous man in the rocking chair, attracting cash and eyeballs.
“For a lot of schools, athletics programs are their No. 1 marketing tool, entertainment tool and donor engagement tool,” said Winter, the attorney who specializes in college athletics.
The only way for CU to make the leap to the Big Ten or SEC, or a super conference that could also emerge in the next round of realignment, is to draw larger television ratings and keep selling out Folsom Field.
For CSU, it’s the same gambit, but to a lesser degree. The Rams ditched longtime rivals Air Force and Wyoming to move to the Pac-12, where they will look to elevate their profile — just as they did with Canvas Stadium.
“We need to lift our brand, we need to lift our success we’re having in key sports, with Coach Prime being a part of that being really valuable for us moving forward,” George said of CU’s ambitions. “… When something does happen again with change in our industry, we need to make sure that we’re at the forefront of those conversations.”
In the meantime, the House settlement could elicit more questions than answers.
There are serious doubts about whether the settlement will hold up under litigation. If courts eventually decide student-athletes are university employees, schools will need even more resources to maintain programs. Trump’s executive order directly pushes against that notion, declaring that “college sports are not, and should not be, professional sports.”
Classifying student-athletes as employees would open the door to unionization and collective bargaining. Should it get to that point, Donchez forecasts athletic departments becoming separate entities from the universities they represent, “so it gives them more flexibility and more autonomy.”
There is also the issue of Title IX, which Winter calls a gray area where “there will definitely be litigation.” A group of female athletes already filed an appeal of the House settlement, arguing it violates Title IX since a vast majority of schools’ revenue sharing is expected to be paid to football and men’s basketball players.
Until those questions are addressed in the courts, CU, CSU and any other school that wants to compete will have to find money between the couch cushions. And lots of it. As Stevenson, the attorney and agent, noted, “It’s going to be a time for ingenuity, for adapting, and for a little bit of pushing the limits of what athletic departments think they can do.”
That’s what CU did when it hired Sanders in the first place.
The day that the school introduced him as its football coach, George said the Buffs didn’t yet have the money to pay their splashy new hire.
But the Buffs found the money, and then they found some more when they signed Sanders to a five-year, $54 million contract extension this spring.
“What Rick George did when he hired Deion, that’s what entrepreneurs do,” Donchez said. “‘I don’t know how we’re going to come up with the money on it, but let’s push forward.’ And then they figure out ways to come up with the funding.
“With the House settlement, that’s going to be the new standard for the majority of schools outside of the universities with the biggest revenues.”
How historic House settlement will impact CU, CSU and college athletic programs everywhere
The settlement allows schools to pay their athletes directly, with a $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap that starts in 2025-26
Kyle NewmanAugust 31, 2025 at 5:45 AM MDTThe University of Colorado athletics department faces an existential challenge — one shared by many other schools around the country that support and promote major college athletics.
A department that’s operated at a deficit for five of the last seven reported fiscal years must now find an extra $20.5 million in 2025-26. Then the Buffs have to do it again every year after that, at annual increases of 4%, until that number grows to roughly $33 million in 2035.
The new expense is a direct result of what’s known as the House settlement — an agreement that permits NCAA member institutions to pay athletes directly for their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rights starting this fiscal year.
Schools can either opt into the agreement and begin paying athletes, as both CU and Colorado State University have, or risk falling behind in an industry that grows increasingly more cutthroat with each passing year.
The latest round of conference realignment — which brought CU back to a picked-over Big 12, and CSU to a reconstituted Pac-12 — further widened the gap between the haves and have-nots by consolidating large sums of media dollars and decision-making power within two conferences: the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference.
With more realignment expected after the current conference media contracts end, starting in 2030, the race is on for programs outside those two conferences to make themselves as attractive as possible to the industry’s power brokers.
“College sports are not in equilibrium yet,” said Roger Noll, a Stanford University professor who is an expert in the economics of sports. “The chaos has only just begun.”
And that chaos makes opting in to the House settlement a requirement, according to Noll.
