‘Creating havoc everywhere’ — House-NCAA settlement causing crunch for Olympic sports as roster limits come into focus

Luke Kalarickal will never run again.

Well, at least not competitively for a college cross country program like he did as a freshman at Georgia last season.

Last August, just before the semester of his sophomore year began, the team cut him and five other runners as the university began the process of reducing its rosters to adhere to new limits related to the landmark settlement of the House antitrust case.

“Coach said we will all have a special waiver to get into the transfer portal,” Kalarickal told Yahoo Sports. “He cut us two weeks before school started. How are we supposed to transfer?”

Jack Tan, a North Carolina high school pole vaulter, saw his recruiting last fall suddenly slow to a crawl as schools began pulling scholarship offers to prepare for the new roster structure, with coaches flatly telling him, “We just don’t have room for a male pole vaulter.”

At Liberty, an assistant track coach, Mark Fairley, sat around a campfire with his women distance runners earlier this January to deliver the news that 16 of them would be cut by the end of the spring. “All of us were crying,” he said.

And at Auburn, Heather Rice fears that her son, Keaton, will see his five-year SEC grant-in-aid agreement — which she thought was guaranteed — evaporate if he doesn’t make the cut from the current 42-man swimming roster to the new SEC roster limit of 22, something that could cost the family an unexpected $45,000 annually in out-of-state tuition, board and meals.

“For my son, this was a lock deal,” she said, “and now they are saying because they want to pay a bunch of football and basketball players, we are the ones screwed.”

The new roster limits, imposed on schools that opt into the House settlement’s revenue-sharing concept, are expected to lead to the elimination of thousands of Division I roster spots, most notably impacting walk-ons and partial scholarship earners in swimming, football, track and cross country, as detailed in this October story at Yahoo Sports.

The roster limits make up most of the formal objections that athletes are filing with the court as part of the settlement’s objection process. The deadline for objections is Friday. Already, dozens have been filed and several more dozens — perhaps more than 100 — are expected to drop on Friday.

“We have a very robust objection,” said Steve Molo, an attorney with MoloLamken, a national litigation boutique firm. “The standard of a settlement is that it needs to be fair, adequate and reasonable. This is not.”

The firm is working with more than 100 current college athletes and plans to file with the court Friday perhaps the biggest bulk of affidavits from players who oppose the settlement.

But the question looms: Will the objections matter?

Jeffrey Kessler, one of the lead plaintiff attorneys in the House case who struck the settlement deal with the NCAA and power conferences, does not believe so. California judge Claudia Wilken, presiding over the case, preliminary approved the settlement in October. A final approval hearing is scheduled for April 7.

“None of these objections change the fact that this settlement is overwhelmingly in the best interest of the class,” he told Yahoo Sports this week. “That’s the only question for the judge.”

The money

The House settlement features two primary parts: (1) the $2.77 billion in back-damage pay that will be distributed over the next decade to athletes in the “damage class” who played from 2016-2024; and (2) the revenue-sharing concept going forward that permits schools to spend, to start, about $20.5 million on their athletes annually under an escalating capped system.

Kessler says more than 40,000 damage class athletes have submitted claims for the backpay. As of a few days ago, fewer than 100 athletes have opted out of the settlement.

“The vast majority of class members support the settlement and want to get paid,” he said. “We will have, at best, objections from a tiny percentage.”

The formula used to distribute the backpay — determined by an athlete’s media value, school, conference, etc. — will send as much as 85% to football and men’s basketball players.

Even at the highest level — major college football players — the amounts of backpay are not as significant as some football players currently earn. Many former power conference football players are receiving $50,000 to $150,000 in backpay over 10 years, according to estimates they’ve shown Yahoo Sports. Some of those participating in Olympic sports are receiving backpay in the three and four figures.

The objection Molo’s firm plans to file centers on four key points, he says: (1) the settlement is unfair to women athletes as it distributes to them as little as 5% of backpay; (2) the cap on the future revenue-share is anticompetitive; (3) the $2.77 billion is not enough; and (4) the new roster limits create unfairness.

“The roster limits are creating havoc everywhere,” Molo said.

The roster limits

While the NCAA and power conferences agreed to expand upon scholarships as part of the settlement — schools are now permitted, not required, to scholarship every player on a roster — they also imposed roster limits for sports. Many of those did not previously exist.

Such a change will result in at least 4,000 roster cuts at the power conference level and, perhaps, more than 15,000 in all of Division I, a number dependent on the amount of schools that opt into the settlement.

