JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A landmark multibillion-dollar legal settlement that would have for the first time allowed universities and colleges to pay student athletes directly was expected to be approved this month. But last night, a federal judge pressed pause on the agreement, throwing big-time college sports into uncertainty. NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan is here in the studio with more. Hey, Becky.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: So Becky, I mean, many people were expecting the judge...
SULLIVAN: Yeah.
SUMMERS: ...To approve this settlement. That did not happen. Catch us up. What happened?
SULLIVAN: Yeah. You know, this settlement has been in the works for a very long time now. It's huge. As you mentioned, it would pay out almost $3 billion to former college athletes who weren't able to get compensation under NCAA rules during their time in college. It would also set up this whole new system for the future, kind of, as you said, for schools to pay athletes directly, up to a salary cap of $20 1/2 million. It's a huge departure from the tradition of amateurism in college sports, so a really big deal. The college - or the judge, excuse me - gave her initial approval last fall, but then after that, objectors to the settlement started to write into the court, and what seems like a small detail ended up becoming a huge issue. And that is the issue of roster limits.
SUMMERS: All right. Say more about that. Explain it.
SULLIVAN: Yeah. Yeah. So traditionally, there's no - or there's no cap on the size of a college sports team, only on how many scholarships the school could hand out. So you'd have, like, 85 football scholarships but maybe a hundred or 120 or more kids on the team, some of them splitting scholarships, some of them without scholarships at all. The settlement would have set up roster size limits instead, but those limits were often way lower than the size of many active D1 teams across all sports. And so it came out that thousands of current student athletes were on track to lose their spots if the settlement had been approved. So Ohio State, for example, an official there told me that that school would have had to cut 150 to 175 athletes. So that's Ohio State...
SUMMERS: Wow.
SULLIVAN: ...Alone. The judge turned out to be really concerned about athletes like that. So she wrote in her order that it wasn't fair. The settlement wasn't fair to them, that they - she decided she was going to have to delay the whole settlement until lawyers could agree to some sort of grandfather clause or other thing that would address this.
SUMMERS: Super interesting - I wonder, have you heard from any of these athletes who could be affected by these roster limits?
SULLIVAN: Yeah. I've been speaking to a bunch all week long. So just to illustrate the issue, I'll tell you about one of them. Her name is Jessie Cox. She's a freshman on the track and cross-country teams at Liberty University, which is a D1 program in Virginia. She is the seventh of 10 kids. She has to pay her own way through school. And she came to be a talented runner in high school, and she realized this could be a way to pay for college. So she chose Liberty because she was able to get a scholarship there.
SUMMERS: Sure.
SULLIVAN: And then last fall, soon after she got on campus, she learned that with the roster limits that they were going to have to cut the size of this team in half, and she was probably going to lose her spot. She looked into transferring away, couldn't find anywhere that offered as good a scholarship. She told me she's not giving up yet.
JESSIE COX: I couldn't find anywhere for this fall that I could afford. I do plan on, like, keeping on training and, like, competing unattached next track season and keeping all that up, but it's going to have to be on my own - like, pay for my own, like, shoes and stuff like that.
SULLIVAN: She's not going to lose her scholarship at Liberty, so that's good. But she said she didn't know if she would have chosen Liberty at all if not for the track team. So now she feels a bit stuck.
SUMMERS: Understandably. Becky, did you hear from her today?
SULLIVAN: Yeah. She says she's really excited to hear the news. She's trying not to get her hopes up too much just yet. Athletes I talked to are sort of all reaching out to their coaches today, trying to figure out are they going to be reinstated to the team? Are the roster cuts going to be reversed? This question mark, this is where all of Division I college sports is now, with this settlement on pause. Schools had been planning to have it in place this fall. Now things are uncertain. The judge gave the parties, the lawyers on the two sides, two weeks to try to find a solution - a grandfather clause, something like that for these current athletes. But there's no guarantee it'll be resolved by then.
SUMMERS: Quite the development. Thank you, Becky.
SULLIVAN: You're welcome.
SUMMERS: That's NPR's Becky Sullivan. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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