“Think of it as the ante in poker,” Noll said. “Participating in the House settlement gets you to the next round, and the next round will hopefully have more information, and you can hopefully make a better decision.”
Even in the short term, that’s a difficult proposition.
Both CU and CSU nearly doubled their athletic expenses over the last 10 reported fiscal years, and CU needed spikes in direct institutional support over the last two reported fiscal years to avoid operating at deficits exceeding an average of $19 million annually.
The gamble is that heavy investment now will pay off in the future. Record football ticket sales in the first two seasons of the Deion Sanders Era, as well as jumps in television ratings and undergraduate enrollment, suggest that could be the case for CU.
“CU has a shot in this new era. It’s not impossible they could succeed, and they might as well see what happens,” Noll said. “Colorado State is going to have a much harder time from where they are.”
CU athletic director Rick George told The Denver Post that the Buffs are committed to paying the full freight of the revenue-sharing cap to their athletes. CSU athletic director John Weber told The Post that the Rams plan on ramping up to the $20.5 million cap. Weber said he wants CSU to be one of the first Group of 5 schools — Division I FBS institutions outside the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC — to get to that point.
One thing is clear: For both state schools to fund athlete revenue sharing, they’re going to have to get creative.
“We’re all anxious to understand what the environment and playing field is going to be for everybody,” CSU football head coach Jay Norvell said. “We know it’s a transition, and we’ve just got to swim real hard upstream and have as much success as we possibly can until everything gets clarified. That’s the reality for everybody.”
CU’s plan to pay
In Boulder, Sanders’ tenure has been marked by record revenue — and record expenses.CU athletics finished in the black in fiscal year 2024 after generating $146.6 million in revenue and $138.3 million in expenses, according to its NCAA financial report.
Yet even with recent records in contributions ($29.3 million in donations in FY ’23) and ticket sales ($35 million in FY ’24), CU’s athletic department needed $54.9 million in direct institutional support over the last two reported fiscal years to avoid a deficit. By comparison, CU athletics received $49.3 million in direct institutional support — classified as revenue in NCAA reports — over the previous six fiscal years combined, between 2017 and 2022.
Now CU athletics must account for another $20.5 million to pay its athletes, on top of Coach Prime’s record $9.5 million salaryafter the school boosted his pay last spring.
CU’s revenue-sharing equation will align with how much revenue each program generates, meaning nearly 90% of the money will go to football and men’s basketball players. Based on the 2024 operating revenues for CU, football’s cut would be about 77%, while men’s basketball’s would be 11.2%.
George acknowledged the department must look for additional revenue to meet the revenue-sharing cap, though he said CU won’t make “big increases” in ticket prices.
CU installed turf at Folsom Field this summer, partly to enable more concerts, and tripled its student athletic fee for undergraduate students to $90 per semester starting this fall. The latter was the first such increase in three decades. On Aug. 7, CU also announced a seven-year partnership with The Mountain States Ford Stores to become the official naming rights partner for the football team’s indoor practice facility.
In addition, CU will continue to lean heavily on its Buff Club, the fundraising arm of CU athletics that features the Flatirons Societyfor donors who give $10,000 or more.
“(That $20.5 million) will come from the different things that we do, like concert revenue, our multimedia rights partner (Learfield’s Buffalo Sports Properties), our conference distributions, our donors that support our program,” George said.
CU earned $16.6 million from media rights in FY ’24, its first year back in the Big 12, plus an additional $12.1 million between NCAA and conference distributions.
But those NCAA revenue distributions will go down over the next 10 years for all Division I schools, as the NCAA uses that money to fund $2.8 billion in backpay to former college athletes as part of the House settlement. The federal settlement also eliminated scholarship limits while instituting roster limits for each sport and created regulatory oversight of third-party NIL deals.
CU’s revenue from media rights and overall conference revenue will increase as part of the Big 12’s extended TV contract that runs through 2031. The extension is expected to distribute an average annual payout of $31.7 million per school, according to ESPN, starting in 2025-26. That figure, however, is dwarfed by the per-school distributions in the Big Ten ($63.2 million in FY ’24) and the SEC ($52.5 million), according to the conferences’ tax records. And those payouts are expected to increase this year, according to USA Today.
