Athletics officials are rewriting the financial playbook after a landmark Name, Image and Likeness settlement that is reshaping college sports.
By Stephen P. Schmidt, Louisville Business First
Ask any founder — running a startup is tough work. And unrelenting and often thankless.
Now, imagine that startup is trying to establish a nationwide network in a matter of days. And there’s thousands of stakeholders watching it all.
Forget about a runway or a go-to-market strategy — there’s not enough time.
Welcome to the College Sports Commission (CSC), an organization that was established in Washington, D.C., following the finalization of the landmark House v. NCAA case, which also had two other federal antitrust lawsuits folded into it.
Former Major League Baseball executive Bryan Seeley is leading the organization as CEO.
As part of the settlement, the NCAA was required, over the next 10 years, to pay $2.8 billion in back damages to student athletes who competed from 2016-24.
Furthermore, each university that opted into the settlement is now allowed to allocate a maximum of $20.5 million in revenue sharing with student-athletes per fiscal year — for now.
That has essentially created a salary cap in college athletics while centralizing Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) operations within the schools themselves rather than in outside collectives.
“I think that’s what most of the fans are wanting: They just want clarity as to what to do, where to go and how do they help,” University of Kentucky Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart told Louisville Business First. “For about four years now, we’ve had a real lack of clarity about what is the best avenue.”
To get a better idea of local impact, I reached out to the athletic departments at UofL and UK to see the post-House settlement landscape world through the lenses of the state’s two biggest athletic departments.
“Like any industry, you knew it was going to evolve. … I don’t think you were ever sure how it was going to evolve, and it’s evolved. I think it’s our responsibility and our goal to just be as competitive as we can be relative to that evolution process,” said UofL Athletics Director Josh Heird.
n a state with few professional sports teams, college sports are big business, with more than $330 million in revenue between just UofL and UK and helping form social structures and a major component to the identity of those living in the commonwealth.
Talk of paying college athletes would have been unheard of 20 years ago, but this isn’t the college sports landscape of yesterdays that seen in dusty photos in old sports bars.
The sea change began with the advent of allowing athletes to get paid for the use of their NIL rights in 2021. Now, the House settlement has laid down additional infrastructure to what is often still described as the “wild, wild west” of sports.
The limit of a $20.5 million revenue sharing cap was derived as part of the settlement, in which both the NCAA and the Power Five conferences (ACC, SEC, Big 10, Big 12 and the former Pac-12) were listed as defendants. According to the CSC, “schools can distribute each year up to 22% of the average revenue” among those power schools that is generated from media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships.
UofL and UK have agreed to sharing the maximum amount with their student-athletes. Several other Division I schools in the commonwealth opted into revenue sharing (of varying amounts): Western Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky, Northern Kentucky, Morehead State and Murray State.
The only Division I school in Kentucky to not opt in was Bellarmine University — although the school’s athletics director, Scott Wiegandt, did say that the school is in the process of setting up an NIL collective.
“We are operating as business as usual,” Wiegandt said. “We’re still delivering — as best we can — the collegiate model, and we feel that’s what’s in our best interest right now.”
Searching for a fair market
The “House” in the case title is Grant House, a former swimmer at Arizona State University who originally filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in 2020 regarding NIL.
The preliminary approval of the settlement in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California was Oct. 7, 2024. It was finalized June 6, 2025 — giving the schools that chose to opt in to the settlement 25 days to finalize how they wanted to allocate revenue sharing with their student athletes before the start of the new fiscal year July 1.
“The House settlement has created a semblance of structure,” said Andrew Brandt, a strategic adviser for UofL Athletics.
Since the mid-1980s, Brandt has served as an agent, general manager, vice president, executive director, lecturer, contributing writer/media personality and podcast host — all within the painted white lines of major spectator sports (more on him later).
“I think we’ve still got a lot of work to do before there’s real, established frameworks,” said Jake Eldemire-Smith, a Louisville-based attorney who has helped set up NIL collectives for colleges across the country.
Eldemire-Smith, of White & Eldemire PLLC, also is a former offensive lineman who played football for UofL in the 2010s. He is a former board member of UofL’s NIL collective, 502 Circle, which has been transitioning to more of a marketing agency role with the goal of gaining supplementary NIL deals for UofL student-athletes through its Floyd Street Media platform.
In March 2022, we first spoke with Eldemire-Smith for an in-depth story that looked at the NIL landscape from a legal perspective less than nine months after the start of the NIL Era on July 1, 2021.
