What House vs. NCAA settlement’s final approval means for Iowa Athletics in 2025 and beyond

IOWA CITY — The era of schools directly paying college athletes will soon begin.

The House vs. NCAA settlement received its long-awaited final approval on Friday night, clearing the way for schools to directly share revenue with its athletes beginning on July 1.

It also clears the way for nearly $2.8 billion in back pay to former athletes, roster caps (that replace the previous scholarship caps) and a new enforcement mechanisms around name, image and likeness deals.

Here is what that means for Iowa Athletics in 2025-26 and beyond:

How will Iowa distribute the expected $20.5 million?

Iowa is “fully committed to rev share and up to the total permissible number,” deputy athletics director Joe Parker said in early April.

That cap — based on a percentage of revenue for power-conference schools — is expected to be $20.5 million for the first season, to be split up among any of Iowa’s intercollegiate teams. (It could potentially grow to $32.9 million by the 2034-35 academic year.)

FBS schools are expected to devote most of their funds to football. Texas Tech’s Kirby Hocutt, for example, told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that the Red Raiders will spend 74 percent of their revenue sharing money to football and 17 to 18 percent to men’s basketball, with other sports getting much smaller allocations.

Iowa officials — and their counterparts at many other power-conference schools — have been reluctant to publicly share how much exactly each sport will receive, though.

“I know some schools have decided that they want to be able to share that publicly,” Iowa athletics director Beth Goetz said in February. “That’s not something that we’re going to do. We feel really comfortable about where we’re at. We’re going to be competitive, but I don’t think we are at a point where we want to share that with our peers.”

Goetz said ahead of a Polk County I-Club event in May that she is anticipating and hoping for some information “at least in aggregate” about revenue sharing distributions across the board.

“Part of the challenge right now is we’re all negotiating against sort of a blind number there,” Goetz said.

How will Iowa’s new scholarships affect its ability to participate in revenue sharing?

Iowa’s full participation in revenue sharing does not necessarily mean that all $20.5 million of the expected new spending will go to revenue sharing.

That’s because up to $2.5 million in new scholarship money can count against the $20.5 million cap. Iowa is adding 20-plus women’s sports scholarships in order to be in Title IX compliance.

That means that the NCAA’s expected $20.5 million cap might look more like a $18 million or $19.5 million cap for the Hawkeyes, depending on the exact cost of those added scholarships.

How will Iowa fund revenue sharing?

Adding a $20.5 million expense item to Iowa’s budget obviously is disruptive, even with the cushion that comes with Big Ten’s lucrative media rights agreement.

That is slightly more than what Iowa spent in 2023-24 on athletic student aid, recruiting, sports camps and medical expenses and insurance combined, according to Iowa’s most recent NCAA financial filing, which The Gazette obtained via an open records request.

In fact, the only 2023-24 expense categories, as defined in the NCAA report, that exceeded $20.5 million were coaching compensation and support staff/administrative compensation.

Goetz has discussed “both constraining some of our current expenses and looking for new ways to generate revenue” as Iowa prepares to directly pay athletes. Team travel is among the possible cost-cutting areas for the department ahead of 2025-26.

“We’ll take a look at how all of our teams travel,” Goetz told The Gazette last month. “Certainly there’s some sort of standard for how some of our revenue sports move around, and that’ll continue. But I think we’re just going to try to be as resourceful as we can, and some of that has to do with how you schedule for other sports.”

Parker said during a PCA meeting that Iowa officials have asked coaches to “think really long and hard about their nonconference scheduling and see if they can get it more regionalized.”

“Every time we put a team on the road, the most efficient way to do it is by bus,” Parker said at the PCA meeting. “Next is commercial aircraft. And then there’s some teams that we just have to simply choose to charter. … There’s big cost-saving opportunities there if we can apply that level of discipline.”

Iowa officials have repeatedly said that they will not cut any sports as they finance revenue sharing.

“That’s not an option that’s ever been discussed on our campus,” Parker said.

What impact will this have on Iowa’s roster sizes?

Since the settlement’s preliminary approval in October, teams have been operating under the assumption that the new roster limits would take effect on July 1.

The settlement was revised to allow athletes who were on the chopping block to not be counted against the new roster caps, but many of those athletes already departed under the expectation that they were going to be cut. That is especially the case in football — where Iowa had 131 players at the start of the 2024 season, but the staff thought it could only carry 105 going into the 2025 season.

“We just let our guys know in December if we couldn’t guarantee a 105 spot, we told our players that and allowed them to go on visits and still be part of the team and still go to the bowl and all that,” Ferentz said in the spring. “But I just think we were all in agreement staff-wise that the right thing to do was let guys know and be transparent with them.”

Track and field can only carry 45 men and 45 women as part of the settlement, but track and field director Joey Woody told The Gazette that the Hawkeyes “already kind of planned on having a smaller roster” as they try to compete in a more challenging Big Ten.

“You don’t have enough time with some of the developmental athletes to get to this level,” Woody said. “And it’s unfortunate because we love developing athletes, and we’ve had a long history of doing that. They have to be at a higher level coming in the door to be able to make an impact within the conference and obviously the national meet.”

The impact is not necessarily as pronounced for every team on Iowa’s campus. Men’s and women’s basketball, for example, will each have 15 roster spots. The previous scholarship limits were 13 on the men’s side and 15 on the women’s side.

Overall, Parker estimated in April that Iowa’s total count of athletes across all sports will go down by “almost 100” following the settlement.

“We hate the thought of limiting the access to the experience, but at the same time, we’re trying to see it as a glass half-full and that we can serve the 550 student-athletes that will still remain a part of our roster in a higher level and a better way,” Parker said.

What does this mean for Iowa’s Swarm Collective?

Third-party NIL deals — including the ones with a collective like Swarm — now face additional scrutiny. Beginning Saturday, any deal worth $600 or more will need to go through the Deloitte-run NIL Go clearinghouse.

Deals will be evaluated based on the relationship between the payer and school, fair-market value and the presence of a “valid business purpose.”

It’s unclear what exactly that means for the Swarm Collective’s future, especially when the clearinghouse’s guardrails could theoretically be the subject of future legal challenges.

“The Swarm plans to continue our mission to support Iowa’s student-athletes, our communities, and be a conduit for student-athletes to help local and national businesses,” Swarm founder and CEO Brad Heinrichs said in a tweet after the settlement was approved.

Will this affect smaller schools the same way?

No.

Schools have the option whether to opt in to the settlement — and therefore whether to participate in revenue sharing. Even for the schools from a smaller conference that do participate in revenue sharing, they surely will not be able to afford the full $20.5 million in expenses that power-conference teams are expected to spend.

Drake’s entire athletics budget, for example, was $21.8 million in the 2023-24 fiscal year, according to data accessible via the U.S. Department of Education. Northern Iowa reported about $17 million in revenue and expenses in that same database.

What have others said about the settlement?

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti in a statement:

“We look forward to implementing this historic settlement designed to bring stability, integrity and competitive balance to college athletics while increasing both scholarship and revenue opportunities for student-athletes in all sports.”

NCAA president Charlie Baker in a public letter:

“Approving the agreement reached by the NCAA, the defendant conferences and student-athletes in the settlement opens a pathway to begin stabilizing college sports.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

Sign up for our curated Iowa Hawkeyes athletics newsletter at thegazette.com/hawks.