Such a gap forces schools outside the Big Ten and SEC into more difficult choices in order to meet the revenue-sharing cap, including where to make cuts. CU did some of that already when it eliminated the positions of two longtime assistant track coaches in June. George said CU “consolidated” those roles into one position.
As George acknowledged, “You can’t do all of this just in revenue generation.”
“We’ll look at our expenses, the different things that we’re doing, and we’ll consolidate in areas where we may need to,” George said.
The one line George says CU does not intend to cross: cutting any of its 17 sports, even if the NCAA lowers the minimum number of sponsored sports required of Division I FBS members (16).
“We have goals when we started this, and one of them was we would not cut any sports, and we have not,” George said. “… There is very little change (in support) that our student-athletes will see.”
CSU’s plan to pay
CSU is no stranger to placing heavy bets on its ability to move up the college athletics ladder.The Rams constructed $220 million Canvas Stadium last decade in part to draw interest from power conferences like the Big 12. While that investment factored into their ability to draw an invitation to join the Pac-12 in 2026, the conference the Rams are joining is still multiple rungs below the upper echelon of college athletics.
Thus, the school enters the House era leveraged in more ways than one: first, with the roughly $12.2 million in annual debt service it must pay through 2055 for the construction of Canvas; then with the millions more it has pledged to pay athletes starting this year.
That makes the challenge to meet college sports’ heightened financial bar even greater.
“A few teams from the Group of 5 will succeed in getting into the Power 4, and maybe whatever super-conferences come after that,” Noll said. “… But for a school like Colorado State or any Group of 5, it’s going to cost a lot more than (just the revenue-sharing money) to be in that conversation.”
CSU athletics had a record $73.5 million in revenue in FY ’24, but it also had $73.2 million in expenses. And while CSU has had at least $10 million in contributions for three straight years, including $14.2 million in 2024 that nearly matched CU’s intake in that category, they are financially much further behind.
The median FBS athletic department revenue in FY ’24 was $96.69 million, according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, including median revenues of $152.1 million for ACC schools, $173.6 million for the Big Ten and $200.1 million for the SEC. Even in their new conference, the Rams will be behind the old Pac-12 guard in Washington State ($89.5 million in FY ’24) and Oregon State ($120.3 million).
College football insider Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News estimated CSU’s payout from the Pac-12’s multiple TV deals will be in the range of $7 million to $10 million, which falls well below CU’s revenue in the Big 12.
“CSU is at a different resource level than CU,” said Bob Donchez, a CU professor of finance and the director of the school’s business of sports program. “For CSU to make that next round of realignment impactful for them, it’s going to be a couple of big steps, not just one big step.”
Michael Rueda, a sports and entertainment attorney with Withers LLP, says that for non-Power 4 schools such as CSU, the choice to fully fund the $20.5 million revenue share will be tough.
“A deep dive (into this) is probably not the best choice for every university,” Rueda said. “And it’s less of an obvious decision for some that sit on the cusp.”
While Weber said the Rams plan on ramping up to the full revenue-sharing amount “within the next couple years,” Blake Lawrence, the co-founder of the athlete marketplace and NIL technology company OpenDorse, says CSU can be competitive relative to its situation by paying revenue-sharing money that’s about 10% of its overall athletic budget.
“If you are Colorado, the number is $20.5 million (to be competitive),” Lawrence said. “… But for any Group of 5, about a $10 million rev-share budget is a big one, which means a $7 million or $7.5 million football budget is highly competitive at the Group of 5 level.”
Like CU, CSU’s revenue-sharing equation will align with how much revenue each program generates. Weber says the Rams don’t plan to cut any of their 16 sports even if the NCAA Division I minimum is lowered, and that they will raise the money for revenue-sharing from “a variety of different sources.”