More than three years later, there are still more questions than answers.
“We don’t really know much about the [CSC]’s precedent for enforcement,” Eldemire-Smith said. “We don’t know much about the resources that it’s going to have to do this over the long term — and it’s all new.”
CSC: We’ll ‘add team members as time goes on’
In partnership with Deloitte, the CSC has established NIL Go for deals worth $600 or more. It’s a portal to establish fair market value and determine if the supplementary/third-party NIL deals have a business purpose tied to an actual endorsement.
“It’s a lot like real estate,” Heird said. “The house that has the square footage in [Los Angeles] is going to be a lot more expensive than the house that has the same square footage in Louisville, Kentucky. So how do you establish the fair market value of an individual when those values could differentiate all across the country?”
From when NIL Go launched on June 11 to Aug. 31, the platform had 32,729 users register (composed of 28,342 student-athletes; 3,160 agents and 1,227 “institutional users”), according to a Sept. 5 document sent to LBF by the CSC.
During that time frame, there were 8,359 deals submitted to NIL Go worth a collective $79.8 million. Nearly 73% were approved, worth a collective $35.4 million.
A CSC representative said that most deals were being cleared within a week. At the time of the CSC’s response, the organization had four full-time employees.
“There is no set target but the CSC is confident it will have the resources and staff needed to fulfill its obligations and meet its goals,” the CSC representative said via email. “The CSC will continue to carefully assess its workflow and add team members as time goes on.”
Doug Barr is managing director at Stoll Keenon Ogden PLLC. Based out of Lexington, Barr is a UK graduate who was a walk-on for the baseball team.
He runs the “Side Barr” podcast, which on occasion, will delve into the changing NIL landscape.
Aside from the establishment of the CSC itself, Barr said the biggest storyline to follow is the evolution of the in-house agencies that are hoping to streamline the supplementary NIL process for student-athletes.
In the case of UofL, it’s Floyd Street Media. At UK, it is the newly founded BBNIL Suite platform, which is being partly run by JMI Sports, the university’s longtime multimedia rights holder.
The announcement of BBNIL Suite came on the heels of UK Athletics and JMI Sports recently signing a seven-year deal that could be valued at more than $465 million over the life of the contract.
“We’re going to partner with our individual athletes, so that we can review their deals, make their deals consistent with what [the school] thinks is the thrust of their efforts, in terms of their intellectual property and … make it good for [the school’s brand],” Barr said of the schools’ mindsets. “And the athlete can make more, because you and I might be influenced more by an ad that [has a school’s] basketball player in his uniform.”
Ethan Coury is a Louisville-based agent who represents approximately 20 men’s college basketball players through the Atlanta-based EZ Sports Group, about half of whom are on the rosters of power conference schools.
“I think that the biggest change is just being able to be creative with different deals and opportunities to earn more revenue and [have] more marketing opportunities for my clients,” said Coury, speaking of supplementary NIL deals in addition to revenue sharing.
Coury added that at the Division I level, the revenue sharing range for players can run from nothing to upwards of $2 million to $3 million for players at power schools, noting that the positions that tend to draw the largest amount are starting point guards and post players on upper-tier men’s basketball teams.
On the football side, the highest paid player on the team is usually the starting quarterback, with a range of $1 million to more than $2 million, according to a recent ESPN article. Offensive lineman and defensive ends (edge rushers) can get in upwards of $1 million.
Neither UofL or UK would disclose the exact allocations of the $20.5 million for fiscal 2026, but it is possible to get a good idea of what they might look like based on the disclosed percentages of other schools.
Spoiler alert: Football most likely gets the biggest chunk.
North Carolina — an ACC member like UofL (both with top-flight basketball programs) — has earmarked roughly $13 million for football, $7 million for men’s basketball, $250,000 for baseball and $250,000 to women’s basketball, according to an article on the Inside Carolina website.
SEC member Georgia, a perennial powerhouse in football, has allocated approximately $13.5 million to football, $2.7 million to men’s basketball and $900,000 to women’s basketball.
The remainder would potentially be divided among the school’s other sports, according to an article in the Athens Herald-Banner.
What is interesting to note is that in its estimated budget for fiscal 2026, released in June, UofL Athletics has projected that the men’s basketball team will actually draw in more revenue than football — with men’s hoops bringing in $28.4 million (47.9%) and football bringing in $28.2 million (47.5%).
Heird: ‘I’ve got to find somebody that has done this’
Around Thanksgiving 2024, Brandt received an email from an old acquaintance facing a new challenge.
