As a judge weighs NCAA deal, thousands of college athletes remain in legal limbo

For the Liberty University women’s cross country team, the bad news came last fall.

The team gathered at a coach’s house for a bonfire night. In a different year, it might have been a celebration of a great season. Instead, the coaches had bad news to share: About half the team’s runners might lose their roster spots if a proposed multi-billion-dollar legal settlement was approved by a federal judge.

“It was very much an emotional night,” recalled sophomore Sophia Park. “I was crying. A lot of people were crying, like, feeling that weight of what that meant to have to lose such an awesome thing.”

Last year, the University of Florida’s men’s track and field team won the NCAA outdoor championships. This spring, before they had the chance to defend their title, coaches dropped athletes one by one, corporate layoff-style.

The Auburn men’s swimming and diving team waited in a hallway for one-on-one meetings with their coaches in March. After more than 20 swimmers and divers emerged clearly upset, another athlete commented that it seemed “the Grim Reaper just took you guys out,” said Tate Cutler, a junior who lost his spot. “We were distraught.”

All of them are among the many student-athletes swept up in the legal settlement involving the NCAA and its major conferences. The case, known as House v. NCAA, is poised to transform the way collegiate athletes are compensated. It would distribute $2.8 billion in back pay to former athletes and, going forward, allow direct payments from schools to players, reversing the NCAA’s long-standing tradition of amateurism.

But what originally seemed to be a wonky detail of the settlement — the creation of roster limits for all Division I teams — has emerged as its biggest sticking point. The roster limits would take the place of the traditional scholarship limits in the top level of college sports.

Now, thousands of athletes are in legal limbo as they await the outcome of negotiations between lawyers and the federal judge who must issue her final approval.

“We are going to see how the NCAA wants to play this. If they decide not to [address the roster limits], they will effectively blow up the whole settlement,” said Noah Henderson, a former collegiate golfer who is now the director of the sports management program at Loyola University Chicago.

For many athletes, the damage is done. Schools, acting under the assumption that the settlement would be approved last month, have already cut athletes from teams and told incoming recruits there would be no spot for them. As a result, many students transferred to new schools, or stopped training altogether for the sport they’d spent their lives pursuing.

Even for those who haven’t left their schools, the months of uncertainty have caused serious stress. And there is no guarantee of a resolution before the end of the school year — or one that won’t increase the cost of attendance for affected athletes.

“It was heartbreaking. I’m not going to lie. It was brutal,” said Cutler, the Auburn swimmer. “The fact that I’m represented in this case, I’m a plaintiff in this case, and I’m getting cut — like, how is that benefiting me? How is the pay-for-play benefiting me?”

Removing restrictions but cutting athletes  

Traditionally, the NCAA managed team sizes by restricting the number of scholarships that schools could award in whole or in part. But the goal of the settlement is to remove traditional restrictions on athlete compensation, and as part of that, the scholarship limits were eliminated.

To maintain competitive balance between teams, lawyers negotiating the agreement agreed to limit roster sizes instead. But the proposed limits were smaller than the current level of many Division I teams — meaning schools would have to cut players to comply with the settlement.

Since then, the roster limit issue has gummed up the settlement, which was widely expected to be approved by now. Instead, last month, Judge Claudia Wilken ordered the two sides to go back to the drawing table to find a way to reduce the harm to athletes currently on rosters.

News of the judge’s delay thrilled athletes who thought they’d be cut.

Lance Hollingshead, a freshman golfer at Notre Dame, was so distressed and embarrassed his roster spot would be eliminated that he couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone besides his parents for an entire month.

He was “ecstatic” when he heard the news of the delay. “It was a weight off my shoulders, like I can walk around freely and take a deep breath that hasn’t been taken in quite a long time,” he said.

Yet it’s unclear whether the issue will be resolved in these athletes’ favor. Lawyers negotiating the settlement — plaintiffs’ attorneys representing roughly 390,000 current and former Division I athletes, along with defense counsel for the NCAA and its five major conferences — oppose a grandfather clause.