At Texas, coach Bob Bowman says he’ll need to cut about 19 swimmers and divers to reach the SEC’s conference-wide limit of 22. Gone are the days of having a developmental or practice squad. “That’s going to be an agonizing process,” he said. “It’s going to eliminate what I love most about coaching — developing a diamond in the rough.”

At Georgia Mason, Jay Hosack, the men’s volleyball coach, needs to cut about seven players to adhere to the new roster limit of 18. “Why can’t we figure out a way to let these kids on rosters be able to go to complete their collegiate career and graduate in the normal timeframe,” he said. “Give us some time to manage that instead of cutting us off at the knees.”

Many of the objections over roster limits request that leaders phase in the new rules and/or grandfather those players currently on a roster. But Kessler argues that the roster limits are not actually part of the settlement. Instead, they are being imposed by the NCAA and power leagues as an addendum to the agreement, he suggests.

In fact, Grant House, the former Arizona State swimmer and leading named plaintiff, told Yahoo Sports in December that he “never signed anything” to limit rosters.

“The people should complain to the NCAA. Roster limits have nothing to do with this settlement,” he told Yahoo Sports. “We’d have no objection if they want to make a change with the roster limits.”

According to those with knowledge of the settlement negotiations, power conference leaders implemented the new roster structure as a way to preemptively avoid any legal action over the previous scholarship restrictions. They also wanted to give schools the opportunity to “increase the number of scholarships,” Steve Berman, another one of the leading plaintiff attorneys, told Yahoo Sports last fall.

However, schools are permitted — not required — to increase scholarships to every athlete on the roster. For instance, Texas Tech recently announced that it would add zero new scholarships. Clemson, meanwhile, is adding 150.

While scholarships at some places rise, roster spots at all places fall. At its most extreme, Ohio State will eliminate at least 150 roster spots.

The settlement’s impact on Olympic sports programs has long been discussed and dissected. Those sports are often subsidized by revenues from football, the same revenues that, presumably, will be used to distribute to football and men’s basketball players in any revenue sharing model.

Bowman believes Olympic sports are in “jeopardy” under the new settlement agreement as there is a “huge incentive,” he says, for schools to cut non-revenue sports to reallocate the dollars to those more popular and money-producing programs like football and men’s basketball.

A whopping 75% of Olympians at last year’s Paris Games competed in the NCAA.

What’s next?

How this will all end is anyone’s prediction.

Phil Sheng, a California-based attorney who has monitored the situation, believes that the settlement creates conflicting class members: those receiving millions from their NIL and those having their roster spot eliminated. “I’ve seen estimates that up to 25,000 athletes will be cut. I don’t see a world where the interests of those two groups are aligned,” he said.

Sheng recently tuned into a Zoom session with more than 100 parents who are mobilizing to file the bulk objection on Friday. He calls the roster limits the “wild card” among all of the objections, as the judge has ignored many of the others in the past.

“The way parents and athletes have mobilized is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The messaging is clear: ‘Get your pitchforks and torches out, we’re heading to the NCAA castle!”

But there are many other loud and influential voices against the immediate elimination of roster spots.

Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, a former walk-on, has called for the creation of, at the very least, a practice squad. Big East commissioner Val Ackerman penned a letter to the NCAA requesting the issue be reexamined. And Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua told Yahoo Sports in November that he hopes the NCAA and power conference commissioners would phase in the roster structure.

“Maybe I’m being naïve, but I was hoping there would be a bit of a grace period,” said Bevacqua, who sits on the College Football Playoff governing board with power league commissioners.

Even former Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, whose cousin is a walk-on football player for the Orange, is speaking out. “If not for walk-ons, I wouldn’t be talking to you,” he said. “I’d be an undertaker in a small town. I got a walk-on spot and earned a scholarship and it went from there. I just don’t understand the reason behind it.”

Tom Chorny doesn’t understand either.

He served as the cross country coach at Georgia for one year before leaving last spring, partially, he contends, over the roster limit cuts. He received notification from the department to cut his 26 runners to 18, then to 15, then to 12 and, finally, to 10.

It leaves little wiggle room for a sport where seven runners score each meet. He’d had enough.

“Some of this stuff went against my moral code. I wish I would have been stronger to say, ‘No, we can’t do it this way,’” he told Yahoo Sports in an interview last fall. “They’re going to go all-in on football and men’s basketball. That is coming at the expense of Olympic sports.”