That would be Heird, who was sitting in a meeting about what he and his counterparts would be facing in the not-too-distant future.
“His words to me, in four words, were basically, ‘Can you help us?’ I was immediately intrigued,” Brandt said. “I had never — and still haven’t — marketed myself as someone that could help out college programs with my pro sports experience, but it made a lot of sense.”
Brandt and Heird share a connection to Villanova University. Brandt, who lives in the Philadelphia metro area, works as the executive director of the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law.
Heird had sandwiched three years at Villanova as an associate athletics director between time on the UofL Athletics staff before being named as full-time athletics director in June 2022.
“He always was just pretty fascinating to me as far as his background and what he accomplished. … and then as college athletics [started] taking a little bit of a pro sports approach, I was like, ‘Man, I’ve got to find somebody that has done this, because I haven’t done it,’” Heird said.
From 1999 to 2008, Brandt worked in various capacities for the National Football League’s Green Bay Packers as a vice president.
“I basically did everything but scouting and coaching, and made sure we had responsible [salary] cap management and good contracts,” Brandt said.
He never thought that he would work in the capacity in major college sports that he does at UofL Athletics — in which he wrote revenue sharing contracts for student-athletes in five of the school’s 21 sports: football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball and volleyball.
One of the aspects of the NIL scene that has taken Brandt most by surprise is the lack of certainty in a contract, given that most NFL contracts are for several years.
Most deals that Brandt has constructed for UofL student-athletes are one year in length. Then, in football, there are the transfer portals that loom in April and December.
The NCAA Oversight Committee has recommended a single 10-day portal window in early January.
“I remember sitting with [UofL Football Coach] Jeff Brohm, and I said, ‘Jeff, I really empathize with you that you’re dealing with free agency every year,’” Brandt said.“And Jeff looks at me and says, ‘Andrew, we’re dealing with free agency every day.’ And it just struck me that that’s where we are in college sports.”
There is not a set mandated contract length by the CSC.
“We’re evaluating different options on length,” Brandt said.
On one side, a two-year contract could create a sense of short-lived stability for a coach and the team’s fans. On the other, Barr said that he could envision a world in which student-athletes would potentially sit out a year if they thought that they were not getting adequate compensation on the second year of that revenue sharing deal.
Brandt said that they used the template that the 502 Circle had established and drafted up.
“We worked hard at developing a contract that we thought was good for both [sides],” Brandt said. “We wanted to make it reasonable for the student-athlete. We don’t think this is as onerous as some of the contracts that I’ve seen out there with other schools.”
Barnhart on the future
In April, UK announced that it would be forming a holding company for its athletics department, Champions Blue LLC. When it was announced, the news release touted it as “perhaps the first of its kind in the country among major programs.”
One of the nonvoting board members is Barnhart, who could become the longest tenured athletics director at a Power Four (minus the Pac-12) school when Joe Castiglione retires from Oklahoma in June 2028.
Barnhart has been in Lexington since 2002.
“I don’t know that anybody has a crystal ball that’s that accurate,” Barnhart said of evaluating current times in major college athletics. “I think that you always knew that the landscape was continuing to evolve.”
Under the settlement, scholarship limits were removed, but roster limits were tightened and/or implemented.
As such, UK was able to add 80 scholarships, but also saw its overall numbers trimmed by 135 to 145 spots. This included around 40 members of the track and field program, which used to have unlimited roster spots and around 15 to 20 football players.
Before the settlement, UK had approximately 680 student-athletes participating in 23 sports at the Division I level. Now that number is around 540. Note: Final roster sizes for the new academic year were still being determined in late September.
“On one hand, there were more scholarships, which we can divvy up to less people, which means more people are getting more money,” Barnhart said. “But at the same time … some of those opportunities were lost from a roster perspective.”
Out of the 23 sports, student-athletes from six programs — football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball, volleyball and softball — were given a slice of the $20.5 million pie.
Most contracts for UK are a year in length as well.
“We think it’s important … from an accountability perspective,” Barnhart said. “It holds people accountable and makes people responsible.”
Barnhart added that the goal was that “everyone received a little bit of something in the process,” such as additional scholarships.
He said that going forward, his team would be “really, really strategic and really fluid” when it came to deciding how to divide up the $20.5 million each year — an amount that is expected to grow to $32.9 million by the 2034-35 academic year.
“We’re comfortable with where we are,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’re not going to continue to look at it and evolve and say, ‘This is a better idea, or a better thought.’”