Acknowledging many athletes have transferred or chosen where to enroll based on roster decisions already made, they argued in a filing last month that “any adjustment to implementation of the roster limits is likely to have a snowball effect that would adversely impact other class members.”

The exact scale of the cuts is difficult to pin down. Lawyers involved in the settlement have downplayed the number: In an April hearing, Rakesh Kilaru, a lawyer representing the NCAA, asserted “something like a couple dozen” would lose their spots on their teams. In a later court filing, lawyers guessed fewer than 200 athletes, “if that,” would be affected.

Based on interviews with athletes who have lost their spots and school officials who have run the numbers for their own programs, those estimates are far too low.

At Ohio State alone, officials anticipated cutting between 150 to 175 athletes if the roster limits were implemented immediately, athletic director Ross Bjork told NPR. Even as the school would add around 90 new scholarships, he said, the cuts to rosters would amount to more than 10% of the school’s current 1,100-some athletes. “You’re looking at programs like rowing, swimming, track and field that have large rosters that have to come down,” Bjork said.

And Ohio State is only one of the 150 or more Division I schools that are either required to comply with the settlement or expected to opt into its terms.

Scores of objection letters sent to the court over the past six months reveal the breadth of those affected: More than a dozen swimmers from the top-ranked men’s team at Texas; walk-on football players at powerhouse programs like Michigan and Notre Dame; women’s soccer players from teams across the U.S., including historically Black universities; track and field athletes at Olympic factories like Houston. No sport is immune. Many athletes and parents wrote in anonymously, afraid that speaking out could give their school reason to cut them, too.

Off the team, keeping scholarships, and now in the financial hole

Athletes cut from the team could face unexpected financial burdens, they say, even though the NCAA has advised schools that scholarships cannot be rescinded from athletes cut from teams due to the settlement.

Many Division I schools, including the University of Florida, provide athletes with an all-you-can-eat dining hall, where breakfast, lunch and dinner are served daily.

Alec Miller, a sophomore runner at Florida who was cut from the team in March, expects his access to the dining hall would be revoked if the cut is finalized. “That would also be thousands of dollars a year extra that I would now be having to spend,” Miller said.

Many athletes cut from teams could also lose what are known as Alston awards, a kind of scholarship to help athletes cover extra costs of attending college that schools have been allowed to award since a Supreme Court decision in 2021. Under the settlement, Alston awards, which can be as much as $5,980 per year per athlete, would count against a salary cap. As a result, many schools plan to reduce or eliminate them altogether.

Schools also often provide athletes with educational supplies, such as laptops, and tutoring services.

In total, the cost of college could rise by $10,000 or more each year for athletes cut from their teams, even if they keep their athletic scholarships.

For freshman Jessie Cox, another Liberty runner, college sports were a ticket to a college education in pursuit of a career. The seventh of 10 children, she was expected to pay her own way for school, she said.

When she was still in high school, a Division II program in her home state of Pennsylvania had offered her a full ride to run track and cross country, she said. But when Liberty offered her an academic scholarship and a walk-on spot on the team, Cox jumped at the chance to compete at a Division I level.

The news of the roster cuts came less than two months after she arrived on campus. Cox looked into transferring, she said, but soon learned transfers are often less appealing to programs than incoming freshmen.

“It put me in a position where I’m like, ‘Do I stay here, or do I get in thousands and thousands of dollars of debt so I can keep running?’,” she said. “I can’t afford to go anywhere else.”

And no one can put a dollar amount on the emotional toll of this past year.

“For the first month, every day was pretty tough. I can’t lie,” said Hollingshead, the Notre Dame golfer. He felt depressed, he said, until he began talking with other athletes at other schools who had lost their spots.

Then, he began to work to encourage affected athletes to write to the court with their objections. “It was definitely a shock. It sucked a lot,” Hollingshead said. “Then it turned into, ‘Okay, let’s get to work on not giving up on my dream and helping other people not lose theirs as well.'”