A week ago, the NCAA and the Power 4 conferences (plus the Pac-12) filed a revised version of the blockbuster settlement that aims to resolve antitrust lawsuits.
The revisions specifically regarded proposed roster limits, limits that U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken, the arbiter who will ultimately decide whether a new era of college athletics can begin this summer, didn’t approve of the first time around.
In a recent order, Wilken asked the NCAA to “modify the settlement agreement so that (the student-athletes) will not be harmed by the immediate implementation of the roster limits provision.”
The updated roster limit proposal from the NCAA was fairly simple: Proposed roster limits would still exist going forward under the House settlement, but any athlete who was on a roster in 2024-25 and who has since been cut or who is currently on a roster or was promised a roster spot after being recruited out of high school for 2025-26 would be exempt.
If it takes effect as written, teams would be able to go beyond the original roster limits to keep current student-athletes (or rising college freshmen) around.
But the revised proposal also said that teams wouldn’t be required to keep players around who’d already been cut. Student-athletes would have the ability to transfer and not count against any team’s roster limits, but schools and teams would not be required to keep players around and go over the roster limits. They certainly could, but no team would be mandated to bring back players.
The plaintiffs in the House settlement, otherwise known as the objectors, were given the chance to respond to these proposed changes. In their filings, they’ve fiercely opposed the revisions, saying they don’t go nearly far enough in favor of the student-athletes and do not prevent harm.
On May 9, Steve Molo, founding partner of the national litigation boutique MoloLamken LLP, filed the first response, stating: “The (amended settlement) does not meet that objective. It fails in numerous respects.”
Molo had three specific arguments against the revised House settlement:
- Student-athletes who were cut in anticipation of the House settlement being approved do not have their roster spots restored.
- Student-athlete who transferred because they were cut can return to their former schools but those schools are not required to bring them back.
- Universities and teams have total control of which players are on rosters, which means student-athlete who were cut have “no opportunity to challenge those decisions or prove that roster caps, rather than something else, caused them to be cut.”
Molo’s group proposed a different revision to the House settlement, one that ensures that all athletes currently on a roster or promised a roster spot would not count against the limits for the entirety of their collegiate careers.
In the proposal, schools would be able to cut athletes from rosters, but only for reasons not related to the roster cap, and if there was a dispute about the reason a student-athlete was cut from a team, the matter would go before a third-party arbitrator.
On Tuesday, attorney Laura Reathaford and attorneys from Buchalter (Douglas DePeppe and Robert Hinckley) filed their own responses.
Reathaford did not hold back, stating that the NCAA and Power conferences (plus the Pac-12) did the absolute bare minimum with their revisions and that the proposed changes do not meet what the court had demanded from them.
Wrote Reathaford: “(The) proposal fails to include adequate safeguards to prevent court ordered harm to all class members. Under the Proposal, roster limits remain mandatory but grandfathering is optional. Thus, any class member whose school does not exercise the option to grandfather athletes, will still by harmed by roster limits.”
Reathaford went on to say that the defendants in the case are the NCAA and the Power conferences (plus the Pac-12) and they asked for the chance to revise the settlement to “rectify the Defendants’ own misconduct.” Instead, Reathaford argues, the NCAA and Power leagues doubled down to try to benefit themselves.
Reathaford proposed that, in place of the current revisions to the House settlement, the court should order the NCAA and Power conference programs to implement mandatory grandfathering, bringing back every student-athlete who has been cut — with no exceptions.
Building off Molo’s and Reathaford’s arguments, DePeppe and Hinckley argued, in essence, that the NCAA and the Power conference schools cannot be trusted to do right by student-athletes.
“If given the opportunity, some Member Institutions will continue to harm members by refusing to bring back cut class members and continuing to cut members in the future,” DePeppe and Hinckley wrote. ”Schools have no incentive to do otherwise, which is the compelling reason why the proposed solution is illusory. ... Power should be placed in the hands of the student-athletes and they should be given the protection of mandatory grandfathering. This is a problem created by the Parties and they should bear responsibility for its solution.”
DePeppe and Hinckley proposed that a formal grievance system for student-athletes be instituted, with oversight from a program similar to the Ombuds Program that works with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic committee.
DePeppe and Hinckley also asked for a court-appointed mediator, as the involvement of select objectors in the revised settlement didn’t seem to motivate the NCAA and the Power conferences to do what Wilken asked.
The NCAA and Power conferences (plus the Pac-12) have until Friday to file their response to the objectors’ arguments, after which Wilken could change the landscape of college athletics (albeit likely temporarily) by approving the House settlement.