“There’s no naming rights on the basketball and volleyball arena (Moby Arena), so that’s an obvious start,” Weber said. “There’s no naming rights on our soccer complex or softball complex. It’s common in a lot of bigger schools to sponsor naming rights on head coach job titles, the athletic director’s job title. We haven’t done any of that, so there’s some basic stuff we can do there.”
Weber, whose background is in startups where he often had to solve funding challenges, vows to do the same at CSU. But he also noted that the Rams would be judicious in how they spend their revenue share money.
Earlier this year, CSU unveiled a three-pronged approach in funding with the creation of the Ram Athletic Fund and the McGraw Society in addition to already-existing sport-specific funds. Weber says the McGraw Society already has about 70 donors committed at a minimum of $25,000 each.
“We live in a world right now where the pendulum swings wildly,” Weber said. “There’s a lot to be said about a strategic approach to this, and not reacting to wild stories or wild payments. … It’s a very purposeful push that we have.”
Pocketbook disparity
With a cap on every school’s direct payments to student-athletes, it might appear that the playing field is being leveled between the NIL juggernauts of the last few years and their peers.But those at CU and CSU, as well as experts, say that won’t be the case. As Donchez points out, “pocketbooks are different levels, and Texas pocketbooks are different than Colorado pocketbooks.”
“Some schools are always going to have a built-in advantage in other areas, where there’s no limit on spending,” said Mit Winter, an attorney with Kennyhertz Perry Law who specializes in college athletics. “Just limiting what schools can pay their athletes doesn’t create a whole lot of competitive balance, because it’s almost similar to what you had prior. There’s still huge gaps between the top and the middle and the bottom.
“The next world of recruiting is figuring out how to get your athletes third-party deals on top of what the school can pay.”
Take Texas Tech as a case in point.
The Red Raiders are expected to distribute a total of $55 million to athletes in 2025-26, according to CBS Sports. That includes the $20.5 million in revenue sharing and about $35 million in third-party NIL deals. Many of those Texas Tech NIL deals were front-loaded to athletes ahead of the approval of the House settlement. That makes them a frontrunner in the fundraising space in the Big 12, while traditional powers in the SEC, Big Ten and ACC also remain ahead of CU.
The exact figures paid to individual players at various schools are largely unknown, since those numbers have been kept out of the public domain. But ESPN reported that Texas Tech offensive line recruit Felix Ojo signed a $5.1 million, fully guaranteed, three-year revenue share contract in early July. It is believed to be a record in the House Era.
Coach Prime lamented the resource disparity at Big 12 media day in early July. He pointed out that “all you have to do is look at the (College Football) Playoffs and see what those teams spent, and you understand darn near why they’re in the playoffs.”
“We have alumni, we have boosters who are doing the best they darn could, but sometimes they just can’t compete with some of the other powers,” Sanders added. “And I wish it was truly equality.”
George recognized the uneven fundraising field that remains in the wake of the House settlement.
“Some schools have budgets up to $240 million, and we’re at $140 million,” George said. “They have 100,000-seat stadiums; we have a 50,000-seat stadium. So while it’s level from what the distribution from the school can be, there’s still an imbalance.”
Unaddressed pitfalls
Noll argues that while the House settlement may appear to be a new chapter in college sports, it’s really just a new spin on what has been occurring since the NCAA began permitting athletes to profit off of NIL in 2021.“The NCAA’s strategy for four years has been to repaint the exterior, but still have it be the same old system where there are serious constraints on what was paid to students,” Noll said. “The NCAA is now trying to protect itself against that by getting Congress to pass legislation giving it A) exemption from antitrust laws and B) exemption from labor laws so the students can’t organize. Both of those efforts are almost certainly going to fail.”
Since 2021, collectives — third-party groups consisting of donors who pay athletes directly — have wielded significant influence over which programs get the most talent.
Now, as part of the House settlement, all third-party NIL deals over $600 are subject to review and approval by NIL Go, a portal the new College Sports Commission is running in conjunction with the accounting firm Deloitte. NIL Go has the power to nix deals that are not deemed to have a “valid business purpose,” according to the settlement.
“There’s no way to enforce that without violating antitrust laws,” Noll believes.
For those reasons, CSU’s director of its sports management program, Andrew Goldsmith, calls the settlement “simply a Band-Aid and not a fix.”
“Unless Congress gives the NCAA an antitrust exemption, this settlement will do little more than just kick the can down the road,” Goldsmith said.
President Donald Trump underscored the NCAA’s attempt to take back control over collectives with an executive order on July 24. The order seeks to prohibit third-party, pay-for-play payments and demands an expansion of opportunities for women’s and non-revenue sports.
But JT Stevenson, an attorney and agent for KMM Sports, forecasts legal challenges to the College Sports Commission’s power over collectives’ NIL deals.
“(CSC) is arbitrarily dictating how a separate entity from the school spends their money,” Stevenson said. “If you apply this legal analysis to any other industry, it’s unheard of. You can’t have Walmart dictating how Amazon spends its money.”
CU and CSU would both benefit from stricter regulation from the CSC. In fact, they are counting on it.
After the House settlement, both schools dissolved their ties with collectives, but many schools still have them in a new era that is essentially a gigantic, expensive experiment.
“It’s really important that we have guidelines around (NIL deals),” George said. “… It’s going to be important that the schools adhere to the settlement.”
An uncertain future
To explain why colleges are willing to jump into the revenue-sharing era now, and figure out where the money is coming from later, look no further than CU’s Prime Effect.Since Sanders took the helm in Boulder in late 2022, CU’s ticket sales, undergraduate applications and exposure have all drastically increased. Enrollment and student retention hit record highs. If college athletics are the front porch of a university, Sanders is the famous man in the rocking chair, attracting cash and eyeballs.
“For a lot of schools, athletics programs are their No. 1 marketing tool, entertainment tool and donor engagement tool,” said Winter, the attorney who specializes in college athletics.
The only way for CU to make the leap to the Big Ten or SEC, or a super conference that could also emerge in the next round of realignment, is to draw larger television ratings and keep selling out Folsom Field.
For CSU, it’s the same gambit, but to a lesser degree. The Rams ditched longtime rivals Air Force and Wyoming to move to the Pac-12, where they will look to elevate their profile — just as they did with Canvas Stadium.
“We need to lift our brand, we need to lift our success we’re having in key sports, with Coach Prime being a part of that being really valuable for us moving forward,” George said of CU’s ambitions. “… When something does happen again with change in our industry, we need to make sure that we’re at the forefront of those conversations.”
In the meantime, the House settlement could elicit more questions than answers.
There are serious doubts about whether the settlement will hold up under litigation. If courts eventually decide student-athletes are university employees, schools will need even more resources to maintain programs. Trump’s executive order directly pushes against that notion, declaring that “college sports are not, and should not be, professional sports.”
Classifying student-athletes as employees would open the door to unionization and collective bargaining. Should it get to that point, Donchez forecasts athletic departments becoming separate entities from the universities they represent, “so it gives them more flexibility and more autonomy.”
There is also the issue of Title IX, which Winter calls a gray area where “there will definitely be litigation.” A group of female athletes already filed an appeal of the House settlement, arguing it violates Title IX since a vast majority of schools’ revenue sharing is expected to be paid to football and men’s basketball players.
Until those questions are addressed in the courts, CU, CSU and any other school that wants to compete will have to find money between the couch cushions. And lots of it. As Stevenson, the attorney and agent, noted, “It’s going to be a time for ingenuity, for adapting, and for a little bit of pushing the limits of what athletic departments think they can do.”
That’s what CU did when it hired Sanders in the first place.
The day that the school introduced him as its football coach, George said the Buffs didn’t yet have the money to pay their splashy new hire.
But the Buffs found the money, and then they found some more when they signed Sanders to a five-year, $54 million contract extension this spring.
“What Rick George did when he hired Deion, that’s what entrepreneurs do,” Donchez said. “‘I don’t know how we’re going to come up with the money on it, but let’s push forward.’ And then they figure out ways to come up with the funding.
“With the House settlement, that’s going to be the new standard for the majority of schools outside of the universities with the biggest revenues.”
